Taking on ISIS for the World’s Well-Being

Amal Clooney — yes, the wife of George Clooney — stunned the public this week by announcing she would bring ISIS to trial in international court for war crimes against the Yazidi people.

Her client, a 23-year-old Yazidi woman named Nadia Murad, survived the Islamic State sex trade. Murad watched as ISIS militants marched into her small village in northern Iraq and executed six of her eight brothers and her mother — then took her as a war prize.

“I’m ashamed as a human being that we ignore their cries for help,” Amal Clooney told the U.N. General Assembly.

Murad testified earlier this week before the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC): “The Islamic State did not just come to kill our women and girls but they took us as war booty, as merchandise, to be exchanged. These crimes were not committed in an arbitrary fashion. It was an organized and planned policy. The Islamic State came with one sole aim: to destroy the Yazidi identity through force, rape, the recruitment of children, and the destruction of all of our temples. All of this can only be interpreted as an act of collective genocide.”

Murad reported that she was brutally raped by ISIS militants, sometimes until she fell unconscious. She was one of 150 other Yazidi girls who were subjected to abuse. In her testimony before the U.N., Murad said she was only able to survive by taking herself to another world mentally.

Amal Clooney is a celebrated human rights attorney with a long track record. Her previous clients include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and Yulia Yymoshenko, the prime minister of Ukraine. But Clooney’s case this time puts her in real danger as a target of a known and prolific terrorist group. In an interview with NBC, Clooney said she felt a sense of outrage at what the Yazidi women and girls have been forced to endure at the hands of ISIS terrorists.

Related: Kids Don’t Need Terror

“It’s been harrowing to hear the testimony of girls as young as 11 and 12, what’s happened to them. And still we haven’t done anything about them,” Clooney said. She took the United Nations to task for its negligence: “‘I wish I could say that I was proud to be here, but I’m not. I’m ashamed as a human being that we ignore their cries for help.”

On an international scale, the world has done very little to address human trafficking and violence against women. The United Nations created an initiative to address this problem barely more than a year ago. That help is tardy at best, considering that human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. More than 20 million women worldwide are bought and sold in the sex trade.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”Human Trafficking” source=”http://www.reuters.com”]Outside Iraq, women are sold for up to $20,000. Inside Iraq, men may pay $200-$500 to spend the night with a virgin. In some cases, girls have been forced to undergo reconstructive surgery so they can be re-trafficked as virgins. ISIS has also carried out abductions as a means of controlling populations, spreading fear, and procuring wives for fighters.[/lz_bulleted_list]

Human trafficking and violence against women affects everyone — it can be fodder for war and terrorism. Valerie Hudson, professor of international affairs at Texas A&M, created the world’s largest database of statistics about women: WomanStats. In analyzing this data, Hudson and her colleagues discovered the best predictor of a nation’s stability is the security and treatment of its women. The treatment of women has a stronger correlation to a nation’s peace than its wealth, religious identity, or democratic processes.

Hudson points out that violence against women feeds terrorism. As of 2005, 163 million women — about 2 percent of the world’s population — went missing from Asia’s population because of sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and other violence. This imbalance in genders can be an impetus for terrorism.

It creates “an underclass of young adult men with no stake in society because they will never become heads of households, the marker for manhood in their cultures,” Hudson said in an article in Foreign Policy. As a result, these young men are often targets for terrorist recruitment.

Others see Clooney’s efforts as little more than a publicity stunt.

In taking on ISIS, Amal Clooney is bringing to the forefront an aspect of Islamic terrorism that is not widely understood: the continued victimization of women and girls through human trafficking. Both Clooney and Murad have received death threats as a result of the lawsuit.

But others see Clooney’s efforts as little more than a publicity stunt. After all, what can a trial in international court do to an absent defendant who defies common law? Clooney said trials can help destroy the fundamental ideas that cause ISIS to thrive. You can’t kill an idea with bombs, she explained. But a trial on the international scene will expose brutality and corruption.

Hudson agreed. “This is the first attempt to bring those responsible for the Yazidi genocide to justice,” she told LifeZette. “By bringing a case before the International Criminal Court — assuming the court accepts the case — states will be under the obligation to find and extradite perpetrators to The Hague, and also to preserve evidence and take witness testimony. This is absolutely the right thing to do.”

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Hudson qualifies those remarks by saying the trial will not likely result in “immediate changes for women.” Still, it’s a step in the right direction.