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WOMEN UNDER ISIS RULE:

FROM BRUTALITY TO RECRUITMENT

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

JULY 29 2015

Serial No. 114–85

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ or

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

(II)

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California, Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

MATT SALMON, Arizona 

DARRELL E. ISSA, California 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

PAUL COOK, California 

RANDY K. WEBER SR., Texas 

SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania 

RON DESANTIS, Florida 

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina 

TED S. YOHO, Florida 

CURT CLAWSON, Florida 

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee 

REID J. RIBBLE, Wisconsin 

DAVID A. TROTT, Michigan 

LEE M. ZELDIN, New York 

DANIEL DONOVAN, New York 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

KAREN BASS, California 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

ALAN GRAYSON, Florida 

AMI BERA, California 

ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, California 

GRACE MENG, New York 

LOIS FRANKEL, Florida 

TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii 

JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas 

ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois 

BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania

AMY PORTER, Chief of Staff THOMAS SHEEHY, Staff Director

JASON STEINBAUM, Democratic Staff Director 

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C O N T E N T S 

Page

WITNESSES 

Ms. Sasha Havlicek, chief executive officer, Institute for Strategic Dialogue .... 4

Mr. Edward Watts, director and producer, Escaping ISIS ................................... 26

Kathleen Kuehnast, Ph.D., director, Gender and Peacebuilding, Center for 

Governance, Law and Society, United States Institute of Peace ..................... 30

Ariel Ahram, Ph.D., assistant professor, Virginia Tech School of Public and 

International Affairs ............................................................................................ 39

LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING 

Ms. Sasha Havlicek: Prepared statement .............................................................. 8

Mr. Edward Watts: Prepared statement ............................................................... 28

Kathleen Kuehnast, Ph.D.: Prepared statement ................................................... 33

Ariel Ahram, Ph.D.: Prepared statement .............................................................. 41

APPENDIX 

Hearing notice .......................................................................................................... 68

Hearing minutes ...................................................................................................... 69

The Honorable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Representative in Congress from the 

State of Florida: Prepared statement ................................................................. 71

The Honorable Gerald E. Connolly, a Representative in Congress from the 

Commonwealth of Virginia: Prepared statement .............................................. 72

Written responses from Ms. Sasha Havlicek to questions submitted for the 

record by the Honorable Edward R. Royce, a Representative in Congress 

from the State of California, and chairman, Committee on Foreign Affairs .. 73

Written responses from Ms. Sasha Havlicek and Ariel Ahram, Ph.D. to questions submitted for the record by the Honorable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ........... 75

(1)

WOMEN UNDER ISIS RULE:

FROM BRUTALITY TO RECRUITMENT 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29, 2015

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS,

Washington, DC. 

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 o’clock a.m., in 

room 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edward Royce 

(chairman of the committee) presiding. 

Chairman ROYCE. This hearing will come to order. 

I am pleased to announce that this will be the first of several 

hearings on the status of women around the world. The committee 

has worked on a bipartisan basis to promote women in our development efforts through a number of bills that we passed out of this 

committee, and I believe these hearings will allow us to build on 

that good work. 

Today, we look at the brutalization and oppression of women living under ISIS. This violence against women is almost without parallel, from widespread rape and trafficking to forced marriage and 

murder. Female captives, including thousands of Yazidi women and 

girls, are sold as slaves in modern day slave markets. One U.N. official described meeting with a woman in ISIS-occupied territory 

who was forced to marry 15 different men in 1 year. Some of these 

so-called ‘‘marriages’’ lasted only 3 days. 

That is life under ISIS for these women today. As one witness 

will testify, much of this seemingly crazed and indiscriminate violence against women is in fact a sinister and quite calculated strategy that goes to the heart of ISIS’s survival. By forcing local 

women to marry into ISIS, the group expands its demographic base 

while reducing the population of those diverse communities it seeks 

to eradicate and to replace. 

Simply put, ISIS needs women—needs to control them—to establish its ‘‘caliphate’’ and give rise to the next generation of ISIS. 

That is why ISIS is investing heavily in recruiting foreign women 

to join its ranks. And with each girl who becomes brainwashed, 

ISIS has a new poster child for its jihadi girl-power propaganda. 

Sometimes it can seem like all we do is look at the worst of humanity. So I appreciate the efforts of Mr. Watts, one of our witnesses with us today. I appreciate his efforts to elevate the voices 

of those courageous individuals who are working to counter ISIS, 

often at great personal risk. 

For all the horrible atrocities being committed in this region, 

there are those incredible stories of strength and integrity, many 

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of them from women and girls with the most to lose: From the 

Kurdish woman on the front lines against ISIS, who declares that 

she fights ‘‘to take back the role of women in society.’’

We appreciate the fact that so many of these Kurdish women, 30 

percent of those battalions that you see, Kurdish battalions, are allwomen battalions, fighting on the front lines. By the way, only 

with small arms and rifles, because they can’t get access. We have 

not given them or sold them to the Kurds, the long-range artillery 

or mortars or anti-tank weapons that they say they need. But they 

stand and they fight as they say to protect all women in society 

and they protect others besides the Kurdish behind their lines. 

And we have the female responders pulling victims from the rubble in Syria. These female units go out and take on that role. And 

we have the captured Yazidi girl described by Mr. Watts, who 

walked right past her would-be rescuers when she realized ISIS 

had staged an ambush for those rescuers, thus saving their lives 

at the expense of her own life. 

These stories inspire us to act. Credible voices need to be heard. 

They need to hear the fact that ISIS land is not a utopia. 

We must prioritize the physical and psychological welfare of 

those women and girls who have escaped from ISIS, many of whom 

have been subjected to unbelievable trauma, and we need to support leaders in the region who are confronting the stigma of sexual 

violence head on and calling on families to welcome back male and 

female survivors with open arms. 

Although we focused today on ISIS, we know full well that 

Assad’s brutality against Syrians includes not only barrel bombs 

and starvation, but also widespread sexual violence. Ranking Member Engel and I have pressed for the consideration of no-fly or safe 

zones in the region, and we are pleased to hear of Turkey’s recently 

increased cooperation with the United States on this issue. 

I had lunch with the Turkish Ambassador last week to discuss 

this issue. I think this is a very important step. I also just for a 

moment wanted to thank Mr. Engel for his long-time support over 

many years of trying to get a focus on what was likely to be the 

blowback in Syria as a consequence of the violence there, and also 

his efforts where he worked with me and others on this committee 

when ISIS first came out of the desert and called for air strikes. 

We went a year without doing that, and we watched ISIS take 

city after city after city, across Syria and then across Iraq, and now 

have some 5 million souls under the control of ISIS. I think our air 

power should have been used back then in order to degrade and 

slow or defeat them when they were targets out on the open desert. 

But I now turn to Ranking Member Engel, whose passionate 

leadership on the crisis in Iraq and Syria has been of great benefit 

I think. And thank you, Mr. Engel. 

Mr. ENGEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for convening 

this hearing and, as always, thank you for your leadership on this 

issue, and all the other issues that this committee confronts. 

To our witnesses, welcome to the Foreign Affairs Committee. 

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your testimony. 

None of the issues that this committee deals with are simple, 

and the fight against ISIS is certainly no exception. Just this week 

we see two of our partners, Turkish and Kurdish fighters, battling 

3

each other. This situation is a mess, and there is no other way to 

put it. That doesn’t mean we should look the other way. On the 

contrary, we need to dig deep, look at all of the aspects of this crisis, and keep working toward a viable strategy. 

Today, we are addressing a particular concern of mine, the way 

women have been victimized in ISIS’s brutal rampage. In ISIS-controlled areas, women have suffered horrendous violence, they have 

been separated from their families, and they have been bought, 

sold, and gifted as if they were property. 

Nearly a year ago, ISIS began its deadly offensive on the Yazidi 

population in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq. As many as 50,000 

Yazidis were forced to flee. Five thousand Yazidi men were massacred, and between 5,000 and 7,000 women and girls became ISIS 

slaves. We have heard the horrifying stories from survivors, accounts of systematic rape, torture, forced marriage, and other 

abuses. Girls as young as 12 have been raped, often multiple times 

and by different fighters. 

Sexual violence has a long, dark history as a tool of war, yet it 

seems that this type of violence is central to ISIS ideology. ISIS 

terrorists are using rape in an effort to wipe away cultural diversity, religious minorities, and killing LGBT persons in order to realize their twisted vision of a homogeneous caliphate. Sounds a lot 

like the Nazis to me. 

It is also troubling that more than 500 women from Western 

countries have chosen to join ISIS. Lured by online glorification of 

life in Daesh, women from the UK, France, Sweden, and other 

countries have been encouraged to abandon their communities and 

join ISIS. It really perplexes me. These women recruited to ISIS 

are then funneled into domestic roles, recruitment jobs, or allwomen patrol brigades to enforce the group’s perverted world view. 

So today I am hoping our witnesses can shed more light on this 

problem and share their ideas on how to meet this challenge. What 

motivates the women who join the ranks of ISIS? What motivates 

anyone who joins the ranks of ISIS? An organization with such a 

brutal record of violence against women and girls, why would 

women want to join them? How do we disrupt these recruitment 

and radicalization efforts? And how can we assist women to be part 

of a solution? 

We know that with the right tools and opportunities women can 

be tremendous agents of change in preventing violent extremism. 

How can we adapt our policies, integrating women to address some 

of the tactics ISIS uses to recruit and radicalize? 

So I look forward to the testimony, to learning more about the 

specific challenges women face in confronting ISIS, and how we can 

best address the recruitment of women who join this heinous organization in Iraq and Syria. 

And I want to add to what the chairman said. Three years ago, 

I put in a bill which would have authorized the aiding and equipping of the Free Syria Army. And I said this 3 years ago, and I 

say it now, I can’t help but thinking if we had been there and had 

done it when it should have been done, might things have been different now in Syria? It is the Syrian people who are bearing the 

brunt of all of the atrocities that are happening, and I think the 

United States needs to be more than just a passive bystander. 

4

So I thank all of our witnesses, and I look forward to your testimony. 

Thank you. 

Chairman ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Engel. 

We are joined this morning by Ms. Sasha Havlicek. She is cofounder and CEO at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue where she 

works closely on counter extremism. She also co-founded the 

Women and Extremism Initiative. 

