The UK Daily Mail relates a tale of Islamic State depravity from Russian news sources, in which a 10-year-old Iraqi girl living in occupied Mosul was tortured to death with Iron Fangs in front of her mother for the crime of going outside without an escort.
The little girl, whose name was Faten, was confronted by a squad of women working as hisbah (morality police) for the Islamic State’s all-woman Al-Khansaa Brigade while she was helping to clean her house and accidentally stepped outside.
The enforcers reportedly pronounced this a transgression of Islamic law and told her mother the penalty would be suffering a certain number of “bites” and asked if she wanted to endure the punishment on behalf of her child.
The mother declined this offer and let her daughter take the punishment, at which point the Al-Khansaa brigadiers whipped out a medieval torture device shaped like a set of iron fangs and went to work on little Faten. The girl ultimately bled to death from the wounds inflicted by the knife-like “teeth” of the torture implement.
This and other horror stories of life under the Islamic State in Mosul came from a woman who fled the city and spoke to Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik News. According to Sputnik, she claimed to know of at least two young girls killed with the iron fangs. She also spoke of the morality policy whipping women in the streets for failing to wear the mandatory full-body covering. According to the escapee, at least one woman died after taking 30 lashes for such an offense.
This single-source account of lurid depravity echoes reports of similar torture using a device referred to by other sources as a “biter.” As early as 2014, reports surfaced of the hisbah “causing severe pain and wounds [which] may lead women in some cases to be transported to the hospital” with the biter apparatus.
In December 2015, a similar story to Faten’s surfaced of the morality police killing a woman for breastfeeding in public with the torture device. Previous accounts have also pointed to the role of the Al-Khansaa Brigade in enforcing sharia law against women living under Islamic State occupation. Some of those accounts specifically referred to the use of the “biter” torture device against women, for such offenses as breastfeeding in public.
Escapees have also smuggled video of the hisbah attacking from the Islamic State’s Syrian capital of Raqqa, in which they are seen enforcing the strict requirements for women’s clothing, among other things.