The Sabaya

This week marks a decade since one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century: the Yazidi genocide and the sexual enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women and girls by the Islamic State terrorist organization. A direct line connects this onslaught on Yazidi women and the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. In both events, the captors of Yazidi and Israeli women were documented referring to their captives as sabaya, an Arabic term that dates back to medieval times to describe the taking of occupied populations as spoils of war or, in a more contemporary context, slavery, including sexual slavery.

In one of the blood-chilling Islamic State videos from Iraq in 2014, cheerful commanders discussed the prices of Yazidi female captives, explicitly referring to them as sabaya. Similarly, on Oct. 7, an armed Hamas militant was documented sitting in the occupied Nahal Oz military base, referring, in the same gleeful manner, to captured female Israeli soldiers as sabaya. As the captives were sitting bleeding, beaten, and surrounded by the bodies of their dead colleagues, a Hamas gunman was recorded telling his comrades: “These are the sabaya (which the IDF, when circulating the video, translated as “women who can get pregnant”), these are the Zionists,” before telling one of the captives in English “you are beautiful.”

Although the use of the term sabaya in both contexts sheds light on the prevalence of sexual violence during conflict, the international attitude toward the term, and toward the use of sexual violence, was entirely different.

In the case of the Yazidi genocide, there was broad agreement about the relation between the term sabaya and the Islamic State’s weaponization and use of sexual violence. Freed Yazidi women and girls have recounted the constant use of the term as part of their abuse by their Islamic State captors. The activist Nadia Murad, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight to liberate Yazidi women, similarly told of how an Islamic State commander referred to her using the term during her captivity. In 2021, a Swedish documentary titled Sabaya premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story of a Kurdish group striving to release abducted Yazidi sex slaves, winning universal acclaim.

Between 2014 and 2017, the international community documented IS atrocities, and as early as October 2014, the United Nations published a report based on interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses and victims of the genocide. Another March 2015 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) described IS’ sexual and gender-based violence, and referenced the group’s pamphlets that documented its rulings on sexual enslavement (sabiy). The following year, the UNHCR issued another report on ISIS crimes against Yazidis which chronicled how “captured Yazidi women and girls are deemed property of ISIS and are openly termed sabaya or slaves.” The European Parliament‘s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights followed with another report in 2017 which also referenced how the Islamic State would “select, purchase and remove Yazidi women, whom they refer to as sabaya (slaves) and consider as chattels,” and whom they “systematically subjected to rape.” Briefly put, there was no debate about the meaning of sabaya in the Yazidi context. In fact, as recently as December 2023, a report by the U.N. Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) mentioned the term 30 times and included a section titled “Sexual slavery—the sabaya system.”

This established consensus, however, did not carry over to Hamas and its Jewish victims. Instead, once the Hamas video from Oct. 7 was made public by the Israeli authorities, it triggered a heated linguistic debate and a semantic relitigation of the term sabaya and even its use. It was not only Iran’s and Hamas’ propagandists who fiercely denied the term’s sexual connotation, but also reputable commentators, public intellectuals, and scholars. Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, appealed to phonology, pedantically insisting that the Hamas gunman used a different word in Levantine Arabic, with a similar pronunciation but a different sibilant, which simply means “young women.” Meanwhile, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, who characterized the IDF video as an “Islamophobic” mistranslation, denied the sexual connotation of the term, insisting that the word means merely prisoners or captives. Other commentators maintained that associating the term with sexual enslavement meant “regurgitating Israeli propaganda” and constituted “absolutely racist drivel.”

There were other examples of these types of claims, some of which Graeme Wood addressed in a column after the video was released in May. Wood debunked the denial of the term’s sexual connotation primarily by pointing out its prevalence in the Islamic State’s lexicon. Yet Wood’s article did not tackle the more acute question: Why, despite the clear evidence of the Islamic State’s use of sabaya to justify sexual slavery, have commentators rushed to deny the term’s sexual connotation in the context of the Palestinian terror group and Israel? And more broadly, why, in the case of Jewish victims, have so many been eager to undermine evidence about the use of sexual violence by Palestinians?

The answer is that the purpose of denying the sexual connotation of the word sabaya is to sanction Oct. 7 as a legitimate military operation under the laws of war, rather than an orgiastic human rights massacre. The assiduous avoidance of referencing the Islamic State and its use of the term sabaya was a tell. It is hard to believe that well-informed commentators are ignorant of the contemporary history of the term, especially given the bulk of evidence about its use. Anyone with an even modest interest in the Middle East in the last decade has been exposed to the sights of the Islamic State’s systemic abuse of the Yazidis and the testimonies, certainly after Murad won the Nobel Prize and the recent premier of the Swedish documentary conspicuously titled Sabaya.

Rather, the petty and willingly ignorant debate about the meaning of a single word was a sleight of hand—a tool to belittle or silence evidence about Palestinian complicity in sexual violence. By hiding behind semantics, these commentators could avoid confronting evidence of sexual violence that had already begun to emerge at the time the video was circulated, including a report about sexual violence issued begrudgingly by the U.N. (which the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, nevertheless insisted was “information” and “not evidence”), and used ornate linguistic exposition to undermine any potential evidence of Palestinian sexual violence.

The dissociation between the use of the word sabaya in both contexts also served a more specific purpose: to distinguish between the “resistance” of Hamas and the “terrorist” Islamic State, and discourage any comparison between the two groups. This trend dates back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. After the start of the “global war on terror,” scholars and commentators were at pains to differentiate between so-called global jihadi groups like al-Qaida (and later the Islamic State) and groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, engaged in war against Israel. Consequently, the latter were deemed legitimate “national liberation” and “resistance” groups whose use of violence is confined to a nationalist framework. Moreover, in contrast with global jihadists, the “resistance” groups were embedded in their societies, where they represented constituents in their respective political systems.

Although the distinction is seemingly about the proper categorization of Islamist groups and the classification of their varying ideologies and objectives, it is also, if not primarily, about something else. Whereas al-Qaida and IS are understood to represent wanton cruelty and inhumanity, in pursuit of a utopian ideology, the violence groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad resort to is deemed understandable—for some, even justifiable—since its context is a struggle for national liberation. Without this fictional distinction, Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorism would have to be regarded as legitimate. Or, to quote Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, and Michael Kenney, professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh: “if Hamas is equated with ISIS, as specious analogies suggest, the only available options for dealing with it will be military-oriented.”

But by memory-holing recent history and resorting to linguistic acrobatics, the polemicists revised the record of the Yazidi genocide and the means employed to justify it. In their effort to legitimize sexual violence against Jewish victims, they denied the plain meaning of sabaya and erased the testimonies and experiences of Yazidi victims. All that to defend the honor of Palestinian “resistance.”