We have Mr. Edward Watts. He is the director and producer of 

the film Escaping ISIS, which features firsthand accounts of 

women and girls who escaped from the terror group. Mr. Watts has 

also produced other critically acclaimed documentaries. 

We have Dr. Kathleen Kuehnast. She is director of the Gender 

and Peacebuilding Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to 

this position, Dr. Kuehnast worked for 15 years in the international development field, including time with The World Bank. 

Dr. Ariel Ahram is associate professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech. He has written extensively on 

Syria and on Iraq and on ISIS. 

Without objection, the witnesses’ full prepared statements will be 

made part of the record. Members will have 5 calendar days to submit statements and questions and extraneous material for the 

record. 

Ms. Havlicek, if you could summarize your remarks. You will 

have 5 minutes each, and then we will go to the questions. 

STATEMENT OF MS. SASHA HAVLICEK, CHIEF EXECUTIVE 

OFFICER, INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC DIALOGUE 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Thank you so much Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the committee. I am very honored to have been 

invited here today and to be part of this extremely important discussion. 

My testimony is looking at the part of this challenge that you 

have already raised but that has been I think largely overlooked 

despite the extraordinary, unprecedented numbers of women that 

are flocking to join ISIS, that are leaving in particular Western 

countries and migrating to ISIS territory. 

Girls and women are—and I think this is difficult to comprehend—it feels counter intuitive—choosing of their own volition 

to join ISIS and subscribing, submitting voluntarily, to their ideology and to their rule. Women in extremist and terrorist organizations of course is not a new phenomenon, but the numbers here are 

indeed unprecedented. There are now thousands of women worldwide that have emigrated to ISIS territory, just from Western 

countries. 

The numbers that official estimates have suggested are well over 

550. That number is taken from estimates at the beginning of 2015 

and will have grown substantially by now. It is important to know 

that these are not foreign fighters. We tend to hear the media categorize them that way. 

For now, ISIS prohibits women from entering the battlefield, but 

that does not reflect the violent narratives that these women 

project in their social media lives—social media lives that we have 

been watching and analyzing over the last year, with a dataset, a 

5

unique dataset that has been tracking the developments of girls 

who have left Western countries and joined ISIS territory. 

So they are, despite the fact of not being combatants, proving to 

be as much agents of the group and its ideology as men: As propagandists and recruiters—as we have heard, they are prolific online—in particular Western girls—as part of peer-to-peer, very sophisticated marketing and recruitment strategies, goading men 

into action—that is also important to note: For a 15-year-old girl 

to be able to say, ‘‘I have made it out here on my own. Why haven’t 

you?’’—but also as inciters to violence. And they are, again, goading 

people who cannot make it out to the battlefield to do as much 

damage as they can at home. 

They are also, as we have heard, enforcers of strict pre-modern 

Islamic codes, penal codes, as part of the Al-Khansa all-female 

moral police brigade. And of course, as mothers of the next generation of jihadists, a role that is held in high esteem for ISIS, but 

also other jihadi groups. 

The violence of their online narratives is striking, and my written testimony is scattered with evidence of what they hope to be 

doing in the longer term. There is a wishful thinking there that 

they will be enabled to join the violence at some stage later. 

I think it is important we understand that this is not a sideshow. 

This is very much a core part of ISIS’s strategy, and it is a part 

of the evolving terrorist landscape. It is a core tactic of jihadist 

groups, well before in fact ISIS emerged on the scene as the predominant group. And as such, they should matter to us more than 

they have to date among security and intelligence circles. 

Why are they important to ISIS? They are in part PR, in part 

troop morale, and in part, and most importantly perhaps, statebuilding strategy. 

Why are these girls going? For a long time, in looking at the 

challenge of radicalization, Western authorities and governments I 

think have been viewing this problem primarily through an equalities and socioeconomic lens. That has not borne out in our minds 

to be true by the data. Women in our dataset in particular defy 

easy categorization on socioeconomic lines. I think that is the case 

across the board, female and male recruitment. 

It is true that the grievances that are articulated in these women’s accounts, not dissimilar to the male grievance narrative 

around identity, around the Muslim community globally being oppressed and there being no intervention to stop it happening, specifically, on the identity side of things, these women talk about the 

Western emancipation project as a ruse, as a means to sexualize 

women. 

ISIS, absurdly, is seen as freeing women from that ‘‘tyranny.’’ 

And so this jihadi girl-power subculture has emerged. There is a 

meme that I have included in the testimony, which is a parody of 

a beauty industry set of advertisements. It is a woman fully covered, and it says, ‘‘Covered girl, because you are worth it.’’ And so 

rooted in Western culture, this propaganda is quite clearly coming 

out of it but rejecting it. 

But what has been largely ignored—and I think to our detriment—is what I see as the pull factors. The pull factors are a 

combination of an ideology that has been seeded over three decVerDate 0ct 09 2002 15:41 Sep 15, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\WORK\_FULL\072915\95695 SHIRL
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ades—a Wahhabi Salafist ideology that is essentially the intellectual foundations for the movements that we see in play today, including, but not only, ISIS. 

And ‘‘Brand Caliphate’’ has done more for the diversification of 

recruitment around the world than anything else, including the recruitment of women. There has been a major spike in female recruitment, because ‘‘Brand Caliphate’’ is more than just about 

fighting. It is about building—building a utopian vision of a pure 

Islamic state. 

And so we need to be looking at how ‘‘Brand Caliphate’’ is succeeding to reach around the world through a digital era 

hypercharging of the narratives, extremely successful propaganda 

recruitment machinery that has essentially gone unchallenged, a 

recruitment machinery that combines iconic memes, apps that have 

been developed, an extremely sophisticated, very evolved, decentralized communication strategy that would be the envy of many 

social media marketing companies and organizations at large. 

What to do? Just very, very briefly. We cannot beat the 

radicalization problem, the conveyor belt challenge, through drones 

or border measures. We need a proportional soft power strategy, a 

machinery that can close the gap we have allowed to emerge between their propaganda recruitment machinery on the one hand 

and our response, which has not been professionalized to date. 

The objective cannot simply be to reduce the number of recruits, 

female or otherwise. It must be to undermine the underlying ideology if we are going to have a long-term impact on this challenge. 

Credible counter narratives are absolutely key. In our minds, we 

need to be undermining, in the first place, ‘‘Brand Caliphate.’’ And 

those that can speak to the heresy, the inauthenticity, of that 

Brand are vital. 

We of course have been working with the largest global network 

of former extremists, survivors of extremism. Those voices, as we 

know, are particularly credible and important. We need more 

women in this space. We need to be growing those networks, so 

that we can incorporate women. Women, female-focused counter 

narratives are to date entirely lacking in the counter extremism 

space. 

And so just as a last point, we need counter narratives and we 

need to be getting ahead of the curve with inoculation strategies, 

tools for those at the front line, whether teachers or social workers 

that are seeing the first signs of young people being groomed or 

young people being approached by radicalizers. And so we need a 

compelling set of tools, some of which we have started to develop, 

to get ahead of that problem. 

We need more female practitioners in the CVE space. This is 

vital, because we need to be addressing this from a gender perspective. And we need a human rights approach that is consistent and 

sustained. We need to be upholding female human rights around 

the world in ways that perhaps we have grown lazy about and relativist in our approaches. 

They have a massive head start, massive resourcing. We need to 

now scale up what we know works. We do know that a number of 

things work. We have data to prove that in the experiments that 

my Institute has undertaken in the counter narrative space we can 

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reach the individuals who are at risk very directly, and we can 

have an impact by engaging with them. 

So we need to implement that competition strategy, so that we 

can drown out ISIS both on and offline. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Havlicek follows:]

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Chairman ROYCE. Thank you. 

To begin Mr. Watts’ testimony, I think we are going to show a 

brief clip from his documentary Escaping ISIS. So we will see if 

that works. 

[Video played.] 

STATEMENT OF MR. EDWARD WATTS, DIRECTOR AND 

PRODUCER, ESCAPING ISIS 

Mr. WATTS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the committee, for the opportunity to testify today. For the 

last 6 months, as has been said, I have been working on this film 

called Escaping ISIS in the U.S., Escape from ISIS in the UK, that 

explores what life is like for an estimated 4 million women living 

under the rule of this Islamic State group. 

I believe it is the most important subject I have covered in my 

career, and I am very glad the committee has made it the focus of 

this special hearing. 

The treatment of women by ISIS is sometimes overshadowed by 

the terror group’s more spectacular atrocities, yet I would argue no 

other section of society suffers more on a day-to-day basis at their 

hands. In the course of my work, I documented ISIS’s abduction of 

thousands of non-Muslim women and girls, their sexual enslavement, and even the rape of girls as young as nine. 

I gathered testimony that described markets where ISIS trade 

young women like cattle, or even rent them to each other for a few 

hundred dollars. They crimes are condoned, even celebrated, by 

ISIS’s official publications. And it is important to remember that 

Muslim women, too, endure terrible oppression. 

They are subject to severe limitations on their freedom of movement and right to education and work. They must abide by a strict 

dress code enforced through harsh physical punishments. Some are 

coerced into marriage to ISIS fighters; others have been stoned to 

death on trumped up charges of adultery. This should be the stuff 

of history books, not contemporary news reports. 

It is worth noting as well that ISIS’s extreme interpretation of 

Islam is not shared by the majority of Muslims in the territory 

under their control. Yet disturbingly I met a woman who had been 

forced to join the organization and then subsequently so thoroughly 

brainwashed that she now shared ISIS’s vision for society, even to 

the point of punishing others who defied it. And we know, as Ms. 

Havlicek said, that young women from our own nations have been 

targeted for similar indoctrination and lured to the territory under 

the extremist control. 

Such stories show that this is a struggle not only with the terrorist organization but also a system of ideas, one that threatens 

the principles on which our modern society is based. It is understandable that from afar we may feel powerless to stop these atrocities, but there is action we could take. 

As you have seen, during the course of filming I met a number 

of local activists who with almost no outside support were risking 

their lives to undermine ISIS’s rule and save the women and girls 

they can reach. Those activists could use our help, and we could 

do more to support the rehabilitation of women who come back, 

often with severe psychological and physical trauma. 

