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Women and girls as young as 11 have been systematically raped by fighters for the Islamic State, which has made sex slavery a pillar of its self-proclaimed caliphate. The New York Times interviewed 21 women and girls in Iraq who recently escaped Islamic State captivity, examined the group's communications and talked to terrorism and religious experts for a chilling report by Rukmini Callimachi, a correspondent who covers Islamic extremism.

The Yazidi religious minority community in Iraq says 3,500 of its women and girls are still being held by the so-called Islamic State (IS), many being used as sex slaves. A few have managed to escape and here tell their harrowing stories. One day in August, Hannan woke to find her family frantically packing.

Almost 3% of people in the Middle East are enslaved. Typically the people are trapped by falling for a "work trap." They leave their homes and families because they are promised employment. Upon arriving to work, the employers take everything from them and enslave them.

ABOUT THE AUTHORSharon Buchbinder, RN, Ph.D., is an award-winning professor at Stevenson University and novelist who recently published Obsession, which deals with human trafficking and international kidnapping. Follow her on Twitter at @sbuchbinder. MORE BY THIS AUTHOR In a previous issue of The Islamic Monthly, I examined the pervasiveness of human trafficking in Southeast Asia.