The Yazidi women were herded from their villages in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, forced into buses and trucks by fighters who had just overrun their homeland. The men and boys were separated first, marched to open ground and executed by firing squad, their bodies later dumped in mass graves that investigators are still exhuming today. The women and girls, some as young as nine, were driven toward the city of Mosul, where they entered a bureaucratic system of enslavement that was meticulously documented, priced, and justified by the Islamic State group as a matter of religious law.

The assault on Sinjar began on August 3, 2014, just weeks after the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had declared the establishment of a caliphate from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. The Kurdish Peshmerga forces responsible for defending the region withdrew within hours, leaving tens of thousands of Yazidis stranded on the arid slopes of Mount Sinjar with little food, almost no water, and nowhere safe to go. As the fighters swept through villages like Kocho, Tal Azer, and Sibashikh Khidr, they gathered entire populations in schools and public squares, separating families with lethal efficiency.

The United Nations later estimated that roughly 5,000 Yazidi men were killed in the first days of the offensive alone.

The survivors who were not killed were taken captive, and the Islamic State group, known then as ISIS or ISIL, had already determined their fate. The group’s religious authorities had classified the Yazidis as polytheists, denying them the protected status granted to Christians and Jews under strict interpretations of Islamic law. This classification was not an afterthought but a premeditated theological ruling that the group used to justify the mass enslavement of an entire community.

In October 2014, the group’s English-language magazine Dabiq published an article explicitly claiming that the enslavement of Yazidi women was permissible under its interpretation of sharia, codifying the atrocity in writing and distributing it through official propaganda channels.

The captured women were first transported to detention centers in Mosul, Tal Afar, and other towns under the group’s control, where they were held in former schools and wedding halls. From there, many were moved to Raqqa in Syria, the de facto capital of the caliphate, where the group operated what survivors and researchers later described as slave markets. Women and girls were displayed for inspection by fighters who came to select those they wished to take as property.

Internal documents later obtained by Human Rights Watch and other investigators revealed that the group maintained actual price lists for these captives, with adult women priced between one hundred and two hundred dollars, while girls between one and nine years old were valued at more than double that amount. Fighters could purchase a woman, hold her for weeks or months, and then sell her to another fighter, with some survivors reporting that they were bought and sold ten times or more over the following years.

In late 2014, the group’s religious police issued a written booklet establishing detailed rules for the treatment of captives, including instructions on when sexual contact with enslaved women was considered permissible and guidelines discouraging fighters from selling captives to their relatives. The document read less like the ramblings of random criminals and more like an official rulebook, which is precisely why investigators considered it so significant. Girls were forcibly converted to Islam, given new names, and made to memorize verses from the Quran under threat of beatings for failure.

Some were deliberately handed over to foreign fighters as an incentive to join the group, transforming human beings into recruitment tools.

One woman who survived this system long enough to show the world what had happened was Nadia Murad. She was twenty-one years old, living in the Yazidi village of Kocho, when the group seized her on August 15, 2014, twelve days after the main assault on Sinjar began. Her mother and six of her brothers were killed.

She was taken to Mosul and sold as a slave, enduring repeated beatings and rape at the hands of several men over the following months. She eventually escaped with the help of a Sunni family in Mosul who hid her, protected her, and helped her reach a Kurdish checkpoint. Once safe, Murad became one of the most prominent witnesses to the group’s crimes.

She testified before the United States Security Council in December 2015 and later published her memoir, “The Last Girl.” Her testimony, along with that of thousands of other Yazidi survivors, formed a critical part of the evidence behind the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 2016 determination that the group’s campaign against the Yazidis amounted to genocide. The sexual enslavement of Yazidi women was specifically identified as one of the means used in that campaign, because forcing women into sexual slavery, dispersing families, and killing men and boys would prevent the continuation of the Yazidi community.

In 2018, Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of victims of human trafficking and sexual violence.

While the genocide of the Yazidis was being carried out, something entirely different was happening elsewhere. Women from outside Iraq and Syria were traveling voluntarily to areas under the group’s control. Even before Baghdadi formally declared his caliphate in Mosul, the group was running an extensive online recruitment campaign that specifically targeted women.

Between 2013 and 2018, researchers estimate that between 550 and 850 women and girls left Western countries to join the group, with thousands more traveling from countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but many were young and had been exposed to the group’s propaganda online. The image the group presented to these women was radically different from what awaited the Yazidis.

Recruiters, including women already living inside the group’s territories, used platforms like Twitter and encrypted messaging apps to describe life in Raqqa as a close-knit sisterhood, presenting the caliphate as a place where women could live according to their religion, find meaning in their lives, and belong to something larger than themselves.

Aqsa Mahmood, a woman from Glasgow, Scotland, was one of the most active recruiters. She left for Syria in November 2013 at the age of nineteen. Once inside the group’s territories, she created a blog offering other women advice on how to travel there without being detected, what to bring, and how to avoid raising suspicion during airport interrogations.

The most famous case was that of Shamima Begum. On February 17, 2015, at just fifteen years old, she left her home in Bethnal Green, a district in East London, accompanied by two school friends, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase. The three girls flew to Istanbul, Turkey, and within days were smuggled across the Turkish border into Syria, where the group controlled vast swaths of territory.

