The Daily - The Daily Presents “Caliphate,” Chapter 9, Part 1

Episode Date: June 16, 2018

The New York Times has introduced a documentary audio series that follows Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism for The Times, on her quest to understand ISIS. Today, as a special episode of “The Daily,” we offer Chapter 9, Part 1 of “Caliphate,” in which Rukmini speaks to an ISIS detainee who challenges her to find the girl he enslaved. For more information about the series, visit nytimes.com/caliphate.This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.

From The New York Times and the team that brought you The Daily, this is Caliphate. Can you just say what we're doing before we get there? It's July 22nd, and we're heading to a police station in western Mosul. And this is apparently the place where police officers and members of the Iraqi security force are bringing ISIS members who were captured during the battle for western Mosul. So we're hoping to interview some of the detainees. Are we here? Chapter 9. Prisoners. Part 1. So this is the police station.

Let's start at the jail. Okay. So we drive up to a building. They appear to have taken over a stately building in western Mosul. Most likely a municipal building belonging to the Iraqi government. Perhaps it was the stately home of a wealthy person. Poils of barbed wire on the outside. It was heavily guarded. And sandbags all around the building on the balcony.

Okay, so, it's only me, you, and Andy are going in. Okay. No security details with us. That's fine. You, me, and Hawk walk in. Yeah. We are currently in an Iraqi prison where rooms are full of different ISIS members.

And can I just say I'm basically breathing through my mouth right now? The first thing that hit me was the smell. The smell of sweat, the smell of dirt. mean was the smell. The smell of sweat, the smell of dirt. And we began passing these metal doors with big latches on them.

There's like a grate and a window in some of the doors. And I remember when we passed one, you could see these faces peering out at you. We're taken upstairs. And the security officials who run this prison took us into one of their commander's offices. And this is the main facility where ISIS prisoners are transferred? There's a desk, there's a couple of chairs, the Iraqi flag. How many prisoners do

they have here who are confirmed ISIS members? I explain Argul to the commander who is sitting before us. So we have 700 detainees. I never know who they're actually going to bring out to see me. Some of them were reported by the families or by sources. Some of them have their names, matches, like the same name as in the database, saying that this is an ISIS member. But I make clear that I only want to see confirmed members of ISIS.

Two hundreds of them willingly confess that they've joined ISIS already. And I do that because according to Iraq's counterterrorism law from 2005, there are only two outcomes for confirmed members of terrorist groups like ISIS. Life sentence or capital punishment, unless a judge sees fit to intervene. The reality is that once you're taken into a prison like the one that we were in, your chances of coming out are close to no. Now, I want to recognize right away, there are definitely people out there that would say that we have no business being here, that the very action of us coming into a prison and speaking to a prisoner could compromise

that person's fate. Obviously, this is very far from the ideal situation. I get that. But if an ISIS member, even in this complex and convoluted situation, agrees to speak to me, I want to hear what they have to say. I think that there is value in listening to them. After some time, they brought in a young man. Why are they tying his wrists? I don't feel comfortable with them. His hands were bound. Do you think that's necessary, Huck?

Yes. Yes. Okay. He looked to be, I would say, in his 30s, probably his early 30s. He had dark, curly hair.

They can't let him sit in the cushion because he's got dirty clothes. He had rashes on his arms. You can sit on this thing. Yeah, it's okay.

And they did not want to let him sit down because they thought he might have scabies. I basically took my hijab, which I had brought on this trip to cover myself and to try to blend in. And I asked the commander, could we put my hijab down on the couch and he can then sit on that. Assalamu alaikum. Sahafiyah? Amerikiyah. Men, New York Times. and he can then sit on that. And eventually they agreed to that. Just tell him, I'm a journalist.

I have... Please, can we close the door? Can we close the door? Yeah. Please explain to him, Hock, I'm a journalist. We are independent of our government. And I would like his permission to interview him Please explain to him, Hock, I'm a journalist, we are independent of our government, and I would like his permission to interview him and let him know that he is free not to speak

to me. We are journalists, we have no relationship with the government, nor with the police, nor with the army. We are journalists from the New York Times. Do you have the freedom to speak with us? Yes. What would you like to say? Thank you.