27

The example of those survivors and activists should inspire us to 

reevaluate our policies and ask what more we can do. Renewed action is not only necessary but urgent. Every day that ISIS exists, 

more women will suffer horrendous violence or sexual assault, and 

more people will be subject to indoctrination in their ideas. 

The fight against ISIS is all of our fight. It will require time, effort, and sacrifice on our part, too. But in ending their regime, we 

all stand to gain. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Watts follows:]

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Chairman ROYCE. Thank you, Edward. 

Dr. Kuehnast. 

STATEMENT OF KATHLEEN KUEHNAST, PH.D., DIRECTOR, 

GENDER AND PEACEBUILDING, CENTER FOR GOVERNANCE, 

LAW AND SOCIETY, UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Good morning, and thank you, Chairman Royce 

and Ranking Member Engel, for this opportunity to testify before 

you today on an important and timely subject. 

As ISIS captures land, resources, and people, it has borrowed a 

page out of the history book of other wars where deploying sexual 

violence destroyed families, communities, and the very moral fiber 

of a society. 

When sexual violence is used in war, or by extremist groups to 

achieve their ends, it can be even more devastating than a gun. 

Major General Patrick Cammaert, a retired U.N. force commander 

in Eastern Congo, said that sexual violence is cheaper than a bullet 

and far more effective in its efforts to destroy an individual, a 

group, or a society. 

How best should the United States Government respond to these 

horrifying accounts out of ISIS-controlled areas? Sexual violence 

and conflict must be seen by Congress and in U.S. foreign policy 

as a security issue. It is not simply a women’s issue, even though 

many of its victims are women. It cannot be solved by women 

alone, nor can prevention happen in isolation. 

Through U.N. security resolutions like 1325 and 1820, and our 

own U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, 

sexual violence is framed as a peace and security issue. For the 

sake of this testimony, sexual violence includes acts of individual 

rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, sexual torture, genital mutilation, 

and sexual humiliation. Its victims are all ages, men and women, 

boys and girls. 

For women and girls, the results of sexual violence perpetrated 

individually or on mass scale by ISIS results in isolation, exclusion, 

suicide, and, in the case of some parts of Iraq, murder by a family 

member in order to ‘‘preserve the family’s honor.’’ There is no easy 

path to healing from rape and sexual violence and conflict. It is a 

long-term process and must be an integral and formal part of reconciliation in post-conflict situation. 

A year ago, I testified before this committee on engaging and 

educating women and girls in the prevention of violent extremism. 

I emphasized, in addition to supporting girls going to school, we 

must strategically engage fathers, brothers, and sons in learning 

about gender equality to further enable a more capable and inclusive state, and to help end violence as a means of resolving conflict. 

In the same way, policymaking community needs analysis and 

programming on how to help societies that have fused manhood 

and violence together as we see going on in ISIS today. Truly, this 

is a rite of passage issue. If the only way to become an adult male 

in your society is through a right of passage involving violence and 

war, then the chances for peace and security are significantly reduced. 

It is alarming the way ISIS is reaching into the hearts and 

minds of very young people even under the age of 14 years of age, 

31

to entice them with promises of belonging and a violent sense of 

power over women and girls. This issue is why I believe the next 

security and peacebuilding challenge deserving our full attention is 

on children, peace, and security. It identifies both the humanitarian services and protections needed for boys and girls in war 

and in refugee camps. 

Over the past year, reports have emerged that ISIS is setting 

their sights on young children. In March of this year, the Londonbased monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 

reported that ISIS had recruited at least 400 children this year. 

They refer to them as ‘‘tiny terrorists.’’ Children are used in combat 

missions to execute prisoners and spies, families and neighborhoods, and markets and schools. Yes, it does remind us of another 

era of the Nazi generation of young recruits. 

Because we are not collecting complete datasets on boys and 

girls, we are not fully tracking ISIS recruitment efforts. The Observatory reports boys as young as six are recruited into the ‘‘Cubs 

of the Lions’’ of the Caliphate. The boys are lured with the idea of 

money and weapons, shipped off to camps where they learn to 

shoot rifles. First, they learn to behead dolls, and then they execute 

human hostages. 

For girls, the tactic of sexual violence takes the form of kidnapping girls, enslaving them, reselling them as ‘‘child brides.’’ There 

is nothing childlike about these brides, and there is nothing 

bridelike about an enslaved girl. 

The reality of ISIS trolling for children is something that should 

cause us great anxiety. We have inadequate data to fully understand what is happening in front of our very eyes. If we are to fight 

this trend, we need better data, how many children are being recruited, what is happening to them in the camps, can they be rescued and returned to society. 

Years ago, I spent a summer working with 5- and 6-year-olds, 

Protestants and Catholics, in Northern Ireland during the troubles. 

I learned every night how early hatred is taught. I learned that 

vengeance even helps children rationalize the kind of violence that 

they have lived through. Such narratives of hate are now easily 

conveyed through social media. 

At a recent conference at USIP on women encountering violent 

extremism, Mrs. Bangura with the U.N. stated that ISIS is using 

modern communications in the service of a Medieval agenda. She 

stressed, ‘‘Information is ISIS’s oxygen, and we must suffocate 

them.’’

By employing the best of the free world’s technology, ironically, 

ISIS has infiltrated social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

And, believe me, I am the mom of twin girls who are 14, and they 

have access to all of this information. It is startling. It is not just 

happening over there. 

Indeed, a greater emphasis must be placed on children, especially 

those growing up in refugee crisis. It is worth remembering that 

there are more displaced people in the world today than anytime 

since World War II. The U.N. refugee agency reported last year 

that it has exceeded 50 million people. This includes many, many 

children. 

32

ISIS is paying families for their boys to pick up a gun and their 

girls for sexual slavery. What kind of alternatives can be offered to 

the families so that children can pick up a pencil and learn while 

they are in these camps? We need to teach critical thinking skills. 

It is not enough to read; we need to help them understand how to 

think through the challenges that they face at a very young age. 

Finally, we need age-sensitive ‘‘exit ramps’’ for children and 

youth who have been entangled in the web of ISIS control and 

brainwashing. We need to recognize that refugee children need food 

for their minds as well as food for their bodies. We need to encourage greater education at these refugee camps. 

Ideally, the very, very best trauma counseling and healing assistance is necessary for victims of sexual violence and witnesses of 

that sexual violence. Otherwise, we stitch the violent experiences 

and memories into the DNA of this very young generation. 

As the largest age cohort of children living on this planet approach their adolescent rights of passage to adulthood, we need to 

find ways to inspire and expand the free world as ISIS tries to offer 

shortcuts to a violent adulthood. We know all too well that violence 

is the shortest path to losing a childhood, a vision, and the way forward. 

Thank you very much for your time. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Kuehnast follows:]

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Chairman ROYCE. Thank you. 

Dr. Ahram, you have 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF ARIEL AHRAM, PH.D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, 

VIRGINIA TECH SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL 

AFFAIRS 

Mr. AHRAM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the committee, for 

the opportunity to speak about the catastrophic sexual violence occurring in Syria and Iraq today. I use the word ‘‘catastrophic’’ to 

stress to you the magnitude of the crisis. The Islamic State has 

systematically abducted, enslaved, and sexually terrorized thousands, and likely tens of thousands, of women and girls. 

There are two common but equally unhelpful perspectives on this 

situation. The first is to see ISIS as a unique collection of religiously crazed thugs. The second is to dismiss sexual violence as 

a natural and inevitable byproduct of the civil war enveloping 

Syria and Iraq today. 

Research by Dara Cohen and Ragnhild Nordas show that sexual 

violence is common in many but hardly all civil wars. Rape is particularly prevalent when fighting groups have trouble recruiting 

combatants or rely on contraband to finance their operations. Rape 

can be part of an operational culture, even if it is not specifically 

ordered by commanders. With that in mind, it is important to consider ISIS’s sexual violence not just in the context of the war that 

ISIS is fighting but also the kind of state that ISIS is building. 

Three types of sexual violence are especially noteworthy. The 

first is sexual enslavement of women and girls. Sexual enslavement 

is uniquely reserved for sectarian groups, which ISIS considers to 

be apostate or heretical to Islam—Shi’is, Alawais, Yazidis, Druze, 

Shabak, Baha’is, and Sunni Muslims that differ from ISIS’s religious interpretations. 

ISIS selectively cites Islamic jurists to justify treating people 

from these groups as spoils, essentially property. They are raped at 

will. Captured women are enslaved in brothels and sold on the 

street, yielding a revenue stream to ISIS. Sexual enslavement is 

also part of a process of ethno-sectarian annihilation. 

Besides immense physical harm, sexual violence induces dishonor and shame among its victims. Even if they escape, former 

captives are often considered despoiled and ineligible for marriage, 

in effect preventing whole generations from procreating. 

There are many reports of suicide and honor killings. Perversely, 

this type of sexual violence yields another strategic benefit to ISIS. 

Children born from such rape are generally considered to be Sunni 

Muslims and, therefore, augment ISIS’s demographic base. 

The second type of sexual violence is forced marriage of women 

and girls. Unlike sexual enslavement, marriage entails reciprocal 

obligations through dowries. These marriages turn ISIS members 

into ‘‘one of the family,’’ so to speak. ISIS’s predecessor, al-Qaeda 

in Mesopotamia, tried to extort tribal sheikhs in western Iraq to 

marry their daughters to ISIS fighters. Many sheikhs apparently 

resisted this, a factor which motivated tribes to join the Awakening 

movement. 

Keeping in mind that ISIS permits polygamy and child marriage, 

we have no idea about the wishes of the women themselves. Today, 

40

ISIS continues to build networks through forced marriage and operates marriage bureaus to find spouses for male fighters. Foreign 

fighters are reputed to offer bridal prices in the tens of thousands 

of dollars. 

The promise of finding an eligible spouse has been an element 

in ISIS’s effort to attract foreigners, both men and women. For 

those caught in the war zone, marrying into ISIS may seem a way 

to ensure protection for themselves and their families. 

Thirdly is ISIS’s sexual violence against men and boys. ISIS has 

tortured and killed accused homosexuals in especially horrifying 

ways. There are also sketchy reports of ISIS sodomizing adolescent 

boys as part of an initiation or induction of child soldiers. This is 

consistent with other cases where sexual violence induces shame, 

and, therefore, increases barriers to exit should a recruit try to flee. 

