OWFI was founded by a few Iraqi women who decided to have a voice. We were sure the future government would not be a woman-friendly one. From the first day our policy was to try to gain support from outside Iraq.

When you torture a person for long periods you might get a very passionate human rights defender but most probably you will get a beast whose only concern is to seek his revenge in the best way possible.

The constitution has put women in a position where no one will protect them from religious cliques. If a woman is the third or the fourth wife and she has no rights inside her home and, on top of that, there is domestic abuse in her house, she is doomed. Under Islamic Sharia law a woman must accept beatings from her husband. Under Islamic Sharia, she must not revolt because she is the third or fourth wife.

What has ISIS done to the women in the cities they have conquered? Direct enslavement, humiliation and turning women into concubines to be bought and sold. This was something nobody expected to see in Iraq.

The leading members of ISIS were either tortured in US military prisons or in the prisons of the Shi'a government which the Americans put in place.

OWFI was founded by a few Iraqi women who decided to have a voice. We were sure the future government would not be a woman-friendly one. From the first day our policy was to try to gain support from outside Iraq.

In the beginning, in 2003, there was the Iraqi resistance, which didn't want the US occupation, then they developed Al Qaeda, but even then it was never this monstrous, this inhumane and as misogynistic as what we're seeing now under ISIS.