Bitcoin was able to penetrate and reach the highest levels that we have not seen since November of 2021, by exceeding the level of $57,000.

Today’s Bitcoin rally came after increased whale activity as well as more encouraging data for spot ETFs.

On Friday, 26,200 bitcoins were transferred to an anonymous wallet, equivalent to $1.3 billion, and were purchased at a price of $51,000, according to Whale Alert. This massive activity by one of the whales was part of an increasing series of Bitcoin transfers to digital wallets not linked to crypto exchanges, an indication of increasing holdings for the purpose of long-term investment.

Bitcoin spot ETFs also continue to show more positive signs as outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) continue to decline to the lowest level since its conversion to a spot fund.

While the outflows from GBTC are approaching zero before turning into positive flows, which will serve as the end last of the chapter of the most important obstacles to the progress of Bitcoin after the launch of spot ETFs.

While GBTC may face difficulty in attracting positive flows in a significant manner like the major competing ETFs, with the highest fee among its peers at 1.5%, in addition to the lack of a premium on the net asset value, which would constitute an arbitrage opportunity.

This bullish Bitcoin rally led to more massive liquidations of short positions in cryptocurrencies. From the early morning hours until 8:00 a.m. GMT, about $100 million worth of short positions were liquidated, while Bitcoin had a share of approximately 60 million, according to data provided by CoinGlass.

As for yesterday, it witnessed the largest liquidation of short positions this year with more than 176 million dollars, of which Bitcoin acquired about 97 million.

I believe that nothing may hinder the positive sentiment among Bitcoin investors now, especially with the fading of outflows from GBTC in conjunction with the approaching halving event next April and more institutional adoption of Bitcoin, which was reflected in the sudden rises in trading volumes during the past week for spot ETFs, while prices corrections appear are like buying opportunities.

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Cryptocurrency market had a very volatile night. Bitcoin fluctuated between the levels of $44,800 and $47,730. Ethereum was also able to advance and register more record levels that we have not seen since May of 2022, reaching the level of $2644.

The movements in the cryptocurrency market came with the historic event of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of the launch of a number of spot Bitcoin ETFs.

While Bitcoin’s decline shortly after the news was announced came as part of what could be “buying the rumor and selling the news.” The markets have been pricing in this news since approximately last October, when Bitcoin was near the $25,000 level.

In details, the SEC approved the launch of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs, which were submitted by many giant asset managers months ago, in addition to approving the conversion of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into a spot ETF after a long struggle in the corridors of the courts. Today, US exchanges are expected to welcome most of the new funds on the first day of trading.

While this news led to more conflict between buyers and sellers, which ultimately led to the continuation of the relatively large liquidations of open positions in cryptocurrencies.

During the past 24 hours, about $280 million in open positions were liquidated, divided between both long and short positions, according to data provided by CoinGlass. Naturally, Bitcoin accounted for the bulk of these liquidations with about $87 million of the liquidated long positions accounting for a share of $53 million.

Meanwhile, with this historic event, this step witnessed widespread welcome, in addition to more criticism, even from the decision makers themselves.

Grayscale Investments CEO, Michael Sonnenshein, believes that Bitcoin will be able to change the world and expressed his happiness at providing access to it through a licensed vehicle in the US.

Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse also believes the move could open the way for more adoption from institutional investors as the focus on Bitcoin shifts from a speculative asset to a cryptocurrency with real-world use.

In contrast, Bitcoin continued to receive more criticism from its traditional opponents. The chairman of the SEC, Gary Gensler, who himself voted to approve the launch of these ETFs, issued a statement warning of the dangers of Bitcoin. He also said that, unlike the metal ETFs that are used in the real world, Bitcoin is a speculative and volatile asset and is used for illicit activities.

Also, a member of the Commission, Caroline Crenshaw, who voted against the approval decision, expressed her concerns about the flood of these products into retirement accounts, which may not bear the burden of the losses that may befall them as a result of fraud and manipulation that affect the market without adequate oversight.

One of the most prominent critics of cryptocurrencies, the CEO of the banking group JPMorgan Chase, also continued his criticism after the decision was announced and reiterated that Bitcoin does not carry any value and that its actual use is in illegal activities.

The famous trader, habitual gold advocate and opponent of cryptocurrencies, Peter Schiff, said that these EFTs are just one of many new ways to gamble on Bitcoin. He also added that buyers now have nothing to bet on.

Today and in the coming days, they will tell us about the aspirations of the market in all its categories, whether individuals or institutional investors, for the future of Bitcoin by monitoring the performance of the ETFs in their first sessions. This is because these funds will provide the opportunity for all categories of investors alike to invest in Bitcoin.

The broad investor base in this market may reduce the impact of speculation and sudden movements in the market to some extent and shift the focus more on market fundamentals on the one hand. On the other hand, it may deepen transparency with many mandatory disclosures that asset managers will provide regarding funds.

