New York May 19 (IANS/AKI): A 20-year-old woman was burnt alive after refusing to perform an "extreme sex act" on a militant of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, the UN envoy on sexual violence in conflict was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
"We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act," Zainab Bangura told the Middle East Eye website.
"We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts," Bangura added.
She said the inhuman campaign of rape and brutality IS was waging against women was worse than in any other war zone she has worked in, including Bosnia, Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Somalia.
Bangura had just returned from a fact-finding mission in Syria, Iraq and three other Middle Eastern countries, where she met officials, survivors from the Yazidi, Christian and Turkmen minorities and frontline workers.
IS is abducting young women and girls, stripping them naked and leering at them, examining their breasts and testing their virginity before selling and re-selling them as sex slaves and forcing them into short-term marriages and prostitution, Bangura said.
"The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold," she said.
Some have managed to flee their captors or to commit suicide, but when IS discovered girls used their headscarves to hang themselves, they forced them to remove these, Bangura said.
"I learned of three girls who tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison, which had been left in a room. They started vomiting and were rushed to hospital and washed out. When they came back, they were brutally attacked."
Sexual violence against women and girls is central to IS's ideology and is used to recruit fighters, raise funds, enforce discipline and advance their radical ideology, according to Bangura.
"IS is organised, coordinated and operates on a widespread and systematic basis to commit a staggering array of atrocities."
"We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes," she said.