ISIS’s brazen and systematic campaign of sexual violence represents a crime against humanity and is widely reviled in the West 

and in the Islamic world. However, ISIS is not the only belligerent 

to carry out sexual violence. Other rebel groups, as well as Iraqi, 

Kurdish, and Syrian security forces, have also used sexual violence, 

including rape and sexual torture. 

Recognizing this gives a better appreciation of how Sunni Arabs 

might view ISIS as a defender of their interests. It also underscores the point that ISIS is not the sole cause of the crisis. 

What can be done to help the situation? I fear that a military response will likely produce even more population displacement and 

leave more women and children vulnerable to sexual exploitation, 

at least in the short term. 

There are, instead, a number of non-military measures that can 

help ameliorate the crisis. The first is to aid neighboring states to 

stop the flow of human trafficking in their countries. The second 

is to pressure Syria and Iraq to stop using sexual violence themselves. This would include the activities of pro-government militias 

like the Popular Mobilization Forces and the National Defense 

Units in Syria. 

Finally, the U.S. must support the United Nations and NGOs 

working directly with victims of sexual violence. These efforts will 

be crucial in assisting victims reintegrate with their communities. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Ahram follows:]

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Chairman ROYCE. Thank you. I was going to ask you a question, 

Doctor, just about the reality that, despite the brutality, you read 

these cases where they actually convince local girls to adopt their 

extremist views. Can you maybe explain that process to me? 

Mr. AHRAM. ISIS relies a great deal on knowledge of the local 

conditions for its operations. The core of ISIS is derived from Sunni 

Arab tries in western Iraq. They understand the local mores, and 

often those local mores are quite conservative to begin with. And 

so the proposition that women should remain covered, that they 

should stay in the house, that does not seem as alien to people in 

those areas as they necessarily would to us. 

That said, we don’t know the inner wishes of the women involved. Especially when we talk about marriages, we are talking 

essentially about deals that are struck between men regarding the 

fate of women. And so we often find cases where people are put 

into marriage relationships where they may not want to be, but 

they feel like they have obligations to their family or they feel like 

they have no other choice, or not know any different. 

Chairman ROYCE. I will just ask Mr. Watts if you observed the 

same thing in your interviews with these girls, and then I will follow that up, if I could, with another question. 

Mr. WATTS. Yeah, I did. I met three women who had been essentially, as Dr. Ahram described, sold effectively to ISIS fighters 

through a deal with their family. ISIS targeted the poorest families. They were married to foreign fighters, all three of these girls, 

and in the process of indoctrination I think just is one of slow, day 

to day, as they described it to me. Literally slowly, slowly they 

began to persuade me about the force of their ideas. And I think 

that is one of the most important things to understand is that they 

are able to convince people that this is the correct way in which 

Islam is to be practiced, even women who don’t agree. 

Chairman ROYCE. Well, that was one of the points that Sasha 

had made in her written testimony. I didn’t hear you say it here, 

but you had laid out this thesis that over time there had been sort 

of a movement of radicalization that, despite all the diversity 

around these continents, increasingly there was a new world view 

here being pushed. I don’t know if that’s in the Deobandi schools, 

or where it is. But this ideology, maybe you could articulate that, 

Sasha. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Yes. Absolutely. In my view, there has been an 

aggressive and very well-resourced, very well-funded export of a 

specific stream of thinking that is the intellectual underpinning for 

these movements, making it of course much easier in many senses 

to recruit to groups like ISIS. 

Thirty years of export I have seen directly in regions like the 

Balkans where this Wahhabi Salafi ideology is absolutely alien to 

the local cultural traditions and practices of Islam. And they were 

sown insidiously in the aftermath of the war, when there was enormous desperation, economic and other, and Saudi charities setting 

up shop, providing handouts to families if they are—if they were 

to adopt stricter pre-modern Islamic codes. 

This was done to some extent tongue in cheek by communities. 

It seemed sort of unimportant at the time, but it has had an absolutely insidious effect over the last 20 years and has shifted culVerDate 0ct 09 2002 15:41 Sep 15, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00048 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\WORK\_FULL\072915\95695 SHIRL
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tural norms. We really desperately need to be upholding those 

groups and individuals who usually with next to no support are 

trying to protect the very diverse cultural heritage and the practices of Islam in places of course as diverse, you know, as South 

Asia to the Balkans. 

Chairman ROYCE. Do you see a role for mothers here? Because 

I can just tell you in West Africa, North Africa, Central Asia, I 

have heard this argument over and over and over again that they 

are changing our culture, they are changing my culture, from parents about what is happening to their children. And this has been 

going on now for maybe 20 years. I am trying to remember the first 

time I have heard it, but I have heard it so many times in so many 

communities. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. I mean, women, as the primary vectors of cultural 

and religious transmission, are extremely important for extremists. 

Since well before ISIS, extremist organizations had propaganda 

targeting women. They know that if they have got women in their 

camp, the extremist project is much more likely to succeed, and so 

the cultural shifts will come through those women. 

And so to some extent the shifts, as you have said, have been 

decades long, decades in the making. And so ISIS, in my view, is 

a kind of cherry on the cake but not the cake. 

Chairman ROYCE. Mr. Engel. 

Thank you. 

Mr. ENGEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Dr. Kuehnast, let me ask you this. In your work in countering 

violent extremism, I understand that your organization has completed several assessments on women’s programming in both Iraq 

and Afghanistan. And correct me if I am wrong, you found three 

areas in need of focus, which is reaching out to rural women, not 

just those in urban areas, engaging religious leaders, and working 

with men and boys. 

Can you tell us—first of all, am I correct in the way I describe 

it? And can you tell us why these areas you have been working on 

and working in are important in countering violent extremism? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Yes. Thank you very much for the question. First 

of all, these were assessments that we did both on our work with 

the U.S. Government on women’s programming in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but also engaged Iraqi and Afghan women. 

Key issues that they identified are that because so much of the 

populations—and this would be true in parts of Africa as well—live 

in rural regions, whatever is happening among perhaps elite, educated women in the urban areas is not necessarily the same world 

that rural women live in. The access to information, certainly television, other forms of ways to learn what is going on in the world, 

is very reduced, and their worlds are reduced and much more hierarchical in terms of their status in the family. 

That is why they recommended that no women’s programming 

should be done in isolation or in a silo without engaging the men 

in their lives—the fathers, the brothers, the sons—as I mentioned 

in my testimony, that it is very key to begin engaging with a full 

gendered perspective, since men are, too, gendered beings. And we 

see, and ISIS has mentioned in other testimonies here today, that 

the concept of what it means to be a real man is being used very 

46

strategically, by women, by men, to influence young men. And so, 

again, it is important to bring men into this picture. 

And, finally, of course, there are religious leaders, who for the 

most part in our world today are men. We must engage them in—

certainly, in their perspectives on the role of women, both in the 

home and in public life, and also in the role that they can play in 

preventing violence. 

I did want to comment just very briefly on the Soviet-Central 

Asia space, particularly in Kyrgyzstan. A year ago, we did a session 

with young university students in Kyrgyzstan, and they identified 

this issue of violent extremism, which they felt was growing, especially in the south of their country. It was related to the fact that 

for 70 years they were a secular country. They knew nothing about 

what Islam was. And, indeed, the very first propaganda, if you will, 

was the Wahhabis, who entered into South Central Asia. 

And so part of the dilemma that they recommended to us was 

that we need to have much more engaged religious dialogue between religious experts on Islam and secular populations, so that 

people are understanding what is real Islam versus what is being 

promoted or propagated by extremist groups. 

Thank you very much. 

Mr. ENGEL. What have you found is the major difference between 

women in urban areas and women in rural areas? What have you 

found in your work that makes it harder for one group or another? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Very simply, time. Women living in rural regions 

often are having to access water, food, any kind of efforts on behalf 

of their children or parents, by foot. It is not like urban settings 

where there is transportation options available to them. 

So time is of the essence, and the number of commitments that 

they have to make sure that there is food, that there is care for 

children and elderly, all of that very much limits their bandwidth 

in an everyday world. Radio is the best access, and we have found 

great success in our programs in South Sudan, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, using radio as a way to help shape positive messages. 

Mr. ENGEL. Thank you. 

Let me quickly, Mr. Watts, ask you—we saw a little clip of your 

film. It seemed extraordinary to me. It seems to me that the Yazidi 

lawyer could be living in a comfortable place, a comfortable life 

somewhere else in the world, and yet he risks everything to save 

these women and these girls. 

I would like you to tell us a little more about that. What do you 

think drives him to do this? And how can he inspire others to help? 

What is the Iraqi Government doing about the situation, the missions this lawyer undertakes? Can it be cheap? How much do they 

cost? And who is funding them? 

Mr. WATTS. Yeah. Well, he is an extraordinary individual, because, as you say, he has taken this on pretty much individually. 

There are about six guys, six or seven guys, who are actually involved in trying to organize these rescues. And they have essentially come up with a methodology completely off their own back, 

gathering information from women who have returned, making 

contact with people inside ISIS territory who don’t agree with their 

views, or who are willing to help the network for money, as you 

say. 

47

So he is an extraordinary character. There aren’t many people 

like him necessarily, and I think he is doing it simply because this 

atrocity is so devastating to his community. It is an extremely conservative community, the Yazidis, where honor is very important, 

men and women live very separate lives, and ISIS has crashed in 

and essentially really hit the foundation of their community and 

their future of their community, because a lot of young boys have 

also been taken and are now being indoctrinated in ISIS’s ideas. 

In terms of the support they are getting, the Kurdish region of 

government has set up an office for the affairs of kidnapped people, 

which does, in a slightly ad hoc way, provide funds toward these 

rescue missions. Sometimes those missions occur for free, because 

there are people inside ISIS territory who are so opposed to ISIS’s 

ideas they are willing to do it for humanitarian reasons. 

There are other people who are so impoverished by the blockade 

of ISIS territory they are willing to help. There was a shepherd 

that was—I knew about who for $100 guided something like 20 

people through the mountains. 

But the problem is, this is all, as Khalil himself described it to 

me, it is a DIY operation. And that is one of the messages that I 

am hoping to get across to all of you today, is that these guys are 

doing extraordinary work inside ISIS territory. And through their 

work, we learn a much more realistic picture about what it is actually like inside ISIS territory. 

