Anyone to stop the Islamic State’s terror?

Have you watched the video of the desperate cry of Feyyan Dahil? She is a member of the Iraqi Parliament. Without even taking the stand during a parliamentary session on Aug. 5, she started to cry from the rear rows of the hall which caused everyone to stop and listen to her in an equal desperation.

She was trying to get the voice of her people heard by the Iraqi Parliament and the world. Dahil is a Yazidi (or Ezidi), one of the believers of an ancient religion that is linked to Zoroastrianism. Their native lands are the Kurdish northern sectors of Iraq and Turkey’s southeast; but there are equally big communities living in European countries who fled decades of religious oppression.

But this time the disaster as Dahil cries out is nothing like before: “We are being killed because of our religion,” Dahil said. “Five hundred of our men have been slaughtered,” she said, but was unable to complete her sentence because she burst into tears. She was also unable to say that 500 Yazidi women have been taken as “concubines,” an indirect way saying that they could be raped by the militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), or in its shorter version, the Islamic State (IS).

The dimension of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq (and Syria) caused by the IS is not limited to what has been done to the Yazidis. After Shiite Arabs and Kurds, the Turkmens (Turkomans) of Iraq are under heavy attack by the IS. The Islamist militants are pushing the mostly Kurds and Arabs of Sinjar north of Mosul, which they captured back in June, and mostly Turkmens in Tal Afar (east of Sinjar) toward the Turkish border in the north. Those who escape from the onslaught of the IS have to keep running away because the searing...