I have always been interested in the Middle East, specifically the Syrian conflict. In early summer 2014, as part of my master’s dissertation, I went to Lebanon to work with the United Nations. I was still there when the Islamic State group, commonly known as ISIS, struck Iraq.

As many in the United States now know, ISIS is an extremist group. Its roots are in a small group of Jordanian jihadis who went to Taliban Afghanistan in 1999 and who were in Iraq waiting for the Americans when the invasion came in 2003. ISIS has been through numerous mutations both in structure and name, and it was nearly destroyed by the U.S. “surge” in Iraq after 2007. But since the U.S. pullout of Iraq and the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, ISIS has found a fertile environment for expansion and has set up a proto-state in areas of eastern and northern Syria and western and central Iraq. ISIS adheres to a version of Islamism that marks even other Islamists as unbelievers who can be killed. It claims to be restoring Islam to the time of its advent with the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. In ISIS’ telling, it is Islam, and all other versions are defective and impure.

My job at the time was to assess health-care facilities for Syrian refugees. The focus of my project was whether vulnerable groups—namely women, children, and the elderly—were being given adequate care.

Alongside my formal mandate, I was able to witness the conditions and difficulties of the Syrian refugees by visiting the informal tent settlements. Lebanon will not allow camps on its territory, as it sees this as granting refugees a right of residence that will make the Syrians’ presence permanent. Many Syrians had been displaced from their homes with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Speaking to the aid workers who had spent time with refugees, I became aware that many of the women had been exposed to sexual and other forms of violence in Syria. And, unlike many others, their ordeal had not ended in exile.

Since that time, I have continued to watch the Syrian conflict from afar, working as an analyst of the war and its various developments. But I’ve always kept one eye on the women caught in the midst of a fight that is largely being prosecuted by men.

The women victimized by ISIS have faced unimaginable horror, and they need our acknowledgement and our help. This is their story—the story that I and others have witnessed firsthand.

Read the article “Think Reports of How ISIS Treats Women Are Too Awful to Be True? Think Again” on verilymag.com.