It is universally accepted that Islamic extremist terrorist groups such as ISIS are brutish, cruel and barbaric criminals, and this is a perception rightfully held. Known for their merciless massacre and theft of thousands of innocent human lives and often remembered for their ruthless murdering and beheading of Christians in Libya last year, these organizations commit so many egregious acts of an indescribable level of inhumanity that one of their largest human rights violations tends to go less noticed: their grotesque contribution to global human trafficking.

The human trafficking industry is considered the second largest source of illegal income worldwide, generating annual profits of $150 billion, and such terrorist groups further aid in the growth of this plaguing injustice. Teenage girls are continually being abducted and sold in slave markets by ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq, where over 250,000 and 345,000 people are exploited by modern-day slavery, respectively. Terrorists continue to run slave markets, buying and selling girls and young women for “as little as a pack of cigarettes” or for thousands of dollars, advertising one 12 year old female for $12,500, sickeningly treating women, children and human lives as some material commodity for exchange at a marketplace and placing a price on human life and dignity. The chief victims of ISIS, as well, are the about 4 million women under ISIS control, facing sexual violence, rape, detainment and harassment. Abducting, exerting control over, unlawfully migrating and enslaving girls have become parts of these groups’ military strategies. But these extremist terrorist groups do not act in this alone: they are among 45 other armed groups around the world who exercise coercive sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Whilst ISIS is losing territory dominance, it continues to hold control over some 3,000 women slaves, whom they sell and exchange on online marketplaces and encrypted cell phone applications. This repulsive treatment of human beings is further inflamed by the existence of a database within the terrorist group which holds the photographs of these enslaved individuals and the names of their ISIS traffickers, so as to criminally collaborate to coercively prevent their escape.

These terrorist groups clearly take advantage of the political instability rampant in the MENA region to facilitate trafficking in persons; while the root causes of trafficking are rather multifaceted, any form of political unrest furnishes the perfect environment for organized criminal activity and for trafficking, as it often leads people to migrate to neighboring lands as displaced peoples searching for opportunity amidst lives of widespread financial insecurity which heightens their vulnerability to fall victim to modern-day slavery.

ISIS’ horrific involvement in the festering of modern-day slavery reemerged in public discussion in recent days with the United Nation (UN)’s appointment of an ISIS trafficking survivor, Nadia Murad, as the Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Ms. Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi woman, was captured by the terrorist group in 2014 and was exploited and abused after being sold as a slave several times prior to her escape. She was among the over 5,200 Yezidis abducted in 2014 - 3,500 of which still remain in captivity - when ISIS was targeting their population of only 230,000 people in Iraq.

In spite of these chilling and disturbing human rights violations, not all hope in humanity can be lost. Since 2014, Arab and Kurdish smugglers have worked tirelessly to bring these enslaved persons to freedom, successfully helping approximately 134 people flee from ISIS control every month. According to statistics by the Kurdistan government, however, these figures have lessened to 39 since May, but in light of the recent call to the International Criminal Court by human rights attorney, Amal Clooney, to hold these barbaric institutions liable for the genocide, enslavement and inhumanity they've conducted against the Yazidi people and international community at large, it is my greatest hope and continual prayer that not only will a day come in which international terrorism is matter of the past, but also that the strides towards the restoration of justice and tolerance in our global society will be made by our government and leading countries around the world, because it is truly the responsibility of humanity to practice humanity, for in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”