Contact Admin. Please refresh the page and retry. If he happens to bring a loaf of bread or a bar of chocolate, skinny-ribbed girls will line up to be blessed by an imam before climbing into the bridal bed. The marriage will last a couple of hours and be annulled in the morning so the woman can be passed on to someone else. This is just one of the many stories I heard from the 70 or so women, children and disaffected fighters I helped to rescue from the so-called Islamic State , over three years.
The religious one-night-stand, if you will, tells so much about its twisted morality: From until the collapse of the self-declared Islamic Caliphate in March , thousands of young women made the unconscionable decision to leave their families and travel in secret across Europe to Iraq and Syria. U nder the spell of Isis lies and propaganda, they went for the promise of love, adventure and jannah β the paradise on earth predicted in the Quran.
What they found was a living hell. In the scores of interviews I conducted, I heard how girls as young as 15 were sold in Isis slave markets to drug-fuelled jihadis boasting how they intended to score their 72 virgins on earth rather than wait for martyrdom. Raped, starved and beaten with canes, most had watched beheadings. One girl caught with a mobile phone was stoned to death and her sister brides had to join, in terror.
After a dismal start β a violent father, low self-esteem β life had been good to me. I served six years in the Yorkshire Regiment and did two tours of Northern Ireland. I went to Iraq in and climbed the greasy pole to team leader with Aegis Defence Services, the private security firm set up by Colonel Tim Spicer.
When US and British forces pulled out of Iraq, Saddam dead, job done, it left a gap in the security market. M y drivers were mainly Iraqi, many of them Kurds. I picked up street Arabic, learned the intricacies of baksheesh β the tipping, or bribery essential to survive β and built an extensive network of contacts. She was now stuck in Mosul, where Assyrian masons laid the first mud bricks 2, years before Christ; now an Isis stronghold of narrow streets and secret tunnels.