There are people opposed to their rule. It is a dictatorship, enforcing a certain system of rules on a local population. And I think 

that their efforts could be supported in that way, and their work 

is also potentially giving us important intelligence that could guide 

a broader strategy as well. 

Chairman ROYCE. We will go to—thank you. We will go to Chris 

Smith of New Jersey. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you so very much, Mr. Chairman. And I want 

to thank all of you for bearing expert witness to this pervasive, systematic exploitation against women, this violence against women, 

and for your policy recommendations, which will be very, very helpful. 

Let me ask you, first, Ms. Havlicek, in your testimony, you point 

out that there is a shifting terrorist landscape, understanding 

women not just as victims but as perpetrators of extremism. 

And, as we all know, all around the world, in human trafficking, 

syndicates often use women as the leaders in the subjugation of 

their victims. And the level of violence and gross indifference to the 

plight of those victims often equals that of their male trafficking 

partners. 

And I am wondering if you could tell us, is that what it is like—

is that what it is—are they using these women, ISIS, the ones that 

are becoming radicalized in that regard? 

Let me also ask, you said with regards to our response that we 

need to reach the at-risk people directly, and all of you have pretty 

much cited some of the ways that that can be done through social 

media, and the like. But I am just wondering, in the counter strategy, what role do elementary and secondary schools, particularly in 

the West, have to play to try to provide a defense there? 

48

Mr. Watts, you have pointed out that non-Muslim women are 

enslaved and raped. And I am wondering, you say how Muslim 

women are also oppressed and treated extremely harshly. But are 

they also sold? And what happens when a Muslim woman speaks 

out in some way, tries to defend other women who don’t happen to 

be Muslim? Is she then really selected out for extreme punishment? 

Dr. Kuehnast, if I could ask you, you made an excellent point 

about the focus on children. You point out that in March of this 

year the London-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory 

for Human Rights, found that ISIS had recruited at least 400 children, and that is in 3 months, you know, from the beginning of the 

year to March. At least—I am not sure what the time period is. 

And I am wondering, is this parallel to child soldiers of Joseph 

Kony, Charles Taylor, that we saw in Africa? And then you talked 

about how they are shipped off to camps. Is that boys and girls? 

And where are those camps? What do they look like? If you could 

maybe elaborate a bit on that. 

And, Dr. Ahram, you mentioned that ISIS selectively cites Medieval Islamic jurists to justify treating people from these groups as 

spoils, essentially property, and that they are raped at will, and 

you go on. Maybe you could elaborate on those Medieval texts and 

who these scholars are, and jurists, and that would be very helpful 

to the committee. And anything you can provide additionally for 

the record on that would also I think be very helpful. 

[The information referred to follows:]

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WRITTEN RESPONSE RECEIVED FROM ARIEL AHRAM, PH.D. TO QUESTION ASKED

DURING THE HEARING BY THE HONORABLECHRISTOPHER H. SMITH


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Mr. SMITH. Ms. Havlicek. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Thank you so much. In terms of the first question 

about how they are being used, I think it is very clear that ISIS 

has had a targeted strategy to recruit women, so they value them 

as part of the operation on a number of different fronts. 

They are using Western women in particular in the propaganda 

recruitment machinery that they have developed so successfully. 

Western women are prolific in social media spaces. They are providing both practical advice to women and men as to how to get 

out there, how to avoid security services, their parents, and so on, 

and then of course ideological advice and propagandizing. 

They are very important from a PR perspective, because the fact 

of a young Western woman leaving all of the so-called freedoms of 

the Western world and choosing of her own volition to travel to 

ISIS territory and to adopt this new life and world, is extremely 


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compelling. And, of course, the PR value is also in the fact that 

media has disproportionately covered this story of Western girls, so 

they know that they are high PR value. 

The piece of this which is really troop morale strategy is about 

making sure that fighters, foreign fighters writ large, who like the 

idea of Western brides are getting a steady stream of these girls 

in. There is a functional dimension to this. 

And then, of course, the question of building the next generation. 

That is I think key. They are taking a long-term view on the life 

of ISIS. This is the state-building piece of the strategy, which is 

really about rearing the next generation of jihadis. And so in so 

many ways that radicalization is absolutely intrinsic for the success 

of the long-term project. 

On the second point, you asked about what we could be doing in 

schools for instance. I think that there is an absolutely critical job 

to be done on inoculating young people in two ways. One, we need 

a much, much better, a stronger approach to sensitizing young people to extremist propaganda. And we need critical thinking skills 

specifically in terms of how young people are using the internet. 

We have developed a program which combines extremely—and I 

should say, you know, myth-busting doesn’t work for young people 

in this space. What is drawing them in is the incredibly emotive 

material that they are being exposed to on a 24/7 basis in these social media environments, in the echo chambers that they are entering into online. It is extremely emotive. 

And so we can’t come back with a set of facts about what doesn’t 

work. We need emotive stories to counter that, the sort of work 

that Mr. Watts has done, absolutely critical. But, again, the voices 

of formers, of survivors, are absolutely critical. 

We have developed a series of films based on those sorts of testimonies, and accompanied that with a state-of-the-art tool for teachers, a set of guides for teachers to use that kind of material interactively in a school setting, in a community center setting, for parents to start to engage their children in the difficult conversations 

that need to be had now with young people about what they are 

starting to see or about to start to see. They need to be inoculated. 

Chairman ROYCE. Ms. Havlicek, we best go to Albio Sires of New 

Jersey. Thanks. 

Mr. SIRES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing, 

and thank you for being here. 

Mr. Watts, that is pretty powerful in just a few minutes. I am 

just wondering when these survivors—or when you reunite some of 

these children and women, how damaged are they? Do they make 

it back? I mean——

Mr. WATTS. The damage is incredibly severe. It is the worst I 

have seen, having covered conflicts and sexual violence in a number of places around the world. If you see the film, there is one example of a 21-year-old girl who suffered a physical traumatic flashback as she was describing what she had been through, where she 

physically struggled for breath, she collapsed, she effectively passed 

out and had to be brought around with medical assistance. And her 

case is not isolated. 

I spoke to a doctor who is dealing with the women coming back 

who said that that was actually quite a common phenomenon. I 

52

think partly because of these girls—they are very young, they are 

from a conservative society that has had no real education about 

sex, and then they are taken into the worst possible sexual atrocities imaginable, and the effect on their mind is quite severe. 

Physically, though, as well, there was a case of a 9-year-old girl. 

I didn’t meet her myself. She had been raped multiple times and 

was now pregnant. And, you know, it is really the most extreme 

physical and psychological trauma that you can imagine, and they 

are pretty understaffed as well to handle it. 

Mr. SIRES. Do they have any kind of normal life after this? Not 

just you; anybody else that wants to. Doctor? 

Mr. WATTS. Well, I would say that I—I met an 18-year-old girl 

who had been raped. During her testimony to me, she described 

being gang-raped on two occasions and raped in total by up to 30 

different fighters. And she is 18. I met her for dinner the other day 

to give her her first pizza. And if you saw her in the street, you 

would not believe what happened to her. She seemed like a normal 

18-year-old girl, laughing, joking. 

So I believe that these young women and girls have such incredible strength. They show amazing powers of recovery. But it is incredibly difficult to overcome what they have been through. 

Mr. SIRES. I find that hard to believe, but I take your word for 

it. 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Thank you. I would just add a couple of thoughts 

here. There are neurologists and neuroscientists who are studying 

the impact of extreme trauma on the human brain. And I think 

that is why in my testimony I am advocating for more data. We 

know that it affects literally the brain, and that is why this type 

of trauma happening to a child could affect them the rest of their 

lives. 

There is no doubt, though, that one of the other major findings 

that we are seeing is that the vulnerability of this next generation 

as a result of trauma sets us up for more concerns. There is a phenomenal researcher, Dr. Wendy Lower, who studied the role of 

women in the Nazi killing fields. And one of her premises is, what 

happened in World War I, and what they witnessed, helped set up 

the situation and the vulnerability for the engagement of women 

and children in these efforts. We should learn from our history as 

well. 

Mr. SIRES. You know, Muslim scholars and imams from around 

the world have called ISIL members un-Islamic and have condemned the treatment of women they have captured. Some believe 

that the battle against ISIS can be won by winning the hearts and 

minds of these fighters through transforming their view of women 

as part of the Islam faith. Would you agree with that assessment? 

Doctor? 

Mr. AHRAM. I think this relates both to your question and to 

Congressman Smith, and I will have to offer commitments for the 

record in more detail. 

Mr. SIRES. Doctor, would you just hit that button there? 

Mr. AHRAM. I will have to offer comments for the record in more 

detail. But I think that one of the most important things about 

ISIS is that they have looked at Islamic history through a lens 

really fashioned by a thinker, an Egyptian thinker named Sayyid 

53

Qutb offered the idea that in certain circumstances Muslims were 

in a position to declare other Muslims to be apostate, to be un-Islamic. That was really an innovation that came about in the 1940s 

and 1950s. 

That ability to say that ‘‘We are real Muslims and you are not,’’ 

had never really existed in the Islamic world before. ISIS is very 

aggressive in declaring that other groups that consider themselves 

to be Muslim, that they are not legitimate. And because they are 

not legitimate, they can be targeted. 

So I think that it really is a battle of ideas within the Muslim 

world, just as much as it is a competition between what Dr. 

Havlicek described as a battle between the West and the Islamic 

world. There very much is a great deal of contention about who has 

the right to determine what is Islamically permissible. 

Mr. SIRES. Thank you very much. 

Chairman ROYCE. Thank you. 

Mr. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina. Will pass. 

Mr. Ted Yoho of Florida. 

Mr. YOHO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate your testimonies here. If you guys could kind of give me the outline of a 

person, what makes a person want to go over there from a Western 

culture? What is the demographics you see? Age? Financial background? Religious background? Family structure, if you have that, 

that would draw somebody to that? I just—I find it unfathomable 

that somebody would do that by choice. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Perhaps I could take that up. Based on the 

dataset that we have just of Western women joining ISIS, what is 

interesting is that they don’t lend themselves easily to profiling, to 

actionable profiling. They are very diverse in terms of their socioeconomic backgrounds, in terms even of their religious backgrounds, and in terms of their educational attainment. We do see 

girls, in general, more educated than boys, some as educated as 

doctors. 

