ISIS’s Naked Slave Markets
Erosblog had a post recently discussing a UN official who told a salacious tale about ISIS selling women from captured towns naked in local markets:
Filling an idle moment with TV punditry, I came upon a United Nations bureaucrat attempting to describe the plight of women and girls captured by ISIS. She told a horrifying tale: whole populations of captured towns stripped of their sexually-desirable women and girls, who are then, she claimed, sorted, ranked by attractiveness, and sold in a state of nakedness in local markets, as sex slaves; excepting only the youngest and most attractive, who are routinely saved for the enjoyment of the ISIS sheik (her word) and his close associates.
It’s horrifying. But, is it true?
She offered no evidence; she didn’t even state where her information came from. She just said that this was the routine sequence of events whenever ISIS captures a town or village. Her credulous interviewer asked her no hard questions of any kind.
The rest of the Erosblog post goes into the nature of credible evidence about an atrocity of this sort, and why it would be hard to marshal any such credible evidence, even if the story were true. My take, though, is that the story is obvious bullshit. What makes me curious is the reason for it. Whose agenda is served, I wonder, by selling a lurid story straight out of Victorian pornography, complete with nude slave markets and leering Arab warlords saving the best harem girls for the sheik?
