Iraq woman and sons holding guns
A woman whose sons have volunteered to join the Iraqi army in their fight against the Islamic State Reuters

An Iraqi woman has reportedly killed an Islamic State (Isis) militant commander Abu Anas. She allegedly killed Anas three months after he forced her to marry his militant comrades.

Saeed Mamouzini, spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Mosul, told the al-Sumaria TV network that the woman killed the terrorist, know as Abu Anas, in Tal Roman district, west of the IS-held city of Mosul. The report comes two days after IS militants brought non-Iraqi women to Mosul as sex slaves, following an order by Ibrahim al-Samarrai (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), the regional IS leader.

Hana Nawafili, a spokeswoman for the Iraqi Observatory for the Defence of Battered Women, told Arabic-language al-Maalomah news agency on 18 July that IS terrorists had gang-raped seven female residents of Fallujah, situated about 69km (43 miles) west of Baghdad, and then murdered them.

Sex slave trade

The rapes and atrocities date back to at least 2014 when the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported on 16 December that IS terrorists had executed 150 women, including those who were pregnant, in the country's western province of al-Anbar, after they declined to marry them. The ministry further stated that the militants buried the women in mass graves in Fallujah.

According to Zainab Bangura, the special representative of the UN secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, IS militants attack villages and send women to slave auctions. The girls were sold naked, with IS leaders having first choice, followed by emirs (commanders), and finally the fighters, Bangura noted, according to the Syrian Free Press Network.

Each purchaser usually takes three or four girls, keeps them for a couple of months, and then sells them off after getting tired of them, she told Middle East Eye. One girl was traded 22 times, with the name of a terrorist leader written on the girl's hand to show that she was his "property", the UN envoy said.