Mr. YOHO. Let me interrupt you here. Have you done retrospective studies going backwards, after you have found people over 

there that have gone over there, and then gone back and say, ‘‘All 

right. You came from this background; you have done that’’? 

Ms. HAVLICEK. That is right. We are looking at the backgrounds 

of the girls and women in our dataset who have migrated from 

Western countries and are now living in ISIS territory, as far as 

we can see it from the data. 

And there are some trends. We are seeing on average the age diminishing in terms of female recruits in line with the fact that of 

course the fighters will want untarnished wives, obviously unmarried girls. We are seeing—we do see a high proportion of converts 

within that group, and I think that that is coming across 

radicalization, women and men. But essentially they are not lending themselves to that kind of social profiling. 

In terms of the—what has been interesting is looking at the narratives that they themselves use to justify their own departures 

from the West, their own joining of ISIS. There is a number of narratives that are quite prevalent, some of which are common to the 

male datasets that we look at. 

54

They are about the global Muslim community being under attack, about the inaction of the international community to do anything about that, about their own feelings of isolation within Western societies, and then—and as I mentioned, for the girls, there is 

a gendered aspect of that identity questioning, which is really 

about whether the Western emancipation project has resulted in 

what we thought it would. 

Does it in fact free, or does it enslave you in some other way? 

And so the narrative is actually about getting away from the ‘‘tyranny’’ of Western female emancipation to some extent as part of 

that narrative, and justifies the extremely puritanical iterations 

that we see of Islam. 

Mr. YOHO. All right. Let me ask Dr. Kuehna—is it Kuehnast? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Kuehnast. 

Mr. YOHO. Kuehnast. What are you finding? Are the women that 

are going over there, are they from an indigenous culture, born 

here in a Western society, in Europe? Or are they from a Middle 

Eastern background that has migrated there? Maybe first generation or second generation, and there is a draw on them bringing 

them back to that area. 

Ms. KUEHNAST. I would defer to my colleague, who probably has 

the data——

Mr. YOHO. That is fine. 

Ms. KUEHNAST [continuing]. Set more. But I will speak as a Central Asianist and what I know about that region. There are families 

actually going, so it is not even—they are going in groups. And 

some of the motivation is the draw of the income, especially as the 

labor migrants to Russia has narrowed, and so we see a push factor 

there that is often not necessarily ideological but an opportunity, 

if you will, to work. 

Mr. YOHO. What country do we see most of them coming from? 

Is there one specifically? Is it all over the European area? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Tunisia. 

Mr. YOHO. Tunisia? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Right? 

Mr. YOHO. Is that what you are seeing, too? 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Yes. I mean, from across Western countries, it 

is—again, it is very, very diverse. Ethnically speaking, the group 

is extremely diverse. In terms of our data, it is very, very poor with 

regards to recruitment from countries in the region, and that is one 

of the challenges that we do see. 

It is absolutely true that in a Western context what we are seeing, and certainly since the announcement of the caliphate, we tend 

to see girls going solo, unmarried women and girls going solo or in 

small groups. 

Mr. YOHO. I am out of time, and I appreciate your questions—

or your answers, and I appreciate the work you are all doing. 

Thank you. 

I yield back. 

Chairman ROYCE. Thank you. We will go to Brad Sherman of 

California. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad we are having a series of hearings on women. There is a tremendous correlation between a society’s development and the opportunities for 

55

women. The more women are given a chance to expand their horizons, the richer, the more advanced the society becomes. And the 

more advanced the society becomes, the more women are included 

in it. 

We may disagree on some elements of family planning and some 

other things that I would like to see as part of international women’s agenda, but I think our overlap would be quite substantial. 

This hearing is also about ISIS, and I think we have got to remember the enemies of ISIS are more dangerous and more evil 

than ISIS. Turkey believes that perhaps in the wrong way. They 

are bombing ISIS. They are bombing Kurdish groups that are fighting ISIS. If you look at Syria where the Shiite alliance has killed 

200,000 people, we can say that is not as evil as ISIS because they 

don’t put the exploding bodies on YouTube. They do not show the 

gruesomeness. They do not delight in the gruesomeness. But they 

killed 200,000 people, and those deaths are every bit as painful. 

They are just not on YouTube. 

The Shiite alliance in Iran where they are developing nuclear 

weapons, obviously, the Shiite militias that dominate the political 

scene in southern Iraq, Hezbollah, and of course Assad, should remind us that whatever we do against ISIS it cannot be for the benefit of the Shiite alliance. 

I have spent some time in this room talking about how our State 

Department can’t possibly respond to the ideological threat of ISIS, 

because they refuse to hire anyone on the basis of their understanding of Islamic law, history, and jurisprudence. They won’t hire 

anybody who doesn’t have a certain number of Western academic 

brownie points. 

Now, you can be close to the top of your class at Princeton, or 

you can be the valedictorian at Cal State University at Northridge. 

But if you are just an Islamic scholar, and that is the only thing 

on your resume, you will not be hired. So what does this mean? It 

means we are fumbling around in the dark. 

We might show pictures of how gruesome and terrible it is that 

Yazidi girls are being forced to convert. But I don’t know whether 

someone who accepts the tenets of the most extreme versions of 

Islam regards that as a terrible act or a wonderful way to help this 

woman, because I am not an Islamic scholar, let alone a scholar of 

extremist Islam. 

And I am not saying the State Department should issue fatwas, 

but we are doing a lot of unsigned advertising on the internet, designed to appeal to folks who have an extremist and deep motivating connection with Islam, and nobody writing these ads has 

much knowledge of Islam. 

And we occasionally might go to Islamic jurists and ask them the 

issue of fatwa, but it would be like writing a brief for an American 

judge saying, ‘‘Please issue a ruling. And I am writing this to you, 

but I am not a lawyer and I haven’t cited any cases. But the truth 

of my—the justice of my comments are so overwhelming.’’

Nobody would try to get an American judge to issue a ruling 

without hiring a lawyer and convincing that judge not on the basis 

of righteous compassion, but also on the basis of the things that 

lawyers and judges do. 

56

Dr. Ahram, you say that it wasn’t until like the 1940s that the 

concept of apostasy was known in Islam. And I had thought that 

the Alawites and the Ahmadis had been accused of being apostates 

long before that. I mean, you have got, in the case of the Alawites, 

people who drink alcohol. You are saying until the ’40s nobody 

called them apostates? 

Mr. AHRAM. They had been called apostates, but the primary 

consensus had been that since no one was really in a position to 

be sure what ‘‘apostasy’’ means that no one should really be in a 

position to take action based on that consideration. 

ISIS, and other groups, have decided that they are in a position 

not only to be the judge but also the executioner when it comes to 

these decisions. They can make a decision about who is apostate 

and to carry out the sentence for apostasy. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Ms. Havlicek, what portion of the Western women 

who are going to join ISIS have parents who are Muslims, and 

what portion of them are folks with non-Muslim parents who first 

converted to Islam and then decided to join ISIS? Any guess? 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Obviously, ISIS is recruiting among young Muslims, so it is, in fact, the majority are Muslims. But there is a——

Mr. SHERMAN. Well, there are two ways to be—two histories——

Ms. HAVLICEK. Right. 

Mr. SHERMAN [continuing]. Of people who become Muslim, those 

who convert and those who are born. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Yeah. So the conversion rate is very high per capita, within the dataset that we have, in that——

Mr. SHERMAN. So a significant number of the women going have 

non-Muslim parents, were not born Muslim, they converted to 

Islam, then in fact converted to extremist Islam, and then converted to ISIS. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. That is right. 

Mr. SHERMAN. Yield back. 

Chairman ROYCE. We need to go to David Trott of Michigan. 

Mr. TROTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to thank the 

ranking member for scheduling this hearing, and I want to thank 

all of the witnesses today for coming and sharing your insight. It 

is pretty clear from your comments we are not dealing with the JV 

team, and it is a little frustrating because, you know, sitting here 

listening to the discussion of the various atrocities, that is certainly 

productive because it draws attention to the problem and that 

needs to happen. 

But I can’t help but feel that either because of a lack of understanding, or a general insouciance, that we don’t have a plan. And 

so my comments—you know, my questions really shift more from 

discussing the problem, which all of you will have a better understanding of the problem than perhaps anyone in Congress ever 

will. 

So, to that end, I want to ask the entire panel, each of you, if 

you could give me a couple ideas, a couple solutions. And my question is two-fold. First, I would like you each to speak to how you 

feel the State Department’s response to this problem has been. 

And then, beyond that, specifically, if you each could offer a couple ideas of things that Congress could work on or Congress could 

focus on or Congress could ask the administration to work on, what 

57

you think the resources and implementation would be required. It 

would be particularly helpful if the ideas don’t require a lot of 

money, because we don’t have a lot of extra tax dollars sitting 

around. 

But whatever your—if you were in charge for a day, what are the 

two things you would do in Congress or in the administration to 

make a difference on these issues? And we will start with you, Ms. 

Havlicek. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Thank you so much. We understand that $26 billion has been spent to date on training the Iraqi army over the last 

decade. I mention that figure because in the United Kingdom this 

last year we allocated 40 million pounds to the prevention side of 

this problem, that is to say, in a way the soft power side of this 

problem. 

I don’t think it is serious. There is a quote of Osama Bin Laden 

of 2002 that says,

‘‘It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the 

strongest methods. In fact, its ratio may reach 90 percent of 

the total preparation for battles.’’

We have not taken on this soft power piece of the battle in a serious way. It, of course, does not require the type of funding that the 

hard power piece of this battle requires, by any stretch of the 

imagination, it will be an enormous amount cheaper. 

But just very quickly, I don’t believe that a soft power strategy 

can be delivered just through government counter messaging centers. I don’t, in fact, believe that counter narrative can be delivered 

by government. It has to be developed by credible voices. We have 

talked about a few of those constituencies here. 

Networks also of women are important in this, but former extremists, survivors of extremism, are important, credible voices. 

But those voices tend not to have the tools, the skills to be able 

to get their messages out at scale in any sustained way or in any 

strategic way. They have not been empowered. We need the power 

of our communications and tech sector on side to do that at scale, 

and that needs to be a combination things. So that has not happened as yet. 