Market fundamentals are not necessarily sound with this historical event that reflects widespread adoption by many of the market’s major institutional players.

On the positive side, the focus in the coming months is shifting to the Bitcoin halving event which is expected to happen sometime in the second quarter of this year and which is usually a positive sign for the market. We will also monitor whether cryptocurrency technology will be more widely adopted for real-world uses.

On the other hand, a largely unclear regulatory and legislative environment remains the most important obstacle to the widespread adoption of crypto technology. Perhaps this approval reflects some flexibility in the SEC’s approach to a not-so-great extent.

Cryptocurrencies still receive widespread opposition from decision-makers, as we have seen, and there are still many outstanding issues, whether on the enforcement and interpretation of the law or on the legislative side directly regulating this market.

In addition, the performance of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin ETFs may remain dependent on the overall market sentiment to some extent. We continue to see mixed performance in the stock market in recent weeks, with fears that interest rates will remain high for a longer period than expected, which may hinder growth and the flows of investor funds into the market in its various categories

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Bitcoin still maintains its record levels this year, with a decline of 0.55% today, with consolidation above the $41,600 level after touching the $42,400 level yesterday. Ethereum is also still consolidating at the $2230 level, after it touched the $2275 level yesterday as well.

The recent gains in cryptocurrencies come with continued optimism that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will soon approve the launch of a number of spot Bitcoin traded funds (ETFs) at the beginning of next year. Although there is no telling whether or not this is the case, the markets seem to be very clinging to these hopes.

While yesterday’s rise in Bitcoin put more pressure on sellers and prompted them significantly to abandon their bearish bet yesterday.

According to data provided by CoinGlass, more than $200 million of short positions were liquidated yesterday, which represents the highest levels in about a month. Meanwhile, about $140 million worth of long positions were liquidated in what appears to be profit-taking after yesterday’s record gains.

Bitcoin had a share of $84 million in short positions that were liquidated, along with $20 million of liquidated long positions.

While we see that the ratio of liquidation of long to short positions for Bitcoin is noticeably lower than the same ratio for the market as a whole, which may reflect investors’ anticipation of more potential rises greater than the current rises.

There is also this momentum this week after more flows towards cryptocurrencies. According to data provided by CoinShares, last week was the tenth consecutive week of positive net inflows with more than $176 million in net inflows into cryptocurrency-related investment products.

This ongoing run also represents the largest inflow of investor funds in more than two years. Also, net flows may have reached $1.84 billion year-to-date, and if similar net flows are recorded this week, we will see the $2 billion-mark next week.

As usual, Bitcoin accounted for more than $132 million of these net flows. However, what was noteworthy was the return of the positive year-to-date net flows to Ethereum-related products, after recording $30 million in positive flows last week, thus bringing the net flows since the beginning of the year to $10 million.

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While the state of anticipation and caution continues in the crypto markets, with more huge transfers recorded between digital wallets over the weekend, this is a continuation of a series of transfers during the past week as well, and this time with the spotlight on the SBIB and XRP tokens.

According to data provided by Whale Alert, a huge transfer from one anonymous wallet to another amounting to the equivalent of $213 million in XRP was recorded last Saturday, after a series of relatively large transfers that we saw over the past week exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars in value. On the same date, a relatively large amount of SHIB, equivalent to $37 million, was transferred from the Bitvavo exchange to an anonymous wallet. Also, a transfer of $59 million worth of Ethereum was observed from an anonymous wallet to Coinbase.

Although the reasons behind the series of huge transfers that we are witnessing in the cryptocurrency market are not yet completely clear, I believe that they may continue to fuel a state of anticipation and caution in the markets, especially since these transfers come amid weak sentiment among market participants, with the continuing battle in the judicial arena in the United States.

It also comes after a number of judicial and regulatory actions that came for the first time in the market of non-refundable tokens (NFTs) and decentralized financial applications (DeFi), which we also witnessed recently. This may leave the markets in a state of anticipation until the features of the regulatory environment in the United States for the cryptocurrency market become clear.

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He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame associated with rape.

“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.

“He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ” said the teenager, who escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for nearly nine months.

Calculated Conquest

The Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern Iraq.

Its valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority who represent less than 1.5 percent of Iraq’s estimated population of 34 million.

The offensive on the mountain came just two months after the fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it appeared that the subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt to extend the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.

Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different.

Survivors say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they had armpit hair, they were directed to join their older brothers and fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with automatic fire.

The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.

“The offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert on the Yazidi minority. He was in Dohuk, near Mount Sinjar, when the onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists.

Fifteen-year-old F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic State fighters encircled them.

“Right away, the fighters separated the men from the women,” she said. She, her mother and sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my mom. The young, unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.”

The buses were white, with a painted stripe next to the word “Hajj,” suggesting that the Islamic State had commandeered Iraqi government buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. So many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F’s bus that they were forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said.

