The wife of a suspected member of the Islamic State holds her child as she waits to be questioned after fleeing Raqqa, Syria, on Oct. 8, 2017. (Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
In this occasional series, The Washington Post brings you up to speed on some of the biggest stories of the week. First up: The Islamic State may be in retreat, but it won't simply go away.
The biggest story: The next incarnation of ISIS
As the caliphate of the Islamic State nears its end, The Washington Post’s Liz Sly reflects on its rise and fall and discusses what could come next in the Middle East:
The jihadist plan to use women to launch the next incarnation of ISIS
In recent months, female immigrants to the Islamic State have been fleeing the caliphate by the hundreds, eventually returning to their native countries or finding sanctuary in detention centers or refugee camps along the way. From North Africa to Western Europe, the new arrivals are presenting an unexpected challenge to law enforcement officials who were bracing for an influx of male returnees but instead have found themselves deciding the fates of scores of women and children.
Read the full story by Souad Mekhennet and Joby Warrick.
An Iraqi woman’s ordeal as an ISIS sex slave
“The Last Girl,” by Nadia Murad. (Tim Duggan)
While some women deliberately joined ISIS, others suffered in unimaginable ways under the group's rule. When the Islamic State swept into northern Iraq in 2014, thousands of Yazidis were killed and thousands more kidnapped, including women and girls who were taken as sex slaves.
Now, 24-year old former Yazidi sex slave Nadia Murad has unveiled her harrowing memoir, “The Last Girl.” The disturbing personal account is part of her effort to bring Islamic State members to justice for war crimes and genocide against the Yazidi people, writes Anne-Marie O'Connor.
Five other important stories
1. Suddenly, Zimbabwe’s biggest newspaper can print exactly what it wants. It’s harder than it sounds.
Zimbabweans celebrate in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Nov. 21, 2017, after Robert Mugabe resigned as president. (Ben Curtis/Associated Press)
After the resignation of Robert Mugabe as the leader of Zimbabwe, the country's biggest newspaper — long the mouthpiece of the regime — was suddenly without a censor. Inside the newsroom, a frenzied revolution was taking place. Reporters who bit their tongues and moderated their stories for years suddenly saw an opening.
“It was a seismic shift for us,” Felex Share, a political reporter, told The Post's Kevin Sieff.
2. The word the Burmese leadership did not want the pope to say
The power of words was also on display this week in Burma, where the pope refrained from using the term "Rohingya." Rohingya Muslims are not officially recognized as a minority in Burma, and some had hoped the pope would use of the term and increase pressure on Burma’s leadership to refrain from further repression and violence targeting the Rohingya. But others feared that such a move could have escalated tensions further.
3. Even sex is in crisis in Venezuela, where contraceptives are growing scarce
In Venezuela, severe recession and runaway inflation means people often wait hours in line to buy bread, and there are shortages of everything from food to cash to medical supplies. But the shortage of contraceptives has put Venezuelans in a particularly bleak quandary: Can we even have sex anymore?
For the most part, they still do — sometimes with dire consequences, as Mariana Zuñiga and Anthony Faiola write.
4. A ‘ghost ship’ washed ashore in Japan, and clues point to North Koreans
Last year, 66 boats full of dead people landed in Japan. This year, the number is more than 40. Officials believe that at least some of the doomed boats carried North Koreans who were trying to defect.
About 30,000 North Koreans have defected since the devastating famine in the mid-1990s. They tell stories of sometimes-violent reprisals for political speech, being banished to labor camps for watching American movies and old-fashioned starvation.
A battered wooden boat in Oga, Japan, on Nov. 27, 2017. (Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)5. Russia was encouraged by a lull in North Korean weapon tests. It ended up disappointed.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov warned this week that the situation on the Korean Peninsula could become “apocalyptic” but added that he had one key reason to be hopeful: North Korea had not tested any weapons in more than two months.
That prediction, of course, was rapidly proved wrong. But there was another hole in his logic: North Korea's break in weapons testing may have been seasonal rather than strategic, as Adam Taylor writes.
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