As ISIS weakens, efforts to free Yazidi sex slaves stepped up

Ahmed Burjus, deputy director of Yazda, a Yazidi-led charity that supports survivors and is documenting evidence of mass killings committed by the militants, is now petitioning that more be done to help the plight of his people. "Almost all the areas are liberated from ISIS in Iraq and Syria but those Yazidi people are missing. Have they been killed? We don't know where they are," he said in an interview in London.

A UN human rights Commission of Inquiry, which declared the killings of thousands of Yazidis to be a genocide, said in August that the atrocity had not ended and that the international community was not doing enough to stop it.

Some 7,000 Yazidi women and girls were forced into sex slavery, when Islamic State militants assaulted the community's heartland in Sinjar, northern Iraq in August 2014. More than 5,000 people in the religious minority were rounded up and slaughtered by the fighters, also known as ISIS. Though militants were driven out of the last part of the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq in May, nearly 3,000 Yazidi women and children remain in Islamic State captivity, and control over Sinjar is disputed by rival armed factions and their regional patrons. Justice for the crimes Yazidis suffered, including sexual enslavement, has also so far proved elusive.