The Terrorist Factory: ISIS, the Yazidi Genocide, and Exporting Terror

Desbois, a priest who has spent decades documenting the human toll of the Holocaust for his research organization Yahad in Unum, turns his attention to the Yazidi victims of ISIS in this moving volume. In a series of harrowing and haunting interviews with witnesses to and victims of unspeakable depredations—such as Avine, pressed into sexual slavery and purchased by a senior sheikh to be his wife, and Lawin, sole survivor of a mass execution—the authors shine a light on the travails of a religious minority little known outside their Iraqi mountain redoubt. Seemingly motivated as much by power and material gain as by religion, Desbois writes of how ISIS recruits traffic in stolen property and human chattel just as the Nazis did before them. In passionate prose surrounding the excerpted interviews, Desbois argues that ISIS’s strategy goes deeper than annihilation of the Yazidi community: “ISIS... crushes certain of its victims to turn them not only into subjugated slaves but also collaborators.” Of Westerners’ ignorance and indifference, Desbois says that “our desire to sleep peacefully has no limits... deform[ing] our reality to make it carefree.” The survivors’ voices captured here bear witness to humanity’s collective failure to abolish genocide. [em](July) [/em]