We desperately need to do the intellectual challenging of ‘‘Brand 

Caliphate,’’ and to do that we need to be building the sorts of networks, really working with the sorts of people that Mr. Watts is 

working with to get those ideas and stories out in a much, much 

bigger way. 

I do think that one of the things—one of the problems has been 

that governments, by and large, have focused essentially on this 

challenge of propaganda through regulatory response. That is to 

say, we want to take that nasty stuff down. That Whac-A-Mole approach tends in fact not to work. We have now just seen the establishment of a Europole Referral Center, which is to say lots of people in a room flagging nasty material and hoping that the internet 

companies will take it down. That happens very slowly. 

When accounts are taken down, of course, they go up very fast, 

but our research has shown interestingly that the second accounts 

of women, for instance, prolific recruiters and radicalizers, the secVerDate 0ct 09 2002 15:41 Sep 15, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00061 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 F:\WORK\_FULL\072915\95695 SHIRL
58

ond accounts of those women, once their first accounts have been 

taken down, tend to be more influential, i.e. more followers. 

And so we have to be careful that we are not doing counterproductive things in the takedown space, and so I would very much 

propose that we focus instead in a much, much more serious way 

on the counter narrative. I do believe that that needs to be 

mainstreamed in government policymaking through aid and diplomatic efforts. 

If we were to combine those efforts and those budgets, we would 

finally have the muscle in place to do something in this space. It 

does require that extremism, not just the violent piece of extremism, the non-violent piece of extremism that lays the intellectual 

foundations for extremism, is taken seriously and mainstreamed 

across policymaking centers. 

Chairman ROYCE. Mr. Gerry Connolly of Virginia. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Just picking up on what you just said, Ms. Havlicek, it seems to 

me that if it is going to be efficacious that needs to be an Islamic 

message, not a Western message. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. Absolutely. I am sorry if that wasn’t clear. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. No, no. I wasn’t correcting you. I am just observing based on what you——

Ms. HAVLICEK. Well, and credible voices as a whole are of course 

voices from within the communities, and they can be very diverse 

voices——

Mr. CONNOLLY. Yes. 

Ms. HAVLICEK [continuing]. From within the communities. And 

when I talk about building the networks, I mean networks of those 

front-line voices. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. I understand. I am just so horrified, frankly, at 

the details of this hearing. For me, it starts with the whole issue 

of human autonomy. It is easy to compromise someone else’s autonomy when I objectify them as apostate or ‘‘the other.’’ By the way, 

not at all an Islamic phenomenon. I mean, that kind of objectifying 

of human beings has been going on since human beings arrived on 

the planet. 

I mean, there is a long, sad, tragic Christian tradition of doing 

that, Turquemada to wit. Heretics could be burned, because they 

were in error, although it seems to me that there is a contradiction 

here in this behavior with the Koran itself. And I would be interested in your observations. 

I also find it ironic that we are recruiting with 21st century 

Western social media. We are recruiting foot soldiers for a ninth 

century caliphate. And I just wonder if the cruel irony of that has 

struck anybody in the region. 

And then, finally, susceptibility, and I particularly would like 

your reaction to that, although the other two as well. It is very 

hard for us I think culturally to understand, outside of brainwashing, how can somebody—how can a culture, how can a village, 

how can large numbers of people being recruited elsewhere be so 

susceptible to such a barbaric, suppressive message and culture, 

whether you are a female or male. 

And what does that mean for us going forward as we try to think 

about a stable future some day? I know these are broad questions, 

59

but I think we need to better understand the susceptibility here, 

and some of it may very well have to do with, frankly, in some cultures the willingness to suppress women. 

Not like ISIS, but the sort of second-class for women, clearly not 

the equal of male, that culture ISIS is preying upon. I mean, it is 

taking it to an absurd degree, but—and I just wondered what your 

observations are about that, because I think if we are going to 

counter it we need to know a lot more than we know right now. 

Anyone? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. Well, I just want to reinforce what you are asking in this fact that, indeed, I don’t think this is anything new to 

the human race. It is just we do now have YouTube and photos and 

videos that document these atrocities. And in that fact it is new 

and it is what you say. We are seeing the impact of 21st century 

technology that we thought was about freedom of expression, about 

autonomy being used as a tool for extreme propaganda and violence. 

So, indeed, it is ironic, and it is troubling. But it is not necessarily a regulation issue. It is—we have been at this juncture as 

a human race before in moments of great technological shift. And 

we know we can also address it. 

Your comments about women and their role in society, there is 

a professor at Texas A&M, Valerie Hudson, who is basically working on a project, called Women Stats, where very convincing evidence is showing that those states that have gender equality, the 

chances for violence and conflict are much lower; that it is correlated, statistically speaking. 

Chairman ROYCE. We will go to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida. 

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Thank 

you for convening this important hearing on a crucial subject that 

is often overlooked. I regret that I have to get back to the floor. I 

would like my statement to be made a part of the record. 

Chairman ROYCE. Without objection. 

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. But I am pleased to yield my time to Chris 

Smith, so that Congressman Smith can get the answers about the 

camps. 

Thank you. 

Chairman ROYCE. The gentleman is recognized. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much. I thank my good friend for 

yielding. 

You know, you just mentioned, Doctor, Valerie Hudson. I actually 

had Valerie Hudson testify at a hearing that I held on the consequences of gendercide in China. She wrote the unbelievably 

ground-breaking book, ‘‘Bare Branches,’’ about what sex election 

abortion has done to China, and the missing daughters who have 

been at 5 months or so gestation, as babies, forcibly aborted. 

They are only allowed one, so they choose the male, and the impact it is having on an increasingly male and older society, and 

China is in a terrible, terrible demographic meltdown that could 

lead to violence. She even said—Valerie Hudson—that it could lead 

to war because of the missing females in that country, again underscoring the need for—and the absolutely indispensable role that we 

all know—we take it for granted here—that women play in society. 

60

But when they are missing and they are dead, then that is not the 

case. But Valerie Hudson is an extraordinary academic and writer. 

Let me just ask—I had asked those earlier questions to you 

about the tiny terrorists that you talked about, the child soldiers 

maybe is another way of putting it, how any of that compares with 

the LRA or Charles Taylor. The camps I don’t have a sense—I don’t 

think any of us perhaps do—what those camps really look like. And 

let me—and you did compare it to the Hitler Youth, which certainly is a staggering comparison. 

Mr. Watts, again, if you could get to the issue of the women who 

might step up and help another woman who is—Muslim helps a 

non-Muslim, what happens to her. 

You also talked about the brainwashing. If any of you could 

speak to what is being done for any child or person who needs to 

go through the deprogramming of the hate. In Africa, obviously, 

there are a number of programs for child soldiers that do work, not 

perfectly, but I have met many of them. We have had them here 

testifying. 

Lastly, before I run out of time again, for the second time, if I 

could just ask about, Dr. Ahram, on the Medievals. And if you 

could provide that for the record, we all want to read that, and I 

thank you for your answer, if you could elaborate on that, please. 

Ms. KUEHNAST. I will just basically say, in terms of this relevant 

information with the LRA and Uganda with Joseph Kony, absolutely, I think, you know, the Lost Boys, we see that. But I think 

what is different, if you will, is Joseph Kony, as a renegade armed 

actor in a war, certainly did not have the advantage of YouTube. 

And I do think that that is, as our colleagues here have so well 

put, the PR value of making these video clips of little boys carrying 

guns that are bigger than them, any of these visualizations have 

enormous emotional impact, as Sasha mentioned earlier. 

I would add South Sudan to this mix, because we know for a fact 

that the number of children being kidnapped, both boys and girls, 

to be armed actors in this civil conflict is rising, and the use of sexual violence there is really tipping the charts. So ISIS is not the 

only actor here who has figured out that sexual violence is cheaper 

than a bullet. And it is so much more effective; it is terror at its 

deepest level. And it does destroy people, and it destroys the ties 

that bond people together. 

And when you have to witness a child being raped, a mother 

being raped, as many of these things are public spectacles, then 

you are on the edge of what we call in the genocide prevention 

work, on the edge of an atrocity, a human atrocity. This is one of 

the key indicators of genocidal behavior is gang rape. 

Mr. SMITH. The camps—because I am running out of time 

again—the camps, what do they look like, and where are they? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. What we see on the videos and photos and 

YouTubes, they are basic. They are very basic, but they give them 

an identity, a uniform, a gun, and they practice, as I mentioned, 

cutting off first doll heads, so that they are prepared to do the next. 

And as Dr. Ahram said, sexual violence among—against boys is 

very high. Very, very high, because it creates shame and it creates 

belonging in an ironic manner. 

61

Chairman ROYCE. Well, we had better go to Lois Frankel now. 

But perhaps when we get back at the end of some of the questioning, maybe by Judge Poe, we can get to that. 

Thank you. 

Ms. FRANKEL. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for this 

hearing, and thank you to the panel. I will—I am like everybody 

else sitting here. This is just an appalling situation, and to me you 

have just been describing the lowest form of humanity. And I am 

not sure what we can do. I am going to—I want to follow up on 

Mr. Trott’s questions, but I know one thing. We cannot turn our 

back on this. 

Mr. Trott asked you for some examples—or some concrete suggestions, and I think, Ms. Havlicek, you have had—I know you 

gave us your ideas. I would like to hear the ideas from some of you. 

And if you could just also take into account—you know, you said 

there were 4 million women living under ISIS control or contested 

areas. 

So, obviously, there are a lot of these areas, they are war zones, 

so I am not sure—how do you infiltrate these areas? And, you 

know, what are the—I think you talked about the radio, the internet. I don’t know. Are we talking about NGOs, civil society? Could 

you give us some really concrete examples? 

Mr. WATTS. I think there is a very specific example, and it is one 

of the things I was going to say in answer to Mr. Trott’s question, 

which is we need to remember the lessons of previously when 

America was directly engaged against al-Qaeda in Iraq, as it was 

called then, which was the awakening which did so much to end 

their reign of terror then was based on personal relationships, on 

a particular Sunni tribal sheikh who walked into the American 

base at the end of his road and said, ‘‘I know where these guys are 

hiding. I know where they keep their guns.’’ And from that point 

on, in a matter of days, he was able to—they were able to transform the military situation. 