He says you are most welcome, and God may salute you. Can you get his name and where he's from? So this prisoner, his name is Bashar. We're just going to use his first name. And he's from where? From Bab Sinjar, Western Mosul. He explains to us that he's from Western Mosul. He explains to us that he's from western Mosul.

So he said, I was working in my shop, and they used to come to my shop and fix their generators, he said. He says that he was a mechanic. He had a shop where he dealt with a number of electrical appliances, specifically generators. And ISIS began coming to him to get their own generators fixed. ISIS uses generators for numerous things. They were using portable generators to build tunnels, to power up the tools that they were using to dig. They used them to power up their homes and their offices.

He then describes how at a certain point they just stopped coming to him. So they say the only solution for you if you want to get paid is to join us and pledge allegiance to us. When he asked why, they said to him we'll come back to you if you pledge allegiance. And that's what drove me to pledge allegiance to them so that

I can get paid. So he claims that he pledged allegiance, that he wasn't even aware of their ideology. I was doing nothing. I was just going from home to work and from work to home. That he was never a soldier. He never took part in any violence. He was just a mere mechanic. So he says I just joined and to be just like the other people who joined already. And it's then that we start talking about the money. How much was the salary? 300,000 and something, he says. 300,000 is the salary of an emir. It's not the salary of a low-level ISIS guy.

We ask him how much he was paid by ISIS, and he surprises us by saying 300,000 Iraqi dinars. So that's around 250 bucks a month. What explains his high salary? We actually know exactly how ISIS pays its fighters because of the work of researchers like Ayman Tamimi, who have found these salary slips. The payment is according to the family and

children that you have. We know that it's a stipend system based on how many dependents you have. A child, they would pay $25. So an unmarried fighter who has no children starts out at a base pay of around $50.

We know that they pay extra for each wife that you have. They pay extra for the number of children that you have that are under the age of 15. So as I was pushing him on the numbers... I don't remember exactly how they were paying. He then claims that he was, in fact, with ISIS for just a few months, and they asked him to do something that he was uncomfortable with. When they did so, he said, I don't want to work with you anymore,

so he quits. And he quit without any repercussions. And this is total bullshit. Just tell him, Bashar, if he doesn't want to talk to me, that's fine. But I don't want to waste the last two days we have here doing interviews with somebody who's lying to me. And at this point, you and Hawk, you were on

to him. I mean, at that point, I was almost done. Because the one thing I know is you don't just join ISIS. It's not like some sort of, you know, YMCA that you join and then decide that you want to quit the next month. Yeah.

And then I had a terrible thought that could explain the discrepancy in his figures. Did they also give a supplement if you had a subaya? If you had? A subaya. I realized in that moment that he might have had a Sabia. What kind of Sabias did he have in his own care? He just took one.

Sabia is the term that ISIS uses to refer to their female sex slaves. How old was she? 15 years. Means she was 15 when he took her, that means she was captured when she was 12. Yes. Tens of thousands fled the weekend assault on Sinjar and are now surrounded. So back in 2014.

Desperation on a mountain refuge. Not long after they took the city of Mosul. People grasped for aid from a helicopter. ISIS turned its attention to the north, to a place called Mount Sinjar. And it was there that they attacked a religious minority called the Yazidis. We're learning more about those stranded members of a religious minority. Some horrific stories are emerging. You might remember the really heartbreaking images that came out around this time of the

helicopters landing on top of the mountain. In a dramatic rescue mission, the helicopter touched down for five very precious but awful minutes. And of people just rushing it in an effort to escape ISIS. That invasion was widely reported as just another territorial conquest, as ISIS trying to get more land. But in fact, based on the dozens of interviews that I've done with the survivors and based on the documents that ISIS released, it's clear that this was a sexual conquest. They were going there specifically

to get the women and the girls. So could you just explain how it is that slavery factors into ISIS's vision for the world? So the thing to always keep in mind is ISIS is trying to recreate a specific time in history. They're trying to take us back to the 7th century and specifically to the time when the Prophet Muhammad and his companions roamed the earth, which in their minds was the most virtuous period in our history, right? And of course, that was a time when slavery existed. It was common, not just in the Muslim world, but in much of the world. And that is reflected in Islamic scripture. Slavery exists and is mentioned as a lawful institution in the Quran and in the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence. this is the body of laws that was written down after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, where it is codified. Now, what ISIS is doing is they

are telling the world, because it appears in scripture, it is our duty to uphold it, right? We as Muslims have to take the whole shebang, every aspect of it. And their beef with the Muslim world is that they are applying only some of the rules and the ones that no longer jive with modernity are being ignored, like slavery, right? So that's the framework. Okay. Okay. Then within this framework, they have mined this body of Islamic laws to lay out the steps through which a person is enslaved, a woman is enslaved. Okay. And they do this in their magazine, The Beak.

