With Ash on Their Faces

Isis's attack on the Yazidi population of northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world's attention to a hitherto small and secretive faith, worshippers of the sun, fire and a peacock deity, numbering half a million people. The world's media focused especially on the treatment of Yazidi women and girls who were kidnapped by the jihadists, sold in slave markets, forced into marriage, and extensively assaulted and raped.
The headlines have moved on to other stories now. But the events surrounding the mass abductions of Yazidi women, here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of a young journalist who has travelled extensively in the homelands of the Yazidis, provide an eye-opening perspective on life inside the Islamic state.
Today, over 3,000 Yazidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, passed between fighters as chattel. But many other have escaped or been released. Otten bases much of her book on interviews with these...