It is telling that women feature heavily in the Islamic State's rise and fall. While its craven massacre of Yazidi women in Iraq and Syria helped put it on the map, its gradual downfall is coming partly at the hands of Kurdish women fighting against it on the front lines.
It is easy to see a simple revenge story in this progression, but a deeper reading points to the fundamental role of women in the militant group's ideology, and their future role in its denouement.
When IS captured territory in 2014 to establish its self-proclaimed caliphate, it wanted to stage a spectacle that the world would be unable to ignore. So it resorted to the mass abduction, murder, rape and enslavement of women, especially among the minority Yazidis. The brutality against its female captives was intended to humiliate the enemy and send a warning to anyone who did not adhere to its extremist, radical interpretation of Islam.
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