They do it in pamphlets that their religious scholars put out. This was like something they made for their followers. I'm like, here's how to enslave people. It's literally a how-to. It's a Q&A with their religious scholars on who you can enslave, how you do it. And they've plotted it out, starting with the question of what type of women can you take as slaves? And what ISIS does is they point to stories from the life of the Prophet Muhammad and of his companions, stories of battle

when they invaded areas that were non-Muslim, and they took everything that they found there, both the property and the people, as war spoils. So the key is a battle in a time of war, and the victims have to be non-Muslims. That brings us to the Yazidis. There are about half a million Yazidis, most of them in Iraq. The Yazidis believe in seven sacred angels. They follow an ancient religion derived from Zoroastrianism. So in ISIS's view, they are mushrikin. This is the Arabic word for polytheist.

So the fact that they practice a non-Muslim faith and the fact that ISIS invaded their land in a time of war meant that, in the view of the terrorist group, they were fully eligible for enslavement. But they go one step further. They describe the act of raping these girls as essentially a holy act. And this isn't just something that I think they say. It's not just propaganda. It's not just written down. I know now from the numerous interviews I've done with the women and girls who survived

that the fighters who took them literally prayed before they got on top of them and raped them. They were treating the rape as a kind of sacrament. Her name is... From which village? Thank you. From Hardan. From where? Sinjar.

From Hardan village. Okay. What happened to her? Where is she now? Where is her sister? I turned her in to the security forces. So back in the prison, we're sitting with Bashar. I told God that I did it just to get her out to her family.

I didn't do any of the atrocities. He said, that's how I do it, and that's why I did it. I just bought her in order to give her to her family. He then makes this incredible claim. He says, I felt really bad because these daughters belong to families. They shouldn't have been dealt like this. He says that he basically bought a 15-year-old girl for the price of $5,000. This is more than a year's worth of his salary.

And he says that he bought her for the sake of essentially saving her. I asked him, did you rape her? He says, no, I swore to God I didn't rape her. He swore up and down that he had her for the sake of essentially saving her. I asked him, did you rape her? He says, no, I swore to God I didn't rape her. He swore up and down that he had never touched her. I told her that I don't think like these guys. And he said that, in fact, he made an arrangement with her family and her family told him that if you don't touch her,

you are going to risk her. When he had gotten in touch with the girl's father, the father was so relieved and so grateful for what he had done that he in fact offered to help him flee the city. And he could tell, I think, that I was skeptical. And so what he did is he threw it back in my camp and he said, go find this girl. The girl, I'm sure, is going to back up everything I said.

That's what I want. I want you, please, to tell her family. And so I thought, okay, I'll do that. Yeah, call Falah and tell him he's there. Sure, sure, I'll call. I'll call. Is that part of him? Hi, Falah, it's Rukmini.

Sorry to bother you. How are you? Good, good. Falah, we're at the police station here. And we just interviewed an ISIS guy who had a Yazidi girl. And I was wondering, is that too permission once again to interview him, if that's okay. I accept. I approve. So less than 24 hours later, we were back at the prison. Just to confirm, because I'm also doing a recording,

he has said it's okay to interview him. A couple of times. We spoke to him yesterday, and he explained to us that he went to great lengths to save a Yazidi girl, that he bought her for $5,000, and that his aim in buying her was to essentially free her and to give her back to her family. I didn't believe that story. And he challenged me and said to try to get a hold of this young woman. The thing Bashar didn't know as he was sitting across from me is I have deep contacts in the Yazidi community.

So we've gotten a hold of the young woman. She's 15 years old. Actually, she's a girl. And we're going to call her now. We found her phone number. We're going to contact her now. She's my daughter, she's 15 years old. She's her, if not her.

That's her. We're calling her now. that's her hey Fala Fala hi hi Fala it's Rukmini I have you on speakerphone and the ISIS prisoner whose name is Bashar is is sitting next to me.