And what I am saying is that the network that I came across in 

the Yazidi territory that also exists in parts of Syria, there are people on the ground. There is a huge, I think, population. Some of 

the people out there say to me 60 percent of the population in ISIS 

territory are opposed to them. There are assassinations that these 

groups carry out against ISIS members of their own volition. 

If we can just expand on the contacts that already exist, build 

up the personal relationships, follow the line of the network, then 

perhaps we can begin to make contact with people inside who oppose ISIS’s views and are in a position to help direct our efforts, 

you know, whether they have been military or humanitarian, better. 

And I think that is my second point in answer to Mr. Trott’s. He 

asked for two things, which is that if we are going to do something 

we should do it right, like the air strikes are happening, and I get 

an email every day reporting what has been destroyed. 

But on the front line, I was with Kurdish fighters, and we saw 

trucks passing within 100 meters on the highway between Mosul 

and Al-Hasakah and Raqqah. And I said, ‘‘What is going on with 

these trucks?’’ And they said, ‘‘We don’t have any spotters that are 

62

authorized to call in strikes on this stuff.’’ So I think that small 

steps can be taken that would just make the effort more effective. 

Ms. KUEHNAST. I mentioned in my comments that refugee camps 

are there. They have information. They know about what is going. 

They have fleed, and they have opportunities now, one, to try to 

heal from what they have seen and experienced, and we should be 

right there, because this will be the next generation if we don’t engage them. 

We can’t leave them to be idle, because the opportunity to intersect with idleness and the opportunity for engaging in the extremist efforts are provocative because they provide money, identity, 

and opportunity. So refugee camps are key, focusing on young people, very young people, under 10. 

We just should take the playbook from ISIS. They are focusing 

on young people. Why aren’t we? And in the same light, we need 

to pay attention to what Edward said here. Focus on the relationships. They are doing it one person at a time. They don’t have this 

massive campaign. They do it one person at a time, and they spend 

a lot of time on just one. Individuals count. In the same way, we 

need to make those networks and relationships matter. 

Mr. AHRAM. There are, at present, 36 different local and international NGOs and U.S. agencies involved specifically on gender violence in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq. I think those 

would be the agencies that have the most direct access to victims 

and are in a position to try and assist their reintegration back into 

society. 

I think also, though, it is worth cautioning about the impact of 

military intervention. Military interventions are going to produce 

more population displacement, and population displacement, people 

who are displaced—and there are already 13 million displaced people in Syria and Iraq today. Those are the people that are most 

vulnerable to all kinds of sexual trafficking, to sexual exploitation 

and to rape. 

And so I think that while there is certainly a purpose in destroying ISIS, I would caution that there will be a humanitarian 

blowback as well, and there will be humanitarian costs to those 

kinds of activities. 

Chairman ROYCE. We will go to Judge Ted Poe of Texas. 

Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for being 

here. 

I want to center in on specifically the issue of women being trafficked by ISIS, human trafficking. Do we have any estimates about 

how much money is made by ISIS in the trafficking of women and 

girls? Does anybody know? 

Ms. KUEHNAST. I was just going to say this is an absolutely important point, to see that this is a huge criminal network. It is very 

entrepreneurial, and it is making a lot of money. The numbers——

Mr. POE. Does anybody know how much money? Any estimate at 

all? 

Mr. WATTS. I don’t have an estimate on the exact figure, but the 

trafficking is primarily within—when we are talking about sex 

slaves, for example, the women and girls from the Yazidi community, it is within ISIS. So——

63

Mr. POE. Right. How many women are we talking about there 

would be in trafficking? 

Mr. WATTS. In terms of the sex, there——

Mr. POE. Sex trafficking, yes. 

Mr. WATTS. Sex slaves, it is over 3,000, is what we think. 

Mr. POE. How does ISIS justify sex trafficking? 

Mr. WATTS. By its definition of this particular religious minority, 

the Yazidis. Specifically, they are the only group that we know for 

certain have been——

Mr. POE. Tell me how they justify it. They do justify it, I agree. 

How do they justify it? 

Mr. WATTS. They say they are pagans, and they judge them by 

the treatment of pagans back in the—1,300 years ago. 

Mr. POE. And a pagan is what? 

Mr. WATTS. A pagan is someone who——

Mr. POE. In their eyes, under their definition. 

Mr. WATTS. Like an animist, basically, someone who worships 

rocks or animals or, you know, sees gods all over the place, sees 

a multitude of gods. The Yazidis, for example, they use the sun. 

They are actually monotheistic, so actually ISIS have got their interpretation of the Yazidi religion wrong, but the Yazidis view the 

sun or they use the sun as a particular symbol to symbolize God. 

And in ISIS’s interpretation, that means that they are worshiping something other than Allah, a clear—you know, an animist 

symbol. 

Mr. POE. Then that would include everybody that doesn’t agree 

with their specific religious doctrine. Is that correct or not? 

Mr. WATTS. That is not correct in the sense that the Koran does 

have certain outlines for the treatment of the people of the book, 

i.e. Christians and Jews. And so there aren’t—you know, it doesn’t 

apply to everybody. 

Mr. POE. Well, does it apply to Jews and Christians? 

Mr. WATTS. It doesn’t, as far as we know, as far as—to the best 

of my knowledge. Though Christians have been abducted, they 

haven’t been subjected to this kind of sexual enslavement as the 

Yazidis have. That is the only group, to the best of my knowledge, 

that has been treated in that way. 

Mr. POE. But none of you have any numbers, any kind of numbers that we are talking about? 

Mr. WATTS. Well, we are talking about over 3,000, as I say, 

women and girls. And the price for a girl, if she is a virgin, can 

be up to $2,000, I heard in testimony. But after she has been subjected to multiple sexual assaults, the price can go down to as low 

as $100 to $50. 

And what is happening is that girls are being—one girl literally 

described it to me. She was rented out. So she would be passed 

around for 50 bucks here, 100 bucks there, and so—but, again, that 

money is all being transmitted internally within ISIS. To the best 

of our knowledge, they are not trafficking outside their boundaries. 

Mr. POE. I understand. 

Ms. Havlicek, let me ask you something about countering violent 

extremism. We have a program, supposedly, through the State Department to counter violent extremism. This is just my opinion. We 

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are—it seems we are losing that battle with countering violent extremism and the results. 

Can you weigh in on that issue, U.S. countering violent extremism, as it deals with sex trafficking of women? Would you like to 

weigh in on that? 

Ms. HAVLICEK. I am not in a position to speak about the sex trafficking piece of that question. But if I might just respond on the 

U.S. CVE structure. 

Mr. POE. Sure. 

Ms. HAVLICEK. I do think that we have tended to view this battle 

in a slightly narrow way. The idea that you are going to beat this 

enormous propaganda recruitment machinery, this movement 

through a sort of hashtag war, is just too narrow a perspective. 

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think that counter messaging can 

be done—counter narrative work can credibly be done if led by government. I think governments have a job to do on their own strategic communications. No question. But during the Cold War, there 

was a serious investment in the battle of ideas, an investment that 

understood the need to build civil society networks in all sorts of 

different ways through educational outreach, through NGOs, and 

in so many different ways. 

And those were the people, of course, that were at the front line 

of the transition processes when, in fact, there was an opportunity 

to see that happen. That kind of investment I think has not happened in this particular case, and I would hope we could. I think 

one of the problems is that we are also always seeing governments 

running after the fact. 

We are responsive and certainly not proactive. I would make a 

plea for us to look at the displaced populations. The refugee situation, as you well know, it is the single largest humanitarian crisis 

of our time. We need, for both moral imperative reasons, and from 

a practical perspective, to be getting to grips with that population: 

5 million, 6 million people, 4 million outside of the country. 

That is going to be the pool from which extremists recruit. That 

is going to be our biggest challenge and threat over the next generation. We are seeing absolutely nothing being done in the prevention space on those communities and populations right now. That 

would be a way for us to get a little bit ahead of the curve. Also, 

we have said the same thing about women. Here is an emerging 

threat, a trend, that hasn’t really been—that hasn’t really gone up 

the food chain in terms of priorities for policymakers. 

And I must say, though, that the State Department has been 

proactive in looking at ways in which to partner with civil society 

organizations through the ECA’s convening power, bringing women 

from around the world together to start to think about how they 

can push back on this phenomenon. But ultimately we need more 

proaction. 

Mr. POE. Thank you very much. 

Chairman? 

Chairman ROYCE. Mr. Smith, did you have a follow-up question? 

Mr. SMITH. Again, Mr. Watts, I think you wanted to answer the 

question about a Muslim woman who might defend a non-Muslim 

woman. Do they use coercive peer pressure against her? Does she 

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become, you know, just like the non-Muslim, raped and abused and 

exploited? 

Mr. WATTS. Well, very simply, she would be subject to the most 

severe physical punishments. I mean, women receive—Muslim 

women can receive severe beatings for wearing perfume, for speaking too loudly in public. I met one housewife who, when she had 

been crossing the street, her big toe slipped out underneath her 

gown, and she received 50 lashes, she told us, on that big toe for 

it being revealed. So you can imagine. 

I mean, what we did come across was stories where kind of privately and in secret Muslim women from inside ISIS areas had assisted with rescues of non-Muslim women of the Yazidis, either as 

part of the network or on an individual basis taking extreme risks. 

But the punishments can be more severe. 

Mr. SMITH. And forced conversions, is that a serious problem 

with the Christians and others? 

Mr. WATTS. Yeah. I mean, all the Yazidis, as I think has been 

mentioned, you know, effectively that was one of the only ways 

that you could survive in these first few days when a lot of the 

Yazidis were being captured. There were the mass graves that the 

chairman mentioned. Men were offered the chance to convert and 

effectively spare their lives. 

Chairman ROYCE. We just want to thank all of our witnesses 

today. Also, thank you for the time you have put into your prepared testimony. 

By the way, that is online. If people want to go to 

foreignaffairs.house.gov, we will have the Institute for Strategic 

Dialogue, Sasha, we will have that information and, as a matter of 

fact, all of your testimony up, if anybody wants to go through your 

analysis. 

And also, I just wanted to say we have several witnesses here 

who came a continent away to testify before the committee today. 

Thank you so much. And you have given the committee a lot to 

think about, and your testimony is going to be very, very valuable 

to us going forward. So thank you all. 

We stand adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:55 a.m., the committee was adjourned.] 

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