The Islamic State: "a place so barbarically horrible . . . [you're] better off dead"

Islamic State Gunmen
The Spectator

James Delingpole, writing for The Spectator (July 11, 2015), reviews television "at its most unmissable" in "A documentary that ought to rank with the footage of British troops liberating Belsen," showing on British Channel 4's upcoming episode (July 15th) of the documentary series Dispatches, Escape from Isis, which shows secret clips from within the terrorist Islamic State. Let Delingpole suggest a thought experiment:

So you've just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they've all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they'd be better off dead.

Consider the life of your daughter if she's 'lucky' and ends up enslaved to a woman:

The very least she can expect is to have to spend her every day in the most restrictive clothing anywhere in the Muslim world. Her hands must be hidden by black gloves, her eyes invisible behind three veils. On those rare occasions when she is allowed outside, she must stumble as if half blind. If she accidentally breaks these rules she'll be beaten; if she raises her voice she'll be beaten; if she disobeys an order she'll be beaten - usually by the al-Khansaa Brigade, a special female police group of brutal enforcers, mostly foreign recruits determined to prove their loyalty by being extra zealous.

But suppose your daughter is unlucky, as the thought experiment of enslavement turns real:

One 18-year-old escapee reports what happened when she was bought by a self-styled 'sheikh': first, her owner raped her; then his six bodyguards - through the night till morning ("they were not raping me in a gentle way, but with force and fast movement, without care"); then, the driver gave her to 12 men. "They did everything to me. I'm still in pain."

This poor woman was at least able to escape from the Islamic State. Women trapped there suffer on, unless they are rescued:

Escape From Isis uses secret footage . . . to show you in unsparing detail what it's like behind the Black Flag curtain: everything from the small talk of Islamic State fighters as they jauntily discuss what they're going to do [sexually] with their . . . [female] captives to [other atrocities]. It's ugly, it's almost unbearable to watch and it's essential viewing . . . . [because] what makes it bearable, uplifting even, is the extraordinary story it tells of the rescue operations that have brought at least some of these captured [women] . . . back to the bosom of their tearful families. Watch and you will share their joy.

Most of these women are Yazidis, a pagan sect particularly despised by Islamists, and as pagans, they have no rights at all under Islamic law, hence their enslavement.

That's the reality. Their only hope is rescue.