Hisbah of the Islamic State

Hisbah Diwan
ديوان الحسبة
Formation2014
Dissolved2017 (in Iraq and Syria)
Region
Iraq and Syria and other territories (2014—2017)
Mainly West Africa (2017—Present)
MethodsViolence,[1] Coercion, Torture[2]
Parent organization
 Islamic State
SubsidiariesAl-Khansaa Brigade

The Hisbah of the Islamic State (Arabic: الحسبة التابعة لتنظيم الدولة الإسلامية, romanized: al-Ḥisbah al-tābiʻah li-tanẓīm al-dawlah al-Islāmīyah), also known under the official name Hisbah Diwan (Arabic: ديوان الحسبة, romanized: Dīwān al-ḥisbah, lit. 'Hisbah Office'), is the police force of the Islamic State in localized territory under the Islamic duty "Enjoining good and forbidding wrong" which is their slogan.[3]

History

After the Islamic State's declaration of a caliphate and subsequent control of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, the Islamic State established the Hisbah Diwan, alongside the Al-Khansaa Brigade for women's enforcement of modesty and faith,[4] in order to enforce Islamic morals and sharia in the public.[5] The Hisbah Diwan was in almost every single town/city in which the Islamic State controlled in Iraq and Syria, this allowed for means for civilians to interact with them and for them to go to both local and jurisdictional sharia courts.[6] The Hisbah Diwan was organized hierarchically, with a central office overseeing city-level units. Officers were responsible for enforcing dress codes, religious observance, and market regulations.[7] These religious observances mostly included the banning and destruction of forbidden items (alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, music instruments) and the destruction of what they deemed to be idols.[8] The level that the Hisbah Diwan worked at was under the Sharia Shura of the Islamic State, outside of the Military Shura in which fighting units resided, the Sharia Shura is where most if not all Diwans were regulated and created.[9]

Methods of Enforcement

The Hisbah Diwan primarily used tactics of fear and coercion to enforce the Islamic State's interpretation of sharia law, including acts of torture and violence.[10][11] For crimes of smoking which was common in the territory of the Islamic State, punishments included fines, imprisonment, and public flogging.[12] Due to the amount of imprisoned in Raqqa, the Hisbah created large detention centers in nearby areas, including near the Al-Tabqa Dam, where the imprisoned included political prisoners and petty thieves.[13] The hisbah has also been known to carry out extrajudicial executions against what they deem to be violators of Sharia law.[14] While enforcing the local law and sharia under their interpretation, the Hisbah wear tradition Afghan clothing, specifically the thawb style, and patrol areas where it's been reported by eyewitnesses, they harass women and beat passersby.[15] These patrols would normally travel around on foot or with vehicles, carrying AK-47s or similar weaponry.[16] The Hisbah also enforced the dismantlement of what they viewed as shirk and attempted to force an ideal of tawhid, this included the praise of Jesus in Christianity to the destruction of ancient artifacts in Mosul and Palmyra.[17][18]

The Hisbah Diwan police normally during prayer times would patrol the city before and force anyone who isn't leaving to go to a mosque to go to prayer, sometimes forcefully.[19]

Crimes

While the Hisbah Diwan is mostly for enforcement, there have been reports of Hisbah police of the Islamic State participating in torture and rape of women, specifically during the Yazidi genocide, alongside other soldiers a part of the Islamic State.[20] The Hisbah has also been accused of facilitating crimes against the United Nation's Universal Declaration of human rights and Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols by recruiting child soldiers and renouncing all citizenship, even without legal proceedings, affectively forcing members to be stateless citizens.[21][22]

Dissolution

After most of the Islamic State's territory was dismantled or taken control of by other forces, in 2017, the Hisbah dismantled themselves and lost most of their power and fled or joined the military of the Islamic State.[23] Despite this happening in Iraq and Syria, the Hisbah Diwan is still active in areas of Africa including the Islamic State - West African Province and Islamic State - Sahel Province.[24]

In Media

The Hisbah Diwan has been mentioned in several works of the Islamic State including officially published videos and magazines made by the Islamic State's official media outlet Al-Hayat Media Center, Dabiq.[25] The Vice News documentary The Islamic State talked with the head of the hisbah at the time in Raqqa, Syria, in July 2014 which allowed them to show their enforcement policies and methods.[26]

