The New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi was on Fresh Air the other day. One of the things they talked about was the sex slavery of Yazidi girls and women.

GROSS: So the ISIS men who raped these women and used them as sex slaves, they believed that the Quran gave them justification to do it as long as the women didn’t get pregnant?

CALLIMACHI: Yes, yes. The Quran has about more than a dozen references to the phrase those your right hand possesses. And what scholars of Islam have explained to me is that phrase means a slave. And that phrase comes up in sections that deal with what are the licit forms of sexual intercourse that a man can have? So you can have sex with your wife. You can’t have sex with anybody else except those your right hand possesses, right? Now, what scholars explain to me is that even though the Quran lays out slavery as one of the licit forms of sex with a woman, what ISIS has done is, of course, taken it to a different level.

They’re not just saying that it’s licit. They’re saying that it’s holy. They’re saying that because it was, in their eyes, practiced by the Prophet, Muhammad it is, therefore, a sacred duty to rape these poor women. And some of the most heartbreaking interviews I did were with women who described how the fighters would pray before they raped them. They would then rape them. They would go and take a shower, and then they’d come back and pray again because, to them, the act of the rape was – I don’t know how else to put it – but almost like an act of communion.

GROSS: Leaves me speechless. And the women who you interviewed who were used as sex slaves…

CALLIMACHI: Yeah.

GROSS: …They were mostly Yazidi women, members of a religious minority who…

CALLIMACHI: Right.

GROSS: …ISIS basically practiced genocide on. I mean, they…

CALLIMACHI: Yes.

GROSS: Yeah.

CALLIMACHI: Yes.

GROSS: So these were women who were taken while other Yazidis were being just, like, wiped out.

CALLIMACHI: Right. The only women I’ve spoken to are Yazidi women. And it seems that ISIS singled out this particular ethnic group for this very crime. There have been a few anecdotal cases of Christian women being taken as sex slaves and a few anecdotal cases of Shia women being taken. And, of course, we know the terrible story of the American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, who was also taken in this manner. But those accounts are very much at the anecdotal level. There’s very few of them, whereas with the Yazidis, it was a systematic, planned-out orchestrated thing that they did. They showed up on Sinjar Mountain on August 3 and 4 of 2014 with empty trucks, specifically to fill them with women and to take them back to use them in this underground sex trade.

GROSS: And they’re still doing this? I mean, they’re still practicing…

CALLIMACHI: They’re still…

GROSS: They’re still, like, raping women and…

CALLIMACHI: Absolutely, absolutely. There’s about…

GROSS: …And holding them hostage…

CALLIMACHI: Yeah. There were…

GROSS: …And in slavery.

CALLIMACHI: Right. There were 5,000 – more than 5,000 Yazidi people that were taken by ISIS starting in August of 2014. And Yazidi community leaders and the U.N. say that there’s around 3,000 that are still in captivity. That includes women, children and a handful of men who were allowed to live.

But yes – and they – a lot of them have had, at some level, contact with their families because when you go to the camps in northern Iraq, a lot of the families are spending every ounce of their strength right now trying to come up with the ransoms to essentially pay the smugglers to get their girls out.

So they know that they’re alive. The girls will take the fighter’s cell phone and run off to the bathroom and make a quick phone call or hide his phone and wait for him to leave the house and then call. And so there’s contact. We know that they’re – we know that many of them are still alive. And it’s just absolutely gutting to think what’s happening to them.

It shows where religious thinking can get you – the idea that one man 14 centuries ago made a habit of enslaving Outsider women, therefore it’s a Holy Duty for Insider men now to do the same thing. There’s no need to think about what’s good or bad for the women in question, no need to think about their feelings, no need to wonder if it might be cruel to rape girls who have been kidnapped by an army of strange men. None of that. It’s just about what this one man did 14 centuries ago – all because he’s a “prophet,” and not just a prophet but the prophet – and that justifies the mass rape of Yazidi girls and women, it justifies the murder of Asad Shah, it justifies “marrying” little girls age 9.

It’s a bad bad way of thinking. If a god really does approve of that, that god is a bad bad god.