And we'd like, please, to put on the phone. Okay. Assalamualaikum. Marhaba. I'm an American journalist. My name is Rukmini. Waalaikumussalam. Thank you.

So on the other end of the phone was the young Yazidi girl. We're withholding her name at her request. She was talking to us with the permission of her father, who was at her side. And translating for us was a Yazidi community leader named Fala. And right away. She says it's not one month. It was five months. It was five months.

Okay. The girl identified this man as the person who had bought her. She confirmed his line of work. She confirmed what he looked like. She even confirmed his voice. She does recognize his voice when he looked like. She even confirmed his voice. She does recognize his voice when he was speaking. Of course, I know his voice. She went on to tell us that he was in fact the third man that had bought her.

I'm sorry to ask a sensitive question, but can you please tell me and tell this man if he abused you sexually, if he raped you in these five months that he held you. أتمنى أن يكون هناك شخص يدعي الزين وهم أخذوا شرفنا ولم يكن زين هو بالتحديد سوى شيء معك؟ نعم قالت لي أتمنى لله أن كلهم أخذوا مدينتي ومدينتي وقلت لها أنه فعل شيء قالت لي نعم فعلته

وقلت لها أنه فعله And I asked her, he himself, did he do something? She said, yes, she does. She heeded, and I swear to Allah, he did. Every two days he would come to me and he would have sex with me. She said that Bashar was cruel to her. He says he used to beat me and he used to ask my father for ransom, that he used to either to give him 10,000,000 or he's going to sell her to Syria. She also said that he did indeed contact her father. He had said that he had done as much, but it wasn't to help her, to rescue her.

He was contacting her father to shake him down for a ransom. Did he pray before raping her? Yes. Did he pray before raping her? Yes. Yes? Yes. Please tell her I'm so sorry for what she's experienced and tell her my own mother was raped

and she should not feel in any way ashamed by what has happened to her. It was not her fault. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Fala. I'm going to cut the phone now. Okay. Thank you.

Take care. I'll be in touch, okay? Bye. Okay. Yeah. Bashar. Bashar. Now I'd like to ask him what he says.

He challenged me yesterday and said to get this girl on the phone that she would basically recount what he said. She's saying exactly the opposite. What is his reaction? He says this is not true. Bashar swore on the name of God that everything he had done had been for this young girl's good. He had done this to save her. And he stuck to the story even as pretty much every other part of his story started to fall apart.

The place that he had joined ISIS changed. He admitted that he had held her for five months, not one. The amount of time that he had been in ISIS started to expand. He's meeting her on some of the details. Yes. He says, what I'm telling you is all the truth, and that's nothing but the truth. And I am not contradicting, and I'm not lying to you. And that's nothing but the truth and I am not contradicting and I'm not lying to you and that's that's what I have so Bashar I'm just a journalist okay I'm not a member of

any security force and I'm not member of any government I'm asking you do you want to tell me what really happened with this girl or do you not want to be interviewed at all. And after some time, he just stopped answering my questions. And at that point, I knew that it was time for us to go. So, do you know what happened to Bashar? So, the jail where we saw him told us that they transferred him to Baghdad. But when we called Baghdad, they have no record of him. So, I don't actually know what happened to him. What we do know for sure is that the Iraqi government is aggressively prosecuting these people. And they're holding trials that are incredibly hasty.

And human rights groups have criticized that type of justice, saying that these hasty trials are, first of all, violating the due process of the prisoners. And there's worries that perhaps people who are not ISIS members are being implicated. But beyond that, they're also saying that this is a violation of the rights of the victims because they are not being given a chance at closure. They're not being given a chance to know, to even know what happened to their tormentors. know, to even know what happened to their tormentors. And in fact, since that phone call that we made in that jail, we've been able to get back in touch with the young girl's father. And he told us that the fact that his daughter was able to confront her rapist in that way was cathartic for her. But the fact is, this young girl wouldn't have even known that he was in jail

if it weren't for this accident of journalism, if it weren't for the fact that, this young girl wouldn't have even known that he was in jail if it weren't for this accident of journalism. If it weren't for the fact that a group of New York Times journalists just happened to walk into this prison on this particular day. So it's possible that she would have thought that he could have just been out roaming the world, living in the world still. Right. Living in the world still. Right. What these men did lives on in the hearts of the women and girls they left behind. Thank you. you