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Sep 26, 2019
Teachers, nurses, mothers, torturers - under the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group's rule, women played crucial roles in the organisation, some as willing participants, others as coerced victims.

Through a series of rare testimonies, women from Syria and Iraq share what everyday life was like under the armed group.

Their accounts reveal an organisation that is both brutal and uncompromising.

Women hired as religious police patrolled the streets, looking for people who broke dress codes or committed other moral offences. Teachers taught schoolchildren Islamic lessons beyond their age. Nurses were forced to work at ISIL-controlled hospitals. Schools were closed and repurposed as training centres. Make-up was forbidden. Movement was restricted.

And torture was a regular punishment, used for offences as minor as wearing nail polish.

In Women of ISIL, we speak to the women fully integrated into the organisation, playing active roles in punishment and torture, as well as those who resisted through everyday acts of defiance, including running a salon, or teaching schoolchildren in private.

They recall a time when even the police were policed, spies were surveilled, and women paid the ultimate price for a violent rule of law.