Begum married a Dutch fighter shortly after arriving in Raqqa. Over the following years, she gave birth to three children, all of whom died in infancy due to malnutrition and lack of medical care inside the group’s territories. Her case became a contentious international legal issue in 2019 when she was found in a Syrian detention camp, pregnant with her ninth month.

Instead of allowing her to return to Britain, the British government revoked her citizenship, leading to a lengthy legal battle over whether she could come back to the country.

Many women were drawn to the group through carefully managed online conversations and promises. But once they arrived, they found a reality that was vastly different. They entered a system in which the group controlled nearly every aspect of their lives, and leaving was extremely difficult.

This system had its own enforcers, also women, known as the al-Khansaa Brigade. Formed in early 2014, it was an all-female police unit based in Raqqa, named after the famous seventh-century Arab poet al-Khansaa. The brigade was armed and organized as a genuine security unit, but its primary mission was to enforce the group’s strict rules on women.

Members patrolled streets and markets, monitoring women’s clothing and behavior in public. Women were required to wear the full niqab, a garment that covers the body and leaves only a narrow opening around the eyes. The police ensured that no skin or brightly colored clothing was visible and that women did not appear in public without a male guardian.

Violating these rules resulted in immediate physical punishment. Survivors who later escaped Raqqa described women being flogged in public for reasons that might seem trivial, such as having their eyes too visible or wearing shoes that made noise. Many of the women enforcing these rules were teenagers or young women in their early twenties, some of them foreign recruits from countries like Britain, France, and Tunisia.

The brigade’s work was not limited to monitoring clothing; members also operated at checkpoints, verified identities, and interrogated suspects attempting to flee the group’s territories or pass information to forces fighting against it.

In January 2015, the al-Khansaa Brigade published an official document outlining the group’s vision for the role of women within the so-called caliphate. The document stated that girls could be married at age nine and claimed that the primary purpose of women was marriage, childbirth, and staying at home. According to the statement, women who deviated from this role were considered violators of what the group described as the natural order.

Foreign women arriving in the group’s territories without husbands were typically married to its fighters within days or weeks, often through informal marriage brokers operating from guesthouses in Raqqa where many new recruits were initially housed. As large numbers of fighters were killed as military pressure on the group increased from 2015 onward, many women became widows, and the group expected them to remarry quickly rather than remain single for long periods. The group also changed the educational curricula that girls received to align with its ideology.

Schools stopped following standard educational programs, replacing much of the usual curriculum with religious instruction and political indoctrination. Girls were taught the group’s beliefs and rules from a young age, and violating these rules was punished with severe penalties, including death. Several documented cases show women being publicly executed by stoning between 2014 and 2017 after being accused of adultery.

Despite the danger, some women attempted to flee. For Yazidi women who had been kidnapped and enslaved, escape typically depended on secret smuggling networks, often funded by desperate relatives in Iraq seeking to recover their loved ones. The smugglers were mostly local Sunni Arabs sympathetic to the Yazidi community, willing to take enormous risks to help.

They arranged secret communications between captives and their families, obtained or forged travel documents when necessary, and guided women through areas still under the group’s control. Nadia Murad took this secret path in her escape from Mosul. The Kurdistan Regional Government, the governing body of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, established a specialized office to help coordinate these rescue operations, working with secret smuggling networks and helping to pay ransoms to secure releases.

For foreign women who had traveled voluntarily to the group’s territories, escape was an entirely different and often more dangerous situation. The group treated attempts to leave the caliphate as a serious crime, punishable by death. They were trapped in the very system they had chosen to join, waiting for the war itself to change their circumstances.

That change came faster than many inside the caliphate had expected. Beginning in 2016, a US-led international coalition began helping local forces reclaim territory from the group. In Iraq, the coalition worked alongside the Iraqi army.

In Syria, it supported the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, known as the SDF. The campaign gradually pushed the group out of city after city. Mosul finally fell after a nine-month battle that ended on July 10, 2017.

Raqqa fell on October 17, 2017, after a four-month battle. As the group lost territory, its treatment of enslaved women became increasingly chaotic. Some fighters killed their captives rather than allow advancing forces to find and liberate them.

Others abandoned the women amid the chaos of retreating convoys. For some Yazidi women, this chaos provided the first real opportunity to escape.

The last major battle took place in Baghouz, a small village on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border. By early 2019, this last remaining pocket of the group’s territory was crowded with thousands of people. The SDF surrounded the area and gradually tightened their grip.

When Baghouz finally fell on March 23, 2019, it marked the end of the group’s control over any significant territory. Afterward, tens of thousands of women and children associated with the group were transferred to detention camps in northeastern Syria, controlled by the Kurdish authorities who had fought the group during the war. The largest was al-Hol camp, which at its peak held more than 70,000 people, mostly women and children.

Another major camp, Roj, held thousands more, including a significant number of foreigners whose home countries often refused to take them back. For thousands of women, the fall of the group did not bring a happy ending, and its legacy remains present today inside the detention camps of the Syrian desert.