The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in Iraq issued an order that all women between the ages of 11 and 46 must undergo female genital mutilation.
If the group decides to go forward with the order, up to four million women and girls in the war-ravaged parts of the country could be affected, UN official said on Thursday.
“It is a fatwa from ISIL we learnt about it this morning. We have no precise numbers,” the UN’s second most senior official in Iraq, Jacqueline Badcock, said.
Badcock said that if you took UN population figures as a guide, around “four million girls and women could be affected”.
Female genital mutilation is unusual in Iraq and is only practiced in “certain isolated pockets of the country”, she added. It is worth adding also that the practice has nothing to do with Islam.
The Moroccan Times.
