Get married to radical al Qaeda offshoot fighters
Office for prospective wives is opened by Islamic State insurgents
Islamic State militants have opened an office in northern Syria where widows and single women can register to get married to radical al Qaeda offshoot fighters, on Monday said a monitoring group.
The office in a town northeast of Aleppo city, al-Bab, records the addresses and names of the females so that Islamic State insurgents can go to the families and make a formal offer of marriage, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Observatory that cited sources in Aleppo and al-Bab, is based in Britain and relies upon a network of people on the ground to report information in Syria. It wasn’t immediately possible to affirm the report independently.
There have been the previous reports of the militants forcing women or seeking wives to marry them in locations where the group has been active. Rami Abdurrahman, the Observatory's director, said that it was the first time he’d heard of the group setting up a formal office in order to register potential spouses.
It was set strict limits on the rights of women in areas that Islamic State controls. A group statement issued last week said women in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which the rebels captured in June, had been warned to wear full-face veils or risk severe punishment. The statement listed also guidelines on how clothes and veils should be worn, part of the campaign of Islamic State to forcibly impose their radical brand of Islam.
The Sunni militants have declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq and have threatened to march on Baghdad.
Last month Islamic State captured large space of land in neighboring Iraq and has advanced in the parts of Syria where it has become one of the most armed groups in the country, three years in its civil war.
In January more moderate rebels launched a main offensive against Islamic State and have pushed them of large swathes of province Aleppo, although the two sides regularly still clash.
Islamic State, known formerly as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has mainly battled rebel groups in Syria but also has been confronting forces loyal to the President Bashar al-Assad more often in the past 6 weeks.
The United Nations says Syrian rebels are joining the ultra-hardline group and estimates that there’re 10,000-15,000 foreign fighters with different factions battling government troops.
The Syrian military army said on Sunday that it recaptured a gas field east of the central city of Homs that was seized by Islamic State militants earlier this month.
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