AL-KHAZER, IRAQ: Whenever members of ISIS's Mosul vice squad find a woman without gloves, they pull out a pair of pliers.
What follows is just one of a wide range of punishments that the group - known in Arabic by its enemies as Daesh - metes out in its northern Iraqi stronghold.
"Daesh would squeeze the pliers on the skin of the woman hard," said Firdos, a 15-year-old girl who has fled from the city in the last week.
Firdos managed to escape such treatment herself, but she told Reuters that ISIS has more ways of enforcing one of the many rules of its moral code - that women must not show their bare hands in public.
"The other penalty was we (women) would be whipped for not wearing gloves," Firdos said in Al-Khazer, a town taken by Kurdish forces as part of an Iraqi offensive to regain Mosul.
She, like others who have fled ISIS's grip, declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals against relatives still in Mosul, about 27 km (17 miles) away.
When ISIS captured Iraq's second largest city in 2014, it promised that anyone who joined the Sunni militants' cause would eventually earn a place in paradise.
It also told the people of predominantly Sunni Mosul it would eliminate Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite who was then Iraqi prime minister and widely accused of sectarian policies.
This message appealed to some Sunnis, members of a minority which had dominated before the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 and who now complain they are marginalised by the government led by the majority Shi'ites.
But residents who have recently fled ISIS's last stronghold in Iraq say life quickly became unbearable in the city of about two million.
Men had to wear beards to lengths it saw as Islamic. Women had to cover up from head to toe. Sometimes their husbands would be whipped in their place for violations.
No one was allowed to leave Mosul without special permission and former residents said they feared being shot if they were caught trying to escape.
Republic Of Fear
None of the people interviewed by Reuters said they had seen public executions by shooting or beheadings, ISIS's favourite method of creating mass terror.
But everyone knew they took place because the jihadists spread the word. This appeared to be straight out of the handbook of the "Republic of Fear", Saddam's former state built on cruelty, retribution and extreme violence.
More than a decade after Saddam's overthrow by the U.S.-led invasion, some of his former intelligence officers are senior members and strategists for ISIS, according to Iraqi security officials.
Every Friday, the militants force people to go to mosques in Mosul to hear their sermons. Two years ago, ISIS's chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the leader of all Muslims from a pulpit in the city, and the sermons remind residents that his words are sacred.
ISIS also uses mosques to urge people to take up their cause and strike against what it called all enemies of Islam; from Maliki and his fellow Shi'ites to other Arab leaders, Israel and the United States. Continue Reading.....
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