ISIS Mutilates and Kills Syrian Mother Caught Breastfeeding in Public
The all-female policing unit of the Islamic State terrorist organization in Syria has mutilated and murdered a woman for breastfeeding her baby in public, a witness claims.
As IS has become notorious for punishing and torturing women who violate its strict brand of Shariah law, Aisha, a former resident of Raqqa who managed to escape to Turkey after her husband was beheaded, told the United Kingdom-based Sunday Times that she once witnessed the militant group execute a woman simply because she needed to feed her nursing baby in public.
Aisha explained that although the woman shielded her breasts by breastfeeding her child underneath her full-veil burqa, IS' Al-Khansaa Brigade, an all-female unit in charge of enforcing IS' law on the streets of Raqqa and Mosul, deemed the mother's action of breastfeeding a violation of Islamic State law.
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"An ISIS policewoman took the baby, gave it to another woman, and then killed the mother," Aisha said.
According to the Daily Mail, IS-linked social media accounts reported the execution and explained that the woman was mutilated before she was killed. The militant group also proclaimed that the women had "violated public decency."
The all-woman Al-Khansa Brigade was created by IS last year to patrol the streets to check that women are fully covered in public and are dressed in accordance with Shariah dress code. Pictures of brigade members have surfaced on social media showing them patrolling the streets with combat rifles while dressed in full-veil burqas.
Last December, a woman in Raqqa told the media activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently about how the brigade tortured her after finding her breastfeeding in public.
The woman, who goes by the pseudonym of Batol, said that when the brigade caught her breastfeeding, they took her to a torture chamber and put her breast into a torture device called a "biter."
The biter acts much like a bear trap and consists of two iron jaws that have many sharp teeth, which clamp down onto the breast to cause severe pain.
"They took me to the 'Hesba' headquarters in the city, and escorted me to the torture chamber, then they asked me to choose between a whip or a biter," Batol said. "I did not know what a biter was and I thought it is a reduced sentence. I was afraid of whipping, so I chose the biter, then they brought a sharp object that has a lot of teeth and held me, placing it on my chest and pressing it strongly. I screamed from pain and I was badly injured. They later took me to the hospital."
"I felt then that my femininity has been destroyed completely, we no longer afford to live this way," Batol said. "I was not the only one that was tortured with this instrument. There were a lot of women in the headquarters and their situation was tragic."
In February, the Kurdish spokesman in Mosul, Saed Mamuzini, explained that the Al-Khansa Brigade disfigured the faces of 15 Iraqi women by pouring acid on them as punishment for not wearing a niqab to cover their face in public.
"They have implemented this punishment so that other women in the city will never consider removing or not wearing the niqab," Mamuzini said.
