This BBC News report was originally aired December 22. It recounts how the self-styled “Islamic State” (which is in fact neither) has abused several thousand women and girls kidnapped four months ago. The captives are members of the Yazidi religion, a faith practiced by a subset of ethnic Kurds mainly in northern Iraq.

While some have escaped or been rescued by advancing Kurdish Peshmerga forces, an estimated 3,500 are still being held in brutal captivity and subject to rape, forced marriage, forced religious conversion, and slavery. They have been bought and sold the equivalent of ten or twenty dollars. (Girls with blue eyes cost the most.) Some are given as gifts or passed around among a group of men. Part of the clip shows several young men cheerfully anticipating a slave market.

The report is not graphic, but it is disturbing. It’s also worth seeing, because the world should not forget these women and girls, or the other men and women and children subject to the same kind of horrors in far too many other places.

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