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Inside ISIS Price List: 'Girls Peddled Like Petrol'

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The Islamic State is apparently circulating a slave price list for captured women and children. A senior United Nations official discovered the list in an ISIS pamphlet on a trip to Iraq in April. 
  
Zainab Bangura is the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict. She told Bloomberg Business that she has since verified that the document she found is an authentic Islamic State publication and reflects real transactions.

"The girls get peddled like barrels of petrol," Bangura explained in a recent interview. "One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men.  Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom."
  
Bangura told Bloomberg that the bidders include Islamic State fighters and wealthy Middle Easterners.  For ISIS fighters, the prices range from $165 for children ages 1-9, $124 for adolescent girls and less for women over 20.
  
Usually the ISIS leaders first take the captives that they want and then allow outsiders to bid thousands of dollars for other hostages.  ISIS fighters can then buy the remaining captives using the price list that Bangura discovered.
  
Bangura, the former foreign minister of Sierra Leone, says the price list demonstrates that ISIS is unlike other insurgent groups and uses unorthodox models of fighting.
  
"It's not an ordinary rebel group" she told Bloomberg.  "When you dismiss them as such then you are using the tools you are used to.  This is different. They have the combination of a conventional military and a well-run organized state."
  
Typically, insurgent groups don't take on established militaries or attempt to hold territory.  ISIS has broken both "rules."  It controls some 80,000 square miles of land across both Iraq and Syria.

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