Syrian women risk lives to produce secret video footage of life beneath ISIS rule

'All women like to show their faces. We've lost that option. We've lost our femininity.'

Two Syrian women successfully infiltrated Raqqa, Syria with a hidden camera to give the world a peek at life under ISIS' rule.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - CNN's Swedish affiliate, Expressen TV commissioned the footage, which was recorded by Oum Mohammad and an unnamed accomplice, both of whom knew they would be stoned to death if the camera was discovered.

The video shows armed patrolmen walking the streets, fully covered women and female faces on product packages censored from view.

In subtitles, one woman commented, "Everyone's left. Foreign ISIS fighters have set up checkpoints, taken the ID cards of Syrians and use them to flee to Turkey."

When one of the women asks for a package of hair dye, she queries why the shop owner scribbled across the models' faces. He explained, "she's wearing a naqāb," meaning she did not have a veil so her face was showing.

Mohammad sits before the camera and states: "All women like to show their face. We've lost that option. We've lost our femininity."

A male narrator explained that women are never allowed to work, go to school, have no rights and must be accompanied by a chaperone at all times.

When riding in a taxi, the radio station was set to play a song praising the ISIS leadership. The cab driver explained he could be stopped and whipped 30 times had he stopped to pick up a woman traveling alone. She would also be punished.

He explained he was forced to purchase his daughter a naqāb and was told to punish the daughter for not wearing one before her uncle, but the cabby refused, saying he would never hurt his daughter and would rather be fined.

As women have no rights and ISIS has men on patrol at all times, any woman can be stopped any time for any reason.

In one scene, as the women walked past a guard, they were told, "You! Stop!" 

"Me?" one woman asks as the other explained, "He wants to you fix your niqab. It's two garments on top of each other."

"He stopped me since I didn't notice the veil had to be sorted out," the first woman explained as the camera shifts with her movement.

The 13-minute video continued, with Mohammad explaining different scenes that played out in the public eye but was seen as normal in Raqqa.

Mohammad described the execution process, saying the extremists "execute with bullets, desecrate the body, decapitate it, stick the head on a spike and put in on display at the roundabout. Or they will put the body on the road and force cars to run it over until nothing is left. The body will become one with the ground. Only the clothes will be left."

Mohammad continued and spoke of stonings, executions, showed footage of ruins, explained what ISIS stole from the people and described foreign and European women's rights, all of whom are allowed to wear heels and clothes of different colors.

The film ends with the unidentified woman saying, "I long to take off the niqab and the darkness that cloaks us. Nothing matters more than freedom."

Both women hope the film spreads awareness throughout the world and leads to the freedom of all the people who have fallen prey to ISIS' backward agenda.

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