Vian Dakhil is a member of the Iraqi parliament.

Last week I arrived back home to Iraqi Kurdistan, exhausted but proud of a small but real triumph over the Islamic State. Three women and two toddlers came back with me—five human beings just rescued from enslavement by ISIL. For over a year, they were abused, raped and traded fighter to fighter because of one reason: our Yazid religion. I am determined to save every last one of the more than 2,000 Yazidi women and girls still waiting to be freed.

They thought they were abandoned. Their ISIL captors told them that no one wanted them, in their shame and defilement, and that no one was looking for them. But I insist on reaching out to them through pleas on Arabic radio and TV. I give them my phone number, and tell them that we love them and we want them back. Some brave women hear these messages and contact us, and a rescue mission commences. I answer the phone every time, determined to do all that I can, but it is little, and it is not enough. I know there will always be another call, another Yazidi who is terrified and broken and in need of hope, as the world looks the other way.


One of the women, clutching her 2-year-old child, was so distraught. The child kept asking for her 7-year-old sister, who had been taken away from her mother and enrolled in a religious institution where she would be forced to convert to Islam. Her mother had had no choice but to escape without her, and she told me she feared the girl would be raped at the hands of the militants. We have evidence of the militants raping our girls as young as age 8.

For that brief time in August 2014, the United States launched airstrikes to halt the advance of ISIL after its troops took over a third of Iraq, saving the Yazidi people from total massacre by ISIL troops. But since then, we’ve been abandoned and forgotten by Washington and the rest of the international community. For every story of a girl who has been rescued, there’s another one about a girl who is still in captivity, where she is starved, raped, beaten and sold—often to “fellow” Iraqis. And 500,000 Yazidis, a full 90 percent of the indigenous Yazidi population, are in displaced persons’ camps, living in abject misery and isolation with less than minimal sustenance. We languish in these camps, live without income, and without food, medicine or even shelter durable enough to keep the rain out. As long as ISIL remains intent on wiping my people off the map; and as long as the Iraqi and Kurdish Regional governments continue to see Yazidis as less than second-class citizens, unworthy of significant aid and attention, these horrors will continue.

I’m doing all I can. I’ve been a member of the Iraqi parliament for five years, where I’m one of just two Yazidi representatives. As a non-Muslim who does not wear a veil in a country that’s 90 percent Muslim, I’m constantly reminded that I’m a minority in my own country. For millennia, the Yazidis have lived in their homeland in northern Iraq as a persecuted minority. We have withstood 74 recorded attempts at genocide, many long before ISIL, and have been victims of great prejudice. Even today, we have no access to land ownership, quotas in education and other basic resources.

When ISIL swept into Iraq last year, determined to extinguish my people, it seemed as if no one cared. Our men were slaughtered; our women were sold on the slave market; and thousands were stranded on the top of Sinjar mountain, dying of thirst and hunger. I cried out on the floor of Iraqi parliament and begged for intervention. We were grateful for the American airstrikes, but our problems didn’t end when the airstrikes were over.

Thousands of people—primarily women and children are still in captivity in Islamic State territory. I have spoken to women who have made it out who said they had been sold five or six times, in each case being raped by as many as five men at a time before being sold to another fighter. The militants force the young ones to convert, teach them how to pray and train them to be child soldiers—telling them all the while that their families won’t take them back because they have converted to Islam. Some girls told me that they had lost all hope. We just gave up and decided this is the life that we should live, they told me, because we don’t have another life. We can’t go back to our home.

But they can go home; their families—our families—are waiting for them. And, slowly but surely, I and a determined group of people are getting Yazidi prisoners out of this nightmare. There are some volunteers willing to go into ISIL-controlled areas to save those girls and help them all get back safely to Iraqi Kurdistan. With no help from any government, we’ve been able to rescue 2,150 of the 5,840 Yazidi men, women and children who were taken prisoner—800 of them young girls.

However, escaping from ISIL isn’t the end of their troubles. The freed Yazidi people desperately need medical and psychological rehabilitation. They join the half a million displaced brothers and sisters living in makeshift camps, stressed and overextended and dismal. They lack food, clothes, medicine and other basic necessities. Most of the international aid flow from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other organizations has stopped, and almost no one has stepped in.

This massive humanitarian crisis, the result of a genocidal attack on a single religious entity, must finally be addressed. It must get the attention it deserves. I want the world to know, care and take action for the Yazidi people. We are a small, endangered group of people who have preserved our unique faith and community for almost 5,000 years, and now we are under threat of extinction. Are we not worthy of life?

People sometimes ask me what we want from Iraq and the international community. It’s a big question: Yes, we want aid for Yazidis in refugee camps. We want tents that are waterproof, fresh clothes and medicine to stop the spread of disease. Yes, we want help to rescue those who, one year later, are still in the hands of ISIL fighters. Yes, we want Barack Obama to push the international community to take back our lands so that we can get back to our homes and rebuild our cities. We want international protection, and arms, so that this won’t happen again and so that next time we can defend ourselves.

But on the deepest level we want the Yazidi people to be treated with respect and as equal human beings. People, organizations and nations in this world need to encourage and demand that we receive and continue to receive basic things: food, shelter, clean water, power and medical clinics. We require open access to schools, colleges and workplaces. We must ensure that discrimination against all minorities, in law and action, ceases. We want to feel safe and secure in our own land, and not fear for our women and children, nor fear for the extermination of our people.

We also ask that the world remember: This isn’t over. This is still going on. This is not finished. Our daughters and our sisters are still living enslaved and in terror.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have hope. I have to have hope—so I can keep on working. And so that I can keep answering those phone calls.

