Caliphate · The New York Times

Chapter Nine: Prisoners, Part One

June 14, 2018·28 min·2 clips

Bashar claims he bought a 15-year-old Yazidi girl for $5,000 to save her — then the girl herself is reached by phone from inside the prison.

The feed begins with a re-examination note that changes the footing. The Times says the man once called Abu Huzaifa al-Qanadi was later identified as Shairoz Chowdhury, charged in Canada with perpetrating a hoax, and found unsupported on central claims. Then the episode returns to Mosul, inside a police station in western Mosul, where captured ISIS members sit across from a reporter who keeps pressing on details. The host notices a figure that does not add up. That small mismatch sends the reporting toward one of the worst parts of the ISIS system. She asks about a supplement, and the answer points to the term ISIS used for a female sex slave. The girl was fifteen. The math is worse than it first sounds, because it means she would have been captured at twelve. Sinjar comes into view through news clips about helicopters, stranded Yazidis, and civilians trying to get away after Mosul fell. The host pushes past a simple map-of-territory version of the attack. Survivor interviews and ISIS documents point to women and girls as the target. A guest explains the ideology carefully: ISIS was trying to recreate the seventh-century order it imagined. Then the jail scene shrinks to one phone call. A survivor confronts the man who raped her, not because justice found him, but because journalists stumbled into the connection. Her father calls it cathartic. The host lets the harder fact sit there too: many families never find out where the men are. Prison may hold them, but it does not contain what they did.

As heard by us

A grave, carefully built chapter that turns testimony into clarity without softening the horror.

Chapter Nine: Prisoners settles into the hard, uneasy work of showing what ISIS captivity looked like from the inside. It moves from a police station in western Mosul to survivor testimony, then to a careful account of how sexual slavery sat inside ISIS's ideology.

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Why you'd press play

For a close look at ISIS captivity, testimony, and the cost of survival.

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