Once the bus headed out, they noticed that the windows were blocked with curtains, an accouterment that appeared to have been added because the fighters planned to transport large numbers of women who were not covered in burqas or head scarves.

F’s account, including the physical description of the bus, the placement of the curtains and the manner in which the women were transported, is echoed by a dozen other female victims interviewed for this article. They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart.

F says she was driven to the Iraqi city of Mosul some six hours away, where they herded them into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. Other groups of women and girls were taken to a palace from the Saddam Hussein era, the Badoosh prison compound and the Directory of Youth building in Mosul, recent escapees said. And in addition to Mosul, women were herded into elementary schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of Tal Afar, Solah, Ba’aj and Sinjar City.

They would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet of buses again before being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.

“It was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider Domle, a Yazidi community activist who maintains a detailed database of the victims. “I spoke by telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory of Youth in Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had mattresses, plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.”

Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex trade.

In each location, survivors say Islamic State fighters first conducted a census of their female captives.

Inside the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were over 1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out and leaning against the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by several other women held in the same location.

They each described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was married, and if she had children.

For two months, F was held inside the Galaxy hall. Then one day, they came and began removing young women. Those who refused were dragged out by their hair, she said.

In the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time.

“They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State leader explained it meant slave.

“He told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray — “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit.”

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.

Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as “People of the Book.”

In Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on Mount Sinjar and among the farthest away from escape, residents decided to stay, believing they would be treated as the Christians of Mosul had months earlier. On Aug. 15, 2014, the Islamic State ordered the residents to report to a school in the center of town.

When she got there, 40-year-old Aishan Ali Saleh found a community elder negotiating with the Islamic State, asking if they could be allowed to hand over their money and gold in return for safe passage.

The fighters initially agreed and laid out a blanket, where Ms. Saleh placed her heart-shaped pendant and her gold rings, while the men left crumpled bills.

Instead of letting them go, the fighters began shoving the men outside, bound for death.

Sometime later, a fleet of cars arrived and the women, girls and children were driven away.

The Market

Months later, the Islamic State made clear in their online magazine that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls had been extensively preplanned.

“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq.

The article made clear that for the Yazidis, there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the Jews and Christians.”

“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided” as spoils, the article said.

In much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, to justify their human trafficking, experts say.

Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.

Many argue that slavery figures in Islamic scripture in much the same way that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection of the period in antiquity in which the religion was born.

“In the milieu in which the Quran arose, there was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular religious institution. It was just how people did things.”

Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.

“There is a great deal of scripture that sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel, the author of a research paper published by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did.”

The youngest, prettiest women and girls were bought in the first weeks after their capture. Others — especially older, married women — described how they were transported from location to location, spending months in the equivalent of human holding pens, until a prospective buyer bid on them.

Their captors appeared to have a system in place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers.

Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank, unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic, “Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on.

Buildings where the women were collected and held sometimes included a viewing room.

“When they put us in the building, they said we had arrived at the ‘Sabaya Market,’” said one 19-year-old victim, whose first initial is I. “I understood we were now in a slave market.”

She estimated there were at least 500 other unmarried women and girls in the multistory building, with the youngest among them being 11. When the buyers arrived, the girls were taken one by one into a separate room.

“The emirs sat against the wall and called us by name. We had to sit in a chair facing them. You had to look at them, and before you went in, they took away our scarves and anything we could have used to cover ourselves,” she said.

“When it was my turn, they made me stand four times. They made me turn around.”

The captives were also forced to answer intimate questions, including reporting the exact date of their last menstrual cycle. They realized that the fighters were trying to determine whether they were pregnant, in keeping with a Shariah rule stating that a man cannot have intercourse with his slave if she is pregnant.

Property of ISIS

The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape.

The Islamic State’s leadership has repeatedly sought to justify the practice to its internal audience.

After the initial article in Dabiq in October, the issue came up in the publication again this year, in an editorial in May that expressed the writer’s hurt and dismay at the fact that some of the group’s own sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery.

“What really alarmed me was that some of the Islamic State’s supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the Khilafah had committed a mistake or evil,” the author wrote. “I write this while the letters drip of pride,’’ he said. “We have indeed raided and captured the kafirahwomen and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” Kafirah refers to infidels.

In a pamphlet published online in December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and disposed of just like any other property after his death.

Recent escapees describe an intricate bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward for doing so.

Though rare, this has created one avenue of escape for victims.

A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month, identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore setting her free.

Labeled a “Certificate of Emancipation,” the document was signed by the judge of the western province of the Islamic State. The Yazidi woman presented it at security checkpoints as she left Syria to return to Iraq, where she rejoined her family in July.

The Islamic State recently made it clear that sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible, according to a new 34-page manual issued this summer by the terror group’s Research and Fatwa Department.

Just about the only prohibition is having sex with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as well as those who were past menopause.

Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December.

One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.

“He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.

Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.

“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’ ’’

“And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.

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(via NY Times)

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