Police officers stand on guard next to a woman wearing a burqa
Police officers stand on guard next to a woman wearing a burqa near the venue where controversial Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders will speak in the Sydney suburb of Liverpool February 22, 2013. Security at the function centre was tight for Wilders, who speaks against the spread of Islam across the world. REUTERS/Daniel Munoz

In the past few months, the Islamic State, or IS, cited political reasons why it beheaded several American and British male prisoners. However, for the first time in its one year of sowing fear in IS-held territories, the militant organisation beheaded two female civilians.

This time, the IS used “ witchcraft and sorcery” as charges to justify decapitation. The Washington Post cited its source from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights who used the pseudonym Rami Abdulrahman who, through wire reports, confirmed the beheadings. He said the decapitation took place in Deir al-Zor province.t

According to Abdulrahman, the two women were executed with their husbands. The LA Times reports that the beheadings were publicly done on Sunday and Monday.

While IS has killed females in the past by burning some Yazidi women and stoning to death women accused of adultery, it is the first time the terror group decapitated women. The first Western female known to have been killed by the IS American hostage Kayla Mueller, but how she died remains unclear.

The Observatory estimates almost 3,000 people have been killed by the US, including 74 children and 1,800 civilians. It happened amid reports that IS fighters killed more civilians in Kobani, a town in Syria, when it made house-to-house massacres. These deaths were made for people in IS-controlled areas to live in fear of the terrorist organisation.

The reports did not provide details on what the two women did for them to be charged with sorcery and witchcraft that some tribal groups, such as those in Papua New Guinea, had used as justification for burning old women whom they suspect of causing children in their community to die. The charges, though, are possibly trumped up – both for the “witches” of Papua New Guinea and “sorceresses” in the Middle East.

Also conspicuously absent in the decapitation of the two women is Jihadi John. IS also did not post videos in YouTube of the women’s beheading.

To contact the writer, email: vittoriohernandez@yahoo.com

RELATED STORIES