Far from being innocent bystanders, women who joined ISIS participated in the torture and humiliation of Yazidi women.

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NEW DELHI — As ISIS loses the last of the territory under its control, a global debate is raging over whether to strip citizenship from the women who left their homes in the West to join the self-declared caliphate. But that obscures the crimes they committed in Iraq and Syria, including those against other women. Pari Ibrahim, the executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, a group that was formed to support the vulnerable Yazidi community and create awareness about their political situation, told BuzzFeed News that she rejected the narrative that women who married ISIS soldiers — so-called “ISIS brides” — were innocent bystanders. This week, Ibrahim and the foundation shared a video on Twitter calling for countries to focus on conducting actual investigations into the crimes of their citizens who had joined ISIS.

Captured ISIS perps and ISIS wives #ISIS #Yezidi #Yazidi #YazidiGenocide #ISIScrimes #ISISwives https://t.co/uiRWdGSfpy

“There has been no effort to understand why these ISIS brides are guilty,” she told BuzzFeed News. “In some cases, [the wives] would lock our Yazidi women in the houses so they could not escape. They would force them to do manual labor, humiliate them in captivity; they were beaten and tortured by the ISIS wives.”

Thousands of Yazidi women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by ISIS as part of its genocide against Yazidis in northern Iraq. As ISIS has lost its grip on its last remaining strongholds in eastern Syria, the families of fighters have fled and been placed into refugee camps by Kurdish-led forces. The discovery of a pregnant British 19-year-old in one such camp has led to intense debate over whether the women who joined ISIS should be prevented from returning home and stopped from becoming a danger to Western society.

Ivor Prickett / The New York Times; Laura Lean - WPA Pool / Getty Images From left: Hoda Muthana; Shamima Begum.

President Donald Trump has already rejected the plea of Hoda Muthana, a 24-year-old woman from Alabama whose existence was first revealed by BuzzFeed News, to return home. And the UK government said it would strip Shamima Begum, a 19-year-old from London, of her citizenship, preventing her from returning to the country. Both women will be fighting for citizenship rights in court. In an interview with the Guardian, Muthana said she “deeply regrets” joining ISIS, while Begum told the Times of London her life within the caliphate was fairly normal. She had once seen a severed head in a bin in Raqqa, but said it didn’t faze her. Several of the women who fled the West to join ISIS were teenagers when they did so — Begum was just 15. But sympathy toward these women on account of their age and the fact many have young children — or, as in Begum’s case, have also lost children — as well as debating whether they should be stopped from going home risks ignoring the greater question of whether they will be held to account for any crimes they committed while part of ISIS. Even the term “ISIS brides” popularized in the media reduces the women merely to the fact of their marriage. While the women married to ISIS fighters were part of a system that abused all women, evidence suggests they used their relative power over Yazidi women to torture them further.

Li Muzi/Xinhua/Alamy Live News Pari Ibrahim

Ibrahim, 29, fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with her family when she was 3 and now leads the Free Yezidi Foundation, based in the Netherlands. She said she and her team had heard multiple testimonies from survivors about the role of women in the caliphate. ISIS began its genocide against the Yazidis, an ethno-religious group in Iraq, in 2014 — killing men, taking women into captivity and forcing them into sexual slavery, and destroying Yazidi pilgrimage sites and houses of worship. In her book, The Last Girl, Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, who survived the ISIS torture camps, details the horrors faced by women like her who were sold in markets, and even on Facebook, sometimes for as little as $20. The ISIS pamphlet “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves” gave a free pass to soldiers for the raping, selling, buying, or gifting of Yazidi women and children, “for they are merely property.” Ibrahim said the torture of Yazidi women was often psychological, and the “ISIS wives” were “incredibly cruel” in this regard. One of the younger Yazidi survivors told Ibrahim that a woman had “forbidden” her from crying, although the Yazidi woman’s entire family had been massacred by ISIS fighters. Others spoke about how women who were part of ISIS forced them to recite the Qur’an and denounce their own religion. “In some cases, [the wives] were the ones who made women shower and put on clean clothes and makeup before they were brought to the men to be raped,” Ibrahim said via email from Washington, DC. “They were absolutely complicit, and they knew very well what they were doing.” Ibrahim agreed that every individual case was unique and needed investigation to show the truth. “But we know how bad the women were, and we have evidence in some cases.”

Delil Souleiman / AFP / Getty Images Sabha, 30, was among a group of Yazidi women and girls who spent years as sex slaves under ISIS.