As the Islamic state (ISIS) retreats from Mosul, Iraq, more locals have spoken out about life under the terrorist group. ISIS captured Iraq’s second largest city in the summer of 2014.
OB-GYN Dr. Fatima Khaleel spoke with The Sunday Times about the females she treated in Mosul, noting most of them desperately wanted to get pregnant by ISIS fighters to breed caliphate cubs.
Stories have circulated since Mosul fell to ISIS, but this is one of the first hand accounts from a doctor who had these females as patients:
“I had a lot of Isis wives come,” Khaleel said last week, 50 miles east of Mosul, where she fled after Isis was driven from the eastern half of the city in January. “British, French, Russian. They wanted to get pregnant.”
Khaleel said the brides came to her with all the same features: “their faces were covered, they were armed to the teeth and they were desperate to get pregnant.”
These females also received free healthcare since they belonged to the high levels of ISIS.
Each wife arrived at Khaleel’s clinic “with an entourage — sometimes carrying Kalashnikovs slung over their black robe-like abayas.” From The Sunday Times:
“All Isis wives have the right to shoot at any time,” Khaleel said. “They all had guns in their bags or in their pockets. I was so scared. These foreigners follow the rules of Isis 100% more than people from Mosul.”
This meant the employees in the clinic lived in fear because one disappointed patient could lead to death:
“We knew they could cut our heads,” said one of her colleagues. “Once, I tried to treat a woman who couldn’t get pregnant, but it didn’t work.“I was taken to the Isis security office and they asked me whether I was intentionally stopping her from conceiving. I was so scared but I denied it. They let me go.”
Another doctor described the wives as “crazy” as one shouted “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar” as she gave birth.
The doctors explained that they hated ISIS, but that wouldn’t stop them from treating patients because “[H]umanity comes first.”
Plus, they knew many of these young females did not understand the seriousness of their choices:
The doctors, almost all of whom were highly qualified and spoke English, saved lives. Many of the foreign brides were young first-time mothers who spoke only rudimentary Arabic.“Four months ago a British girl came,” Khaleel said. “She was around 24 and had blonde hair and blue eyes. She was at the full term of her pregnancy, but she had a miscarriage before. I spoke with her, and she tried to google-translate some Arabic words on her phone.”
Yet, in this environment, one has to put themselves first to survive. Yazidi girls, who ISIS kept as sex slaves, would come to the clinic in tears, begging for contraception.
One doctor cried as she told The Sunday Times she could not help them because it could get her beheaded:
“One said she was a sex slave. They were crying. They begged us, but we couldn’t help them. We didn’t have anything, and we were afraid they were trying to trap us. If the girl wasn’t really a slave I would have been beheaded.”
As Mosul slowly regains independence, citizens have chosen to leave. But doctors like Khaleel and her staff want to stay behind for those who choose to stay:
“A lot of people left when the city was liberated. They survive,” one doctor said, straightening her lab coat. “But I have to stay. Where else will my patients go?”
It appears that a lot of ISIS brides achieved their quest. Last March, The Quilliam Foundation, a UK think tank, discovered that 31,000 of the brides were pregnant.
ISIS used social media and internet platforms to lure females to its caliphate as a way to populate the terrorist group:
“ISIS is recruiting these women in order to be baby factories,” Mia Bloom of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell said in September 2014. “They are seeing the establishment of an Islamic state and now they need to populate the state.”
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