Video - Iraqi Ayatollah Al-Haeri: People Who Will Oppose the Mahdi Will Become Slaves or Slave Girls, Who Can Be Lent Out to Friends.

Kurdish forces swaps female ISIS captive for 50 Yezidi Kurdish women

Kurdish forces swaps female ISIS captive for 50 Yezidi Kurdish women. (Rudaw).

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A captured female member of the Islamic State (ISIS) group was swapped for 50 Yezidi Kurdish women in the hands of the militants, a Syrian Kurdish commander said.

Saeid Hussein, a commander of the YPJ, the women’s wing of the Kurdish YPG force that controls Syria’s Kurdish regions, announced the swap.

“We arrested two ISIS members; one of them was a woman. We exchanged this woman for 50 Yezidi women,” he said.

There was some controversy, however, about the details of the exchange. Some sources said the swap took place because the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) had paid to secure the women’s release – something it has been doing since ISIS attacked Yezidi Shingal and kidnapped thousands of women in August 2014.

Qasim Darbo, a Peshmerga commander in Shingal, told Rudaw that his forces had ordered the YPJ to go ahead with the swap.

“They had no choice but to rescue them (the Yezidi women),” he said. “We had a military order to fight them (YPG) if they had refused.”

Lebanon - Syrian 'Sex Slave' Ring Busted after Hizbullah Tip-Off.

Lebanon - Syrian 'Sex Slave' Ring Busted after Hizbullah Tip-Off. (Naharnet).

A Hizbullah tip-off helped the Internal Security Forces dismantle the country's largest known sex trafficking ring, media reports said on Sunday.

The ISF operation that freed 75 mostly Syrian women was carried out last Sunday and Tuesday.

“A Syrian public passenger van driver was passing Friday night in a non-residential street in Beirut's southern suburbs when he noticed four scantily-dressed young women standing on the side of the road,” MTV said in a report on Sunday.

“The driver convinced the women to get in the van after they told him that they escaped from a faraway place where they were locked up,” it added.

The driver promised to help them and took them to an apartment in Beirut's southern suburbs where he lives with a number of Syrian compatriots, the TV network said.

The women were later “sexually harassed in the apartment, which prompted them to start screaming, the thing that drew the neighbors' attention,” MTV added.

“The neighbors then informed Hizbullah's 'security committee' in the area that something unusual was taking place in the apartment,” the TV network went on to say.

“The members of the security committee arrived on the scene and detained all of those who were in the apartment,” it added.

During interrogation, the young women said that they had escaped from a place in Jounieh “where they were suffering beatings and rape.”

The women revealed to police investigators that other women are locked up at the Chez Maurice resort in Maameltein, which prompted the ISF to carry out the raids, MTV said.

A doctor who was arrested in the operation has confessed to carrying out “nearly 200 abortions,” according to the ISF.

"This is the largest sex trafficking ring we've uncovered since the outbreak of the Syrian war," a Lebanese security source told AFP on Friday.

Ten male ring members, eight female workers and a nurse who worked for the traffickers were also arrested in the raids.

A security source said "an eight-month-old baby, likely the child of one of the rescued women" was found during the raids.

Even before the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, Syrian women had been pushed into the illicit sex trade in neighboring Lebanon.

"However, as with any war, conflict has made Syrian women and children even more vulnerable," the security source said. "They pay the highest price." Read the full story here.

Egypt's ‘Summer Brides’: Under-age daughters sold as ‘sex-slaves’ in Egypt.

Egypt's ‘Summer Brides’: Under-age daughters sold as ‘sex-slaves’ in Egypt.(AA).Wealthy Arab tourists from Gulf countries are paying money to purchase under-age Egyptian girls as “summer-brides”, claims a new report on human trafficking released by the U.S. State Department. The marriages are not legally binding and end when the men return to their home countries. According to the report “Trafficking in Persons”, often times these temporary marriages are facilitated by the girls’ parents who profit from the transaction. According to Britain’s The Daily Mail, the wealthy tourists pay an amount to poor families through intermediaries, ranging from anywhere between $495 and $4,950.The young victims, some under the age of 18, are then forced to serve as sex slaves as well as servants to their “husbands.”
Egypt has laws in place that aim to combat human trafficking which prevent foreigners from marrying an Egyptian woman if there is more than ten years age difference, but marriage brokers have found a way around that by forging birth certificates to make the girls appear older and the men younger. These contracts also eliminate any potential problems with hotels and land lords who may demand to see proof of marriage before allowing a couple to stay in a room together, since pre-marital sex is prohibited in Islam. In many cases, the family agrees to marry their daughter without her consent, but often the girls are willing participants as they see it as the only way to help provide for their families. In some cases the men take the Egyptian girls back to their home country to work as maids for their first wives. But even the girls who stay in Egypt do not fare much better since they often become ostracized by society and find it difficult to re-marry in the traditional way, particularly if the “summer marriage” resulted in a child. Many of the young women end up in a cycle of temporary marriages with Gulf tourists, and others are targeted by Egyptian men who marry them in order to force them into prostitution. Many abandon the child out of shame, either to orphanages or leaving them to join the hundreds of thousands of street children that already exist in Egypt. 
Dr. Hoda Badran, who chairs the NGO Alliance for Arab Women, explained to the Sunday Independent that poverty is the main factor behind this phenomenon. “If those families are in such a need to sell their daughters you can imagine how poor they are. Many times, the girl does not know she is marrying the husband just for the short term. She is young, she accepts what her family tells her, she knows the man is going to help them. If the girl is very poor, sometimes it is the only way out to help the family survive,” she told the newspaper. The report by the State department said Egypt is making significant efforts to eliminate human trafficking, but due to the political unrest in the country over the past year, the government is unable to provide law enforcement and prosecution data on those efforts. In 2009, a court in Egypt’s second largest city Alexandria jailed two registrars for conducting temporary marriages of hundreds of underage girls, however NGOs say that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and that more needs to be done to implement existing laws.Read the the full story here.