They're doing some terrible things in the new Caliphate. There's the beheadings they video and post onYouTube, there's the mass murder and pit graves thing they've done with their prisoners, the slavery they've packed the women and children off into, and this whole business of Koran-or-the-sword with the very narrow-minded version of Islam they're throwing around.
And then there's this.
The stories have a sickening similarity. After sustained aerial attack, when soldiers walk into newly emptied, dusty streets in Iraq, dotted with dead bodies and mangled car carcasses, they have found naked women, bound and left on the ground, who have been raped repeatedly.
Then there are the three "rooms of horror" in Mosul prison where clusters of women have been kept locked up and raped at will.
Army chief Lieutenant-General David Morrison told me he is "disgusted" by the reports of sustained sexual violence. The ADF has already begun training its forces to be prepared to confront the aftermath of rape in wars.I don't know about you, but I kind of draw the line when it comes to extending an understanding sort of hand. In a nutshell, these IS people are enacting a real life version of '120 Days of Sodom'. I don't know what the rationale is - I'm not going to be sympathetic with any religious claptrap - when you set up a rape-prison, you're on your own. Justice will come looking for you and it won't be playing nice.
The thing is, with the beheadings and the mass murders, they were trying to put a political point across. It doesn't make it okay, but the rationale has its own logic. It's terrorism. They're busy putting the terror into terrorism. Our society is so delicate and sensitive, it censors 'Salo', a movie based on the fiction of '120 Days of Sodom'. These people are doing it for real. Still, when you go around setting up a rape prison that's something that can be straight out of a book by the Marquis de Sade, that's just gratuitous sexual violence. What possible rationale could there be but out-and-out depravity?
This leads me to think that maybe war is justified. Maybe we can't just sit idly by and let this medieval savagery mixed with a Sadist Dystopia flourish, and still call ourselves civilised. We have to draw the line somewhere in the sand, otherwise there's no point in having institutions like the UN or the Hague.
But then I seem to recall we said the same sort of things about Saddam Hussein - and that turned out to be this current bit of mess. Tony Abbott is rarely right, but he did have it pegged when he described Syria as baddies fighting baddies. One does not necessarily get involved with the enemy fighting its enemy, and the enemy-of-an-enemy is still your enemy. But here we are, sending troops, right into this conflagration.
It's as if the Middle East is this kind of whirlpool of human misery and the rest of the world simply can't help but be sucked into it, gurgling all the way down. We in the first world would much prefer to sit in the comfort of our suburban existence but the world is simply dragging us off to face the black hole of human consciousness. It's terrifying and nauseating. This war with the the Islamic State of Rapists - or ISOR as I now like to now call them - is going to be a stomach turning existential nightmare.