See also

References

  1. ^ Hitman, Gadi; Lisnyansky, Dina (2020). "Rethinking Islamic State's Violence: Primordial-Instrumentalism Mixture for Explaining Its Terror against Sunni Enemies". The Journal for Interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Studies (6): 165–187. doi:10.26351/JIMES/6-2/3.
  2. ^ Khelghat-Doost, Hamoon (2021). "Women in State-Building Jihadi Organizations: Security". The Strategic Logic of Women in Jihadi Organizations: From Operation to State Building (1st ed.). Springer Nature. pp. 141–158. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-59388-9. ISBN 978-3-030-59387-2.
  3. ^ "The Hisba Diwan: Theory, Structure, Procedures". Prisons Museum. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  4. ^ Kafanov, Lucy (2016-11-20). "Female ISIS morality police units terrified and terrorized Mosul". NBC News. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  5. ^ Al-Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad (2018-06-01). "The Internal Structure of the Islamic State's Hisba Apparatus". Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi's Blog. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  6. ^ da Silva, Raquel; Bamber-Zryd, Matthew; Lemay-Hébert, Nicolas (2024). "Statebuilding beyond the West: Exploring Islamic State's strategic narrative of governance and statebuilding". European Journal of International Security. 9 (1): 41–58. doi:10.1017/eis.2023.9. hdl:10071/30000. ISSN 2057-5637 – via Cambridge University Press.
  7. ^ "The Truth of the Islamic State's Governance". Atlantic Council. 2016-07-28. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  8. ^ Teiner, David (2021). "The Islamic State's Rebel Governance: A Combined Approach of Conceptual Classification and Qualitative Analysis of Administrative Documents" (PDF). p. 27 – via University of Trier.
  9. ^ Dobbins, James; Robinson, Eric; Byman, Daniel; Martini, Jeffrey; Jones, Seth G.; Chandler, Nathan, eds. (2017). Rolling back the Islamic State. Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-8330-9756-9.
  10. ^ Fanani, Ahwan; Takayasa, Tika Ifrida (2022). "Hisbah in Public Moral and Marketplace Control: From Historical to Indonesian Contexts" (PDF). Journal for Integrative Islamic Studies. 8 (1): 48. doi:10.28918/hikmatuna.v8i1. eISSN 2503-3042 – via Abdurrahman Wahid State Islamic University.
  11. ^ Khawaja, Moign; Kaunert, Christian (2025-01-14). "3: Understanding Islamic State's "acting" like a state". Islamic State, Media, and Propaganda: Performances of the ‘Visual Caliphate’. Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 37–68. doi:10.4337/9781035336227.00011. ISBN 978-1-0353-3622-7.
  12. ^ Speckhard, Anne; Ellenberg, Molly D. (2020). "ISIS in Their Own Words: Recruitment History, Motivations for Joining, Travel, Experiences in ISIS, and Disillusionment over Time – Analysis of 220 In-depth Interviews of ISIS Returnees, Defectors and Prisoners". Journal of Strategic Security. 13 (1). Henley-Putnam School of Strategic Security: 82–127. ISSN 1944-0464 – via JSTOR.
  13. ^ Bakkour, Samer; Stansfield, Gareth (2023-05-10). "The Significance of ISIS's State Building in Syria". Middle East Policy. 30 (2): 126–145. doi:10.1111/mepo.12681. ISSN 1061-1924.
  14. ^ Chun-Leung, Jacky Li; Mohd Nor, Mohd Roslan; Mustaffa, Khairul Anuwar; Isa, Khalid bin (2024-12-31). "Islamic law and its application as penal code by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS)". Cogent Arts & Humanities. 11 (1). doi:10.1080/23311983.2024.2382519. ISSN 2331-1983.
  15. ^ Al Aqeedi, Rasha (2016). "Hisba in Mosul: Systematic Oppression in the Name of Virtue" (PDF). Program on Extremism. George Washington University. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  16. ^ Khelghat-Doost, Hamoon (2020). "State Building Jihadism: Redefining Gender Hierarchies and "Empowerment"" (PDF). Central European Journal of International and Security Studies. 14 (4): 14–16. ISSN 1802-548X.
  17. ^ Nanninga, Pieter (2019). ""Cleansing the Earth of the Stench of Shirk": The Islamic State's Violence as Acts of Purification". Journal of Religion and Violence. 7 (2): 128–157. ISSN 2159-6808.
  18. ^ Almohamad, Adnan (2021-11-26). "The destruction and looting of cultural heritage sites by ISIS in Syria: The case of Manbij and its countryside". International Journal of Cultural Property. 28 (2): 221–260. doi:10.1017/S0940739121000114. ISSN 0940-7391 – via Cambridge University Press.
  19. ^ Giglio, Mike (2019-10-15). Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate. New York: PublicAffairs. pp. 248–249. ISBN 9781541742352.
  20. ^ Cooke, Miriam (2019). "Murad vs. ISIS: Rape as a Weapon of Genocide". Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 15 (3): 261–285. ISSN 1552-5864 – via JSTOR.
  21. ^ MacVicar, Ian C. (2020). "What About the Camp Followers – and their Children?". Journal for Deradicalization (22): 336. ISSN 2363-9849 – via Simon Fraser University.
  22. ^ Almohammad, Asaad (2018). "ISIS Child Soldiers in Syria: The Structural and Predatory Recruitment, Enlistment, Pre-Training Indoctrination, Training, and Deployment". Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies: 21. doi:10.19165/2018.1.02. ISSN 2468-0656.
  23. ^ Bamber-Zryd, Matthew (2022-11-17). "Cyclical jihadist governance: the Islamic State governance cycle in Iraq and Syria". Small Wars & Insurgencies. 33 (8): 1314–1344. doi:10.1080/09592318.2022.2116182. ISSN 0959-2318.
  24. ^ Raineri, Luca; Nagarajan, Chitra; Albert, Isaac Olawale; Ndiaye, Babacar; Stoddard, Ed (2025-12-06). "Comparing Jihadist Governance in the Sahelian Branches of the Islamic State". African Affairs. doi:10.1093/afraf/adaf026. ISSN 0001-9909.
  25. ^ French, Nathan S. (2020-05-28). Conclusion: “The Islamic State Is Remaining and Expanding”: On the Collapse of the Caliphate (1 ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 225–244. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190092153.003.0007. ISBN 978-0-19-009215-3. Retrieved 2026-01-18.
  26. ^ Zelin, Aaron Y. (2025). "Everyday Life in the Islamic State's Wilayat al-Raqqah" (PDF). Center for Justice and Accountability. Retrieved 2026-01-25.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.