The Terrorist Factory: Isis, the Yazidi Genocide, and Exporting Terror

by Patrick Desbois

With testimony drawn from more than 200 interviews with Yazidi survivors--girls, women, boys, and men--recorded during 11 investigative trips to refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and know from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God." Their fighters are paid with sex, money, and the power of life and death over captives. Their promised paradise is here and now, not after death. Men who didn't swear allegiance were executed. Women became slaves for sex or reproduction, and their offspring may still serve the cause. In mobile training camps, the captured children were drugged, indoctrinated, and taught to shoot Kalashnikovs, plant explosives, and handle suicide vests. They are the intended products of the terrorist factory. In this taut, disturbing account, the authors document a utilitarian genocide that still holds an implicit threat to other counties, including those in the West.

Genres: Middle East, Terrorism, Nonfiction, History, War

272 pages, Hardcover

Published July 3, 2018

About the author

Patrick Desbois is a French Roman Catholic priest, former head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference and consultant to the Vatican. He is the founder of the Yahad-In Unum, an organization dedicated to locating the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile-killing units in the former Soviet Union. He received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest honor, for his work documenting the Holocaust.

Reviews

[Marialyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 sad tragic stars
My reviews can be seen here: https://yayareadslotsofbooks.wordpres...

"I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur; think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia." (Miep Giles) and now through this book think of the Yazidi people, the Kurds.

The Yazidis are members of the Kurdish religious minority. They believe in one God who has placed the care of the world under the protection of seven holy beings, the first being Malek Taus who causes both good and evil to happen to people. In 2014, these people were targeted by ISIS and their extermination and subjugation is the topic of this book.

Going into refugee camps, the authors of this book and their team interviewed over two hundred survivors of the ISIS genocide. Reading this heart breaking tragic tale brought to mind the deceitful hateful behavior, the savage intents of ISIS, and the fact that once again religion used in its most insidious way has killed wantonly. The interviews and the stories will inflame you, they will fill you with idea that ISIS is pure evil. These people, the men, the women and the children were murdered, torn from their homes, killed while families watched. The women and young children were taken, the younger women and girls were used as sex slaves traded from one man to the next and raped violently over and over again. If they became pregnant their babies were taken with the intention of raising a boy as a killer, dedicated to eliminate the kafir (the unbelievers), the baby girls raised to become mothers of those dedicated to the ISIS and their path to the ultimate destruction of those kafirs. Also mentioned and what sent many shivers down my spine was that genocide does not exist unless neighbors are aware of it and at times participants in it being carried out.

The message in this book is clear. ISIS is still perpetrating their philosophy, the laws of sharia. Yes, they are not in the news so much, and yes, claims have been made that they are destroyed but are they? Children have been and probably are being trained to be "soldiers of God". These children know no kindness, they only learn of death and destruction, becoming desensitized to human suffering, with one goal in mind, that of killing the infidels.

This was an extremely difficult book to read. I kept on thinking didn't we vow to the mantra of "never again" after the Holocaust? Yet here we are with a number of genocides in present time after repeating that never again phrase. Did we learn nothing at all?

Thank you to Patrick Desbois, Costel Nastasie, Shelley Temchin, Arcade Publishing, and Edelweiss for a copy of this harrowing traumatic look inside the workings of ISIS. It is a book that I will never forget.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

https://972mag.com/photos-a-modern-ge...

[Lumturi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate everything he has done for survivors of genocide, but this wasn't my favorite book. He often inserts his own comments and doesn't let the victims speak fully for themselves, ex. comments about their appearance or age. He gets off-topic. It's more like a memoir of his travel to Iraq to interview Yezidis. What really did it for me in not liking this book is justifying the bombing of civilians in Germany in WWII. I prefer the book "With Ash on their Faces."

[Troy Disabato · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interviews and research in this book is admiring considering the subject matter about ISIS and child abduction, genocide and sex slavery. This is a very heavy book and it's less than 200 pages.

I would have given the book 5 stars however..

I think the book could have used some more chapters or published more of the interviews rather than the author bringing in the WW2 comparisons that I felt weren't really relevant and far fetched. Sometimes it was cringeworthy towards the point of inappropriate.
I wish instead the author had added more to the book like include a few more descriptive notes or illustrations or photos of some of the locations he was heading too. Maps would have been great. Yet completely understand if publishing the book that was a limiting factor.
I still would also have liked some more of a description of his guides and support group while doing the research for this book. I found he skipped on so many opportunities for more chapters to talk about. I wish he talked more about his experiences im longer detail at the refugee camps, his travels from A to B , he touched about his guide, I wish he talked about them more.

If the WW2 comparisons was removed I would consider this a great work of non fictional research about ISIS and the book's message.
I still still recommend . Definitely a good study book for a high school student for a paper .

[Dan Savickas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book strives to do an important and necessary work. So many Yazidis are still, to this day, dealing with the fallout from ISIS’s genocide perpetrated against them. It is vital to tell their story and let the world know. One line that still rings in my ears, “We are fine with blood being spilt, so long as the stains are in another part of the world.”

This is why it was frustrating that the last 25 percent of the book stumbled into forced comparisons with Nazi Germany or haphazard assessments of ISIS’s motives (ranging from money, sex, manpower, or religion). It felt like the last part of the book deviated from the aforementioned goal of telling the story of the victims and letting the world know what happened.

Despite the shortcomings, books like these are vital for a world largely ignorant to the Yazidi struggle.

[Brandy White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Horrifying details from what ISIS is systematically doing to increase their power and range

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrible. I can't say unspeakable because we allow this sort of thing to persist. I was unaware of the extent of ISIS use of drugs, slavery, and child soldiers.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very grim accounts from survivors of the Yazidi genocide about the horrors of living under ISIS.

[The Inked Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

*quick FYI: I have a booktube channel! You can find me at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKIN...*

[Mandy Walkden-Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daunting insight into the sinister machinations of ISIS. Age old battle - masquerading as a zealous religious quest, but in actuality is nothing more than a twisted grasping to accumulation of power, sex and money masked by the obfuscation of religion. And behind that mask is ISIS.

Compelling, simply written, straight forward. A brave thing these people did. A difficult thing bringing into the light the darkness that is ISIS.
Haunting stories that will linger forever. Not to be forgotten.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too many times throughout the book, the author hand-waves the experiences of people, telling instead of showing. What was there wasn't bad, but there could easily and should easily have been much more.