Awash with Weddings Under Islamic State Rule
“She was only 15-years-old, but we were afraid,” says Adiba, a mother of six at a refugee camp outside Mosul. “If she wasn’t married, we couldn’t say anything if militants wanted to take her.” Adiba, like many parents from Mosul, feared that IS fighters could select her daughter as a wife, and married her to […]Heather Murdock writes for Voice of America:
“She was only 15-years-old, but we were afraid,” says Adiba, a mother of six at a refugee camp outside Mosul. “If she wasn’t married, we couldn’t say anything if militants wanted to take her.”
Adiba, like many parents from Mosul, feared that IS fighters could select her daughter as a wife, and married her to a relative in his late 20s six months after the militants took over.
And while IS-forced marriages never became widespread in now Iraqi-controlled eastern Mosul, the kidnapping and raping of thousands of Yazidi women under the guise of “marriage” was well known. This, along with harsh rules against male/female interaction, lack of jobs and closed schools drove an upswing in weddings in eastern Mosul during the two-and-a-half years of IS rule, according to residents.
