The militant Islamist group ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) put up posters calling on the people of Mosul to bring them their unmarried girls to participate in “jihad al-nikah,” or sex jihad. The reports came from Al-Masryalyoum, a well-respected Egyptian daily newspaper as well as other sources in the Arab press.

ISIS has recently taken over vast territories in Iraq including Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Jihad al-nikah refers to women joining the jihad by offering sex to the male fighters.

Posters in public places in Mosul read:

“We call upon the people of this county to bring their unmarried girls so they can fulfill their duty in sex jihad for their warrior brothers in the city and anyone who will not appear will feel the full force of the sharia [Islamic law] upon him.”

Reports in Mosul indicate that ISIS fighters have been going door-to-door, entering houses, killing the men and raping the women. Rupert Colville, a spokesman in Geneva for Navie Pillay, the top United Nations human rights official, said that he had received information that four women in Mosul had committed suicide after being raped or forced into marriages with the militants.

Al-Iraqiya TV station published a report about the story of two Iraqi girls who were raped by the armed men of ISIS in Mosul (see video below). The two girls, who are sisters, said that ISIS fighters came into their house, killed the men and afterwards, they took turns raping the women.

“They came into the house. They were disgusting. They were armed and spoke among themselves in a language we did not recognize. We were afraid; I tried to save my sister, but one of them hit me with his weapon – on my body and then on my face – me and my sister. I blacked out and woke up to the sound the sounds of the screaming of my neighbor while one of the jihadis was playing with my hair.”

The girls said that the men were Arabs as well as foreigners.

Her sister said, “I heard one of them speaking in a dialect from the Gulf region and the other one was speaking in a language I have never heard before. I kept resisting and he hit me on my head. I woke up and saw that my entire body was covered in blood.”

A Kurdish Iraqi woman, who gave her name only as Um-Lara, reported that she fled to her sister’s house in Baghdad with her children so that her daughters and sons wouldn’t fall into the hands of ISIS.

Um-Lara, who is 40 years old, said that she escaped with her four daughters, who are between the ages of 14 and 23 as well as her two sons, from the Al-Wachda neighborhood in Mosul after men from ISIS started going house to house to take women, girls and boys.

The family fled to the mother’s sister’s house, located in a poor, rough neighborhood in Baghdad, with only the clothes on their backs. Speaking to Novosti (a Russian news agency), Um-Lara said that the militants had kidnapped many women in Mosul, never being heard from again.

To date, there are no statistics on the number of women who have been raped by ISIS since they took over Mosul.

Video: Testimony of two Iraqi girls who were raped by the armed men of ISIS in Mosul