Van Abdou, an Algerian-born Christian from Egypt, was one of the young Christians killed by the Islamic State last week in Iraq. “I’m just a girl from a middle-class family that loves to make Christmas dinners in the morning,” Abdou told CNN a few weeks ago. “But they’ve lost it all.”

In the past, the Islamists have tried to make inroads with other religious minorities, with mixed results. Muslims have often been forced to leave the province of the caliphate, which became the Islamic State’s “Islamic state” last year, and settle in Iraq. And some Yazidi women were married off to jihadi men. But despite having seen the horrors of Islamic State brutality, many Yazidis remain faithful to the faith, and have fought back.

The Islamic State has done little to stop them thus far.

“They have nothing to offer us but slaughter,” said Yazidi woman Mariam, 30, who is living in Sinjar with her husband and kids. “I want my country back. I won’t let them get it back.”

Since March, the United Nations estimates that nearly 90,000 people have been killed or displaced. By contrast, during the same five-month period last year, the United Nations had documented just 20,000.

Still, the atrocities of Islamic State violence continue to pile up. According to the United Nations, the Islamic State has killed more than 2,700 civilians in 2014 alone, including a suicide bombing that occurred on March 7 in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

In May, Islamic State militants attacked two Shiite Muslim villages in southern Iraq. The attack claimed the lives of 12 people, several of them women and children. One villager explained that the attackers came from the north and the south. “They arrived at around noon. They started asking questions about our past,” she said. “They told us they were from the Islamic State.”

She said that the militants held the family captive and started firing at the women and children. One of the militants later told her that those who did not convert to Islam were to be killed.

The attackers were later arrested by the armed forces, the villager said. “At the end, eight of the 12 women and children of the village were killed, and the eight men were then also killed.”

In another incident, Islamic State militants burned alive six Christian boys and four other boys between the