"The USA must act. We must terminate Daesh and all such terror."
Thus declared Nadia Murad, a former Yazidi sex slave, as she spoke before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday in Washington to warn of the new horrors that the Islamic State (ISIS) could unleash, using the name "Daesh," the Arabic pejorative term for ISIS.
Murad was held captive by the terrorist group before she escaped in 2014.
She said the suffering being endured by persecuted Yazidis, Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria are mounting and that they "cannot wait" any longer for help.
She said the Obama administration has to expand its military campaign in Iraq if it hopes of defeating the terrorist organisation.
Murad said she sees no diplomatic or peaceful solution to the problem since the ISIS will not willingly give up their weapons.
She proposed that the U.S. and other countries "establish a safe and protected zone for Iraqi and Syrian religious minorities." However, U.S. President Barack Obama has already and repeatedly rejected this plan, local news station WMUR reports.
In her testimony, Murad said the spread of Islamic terror does not surprise her, citing what happened in Orlando, Florida, recently when Omar Matten, an avowed ISIS supporter, mowed down 49 people at a gay nightclub.
"I knew if ISIS were not stopped, they would deliver their crimes everywhere," she said.
Murad once again revisited the horrors she underwent when she and her family were abducted by ISIS fighters. She said ISIS militants killed six of her brothers and her mother in Northern Iraq. She was eventually made an ISIS sex slave before her dramatic escape to freedom.
In a testimony before the United Nations in December last year, Murad said about 5,000 Yazidi girls and women have been kidnapped by ISIS, pointing out that some of things the ISIS militants are making women go through are "more difficult than death."
She said she was only able to escape from her abductors in the city of Mosul when a Muslim family helped her obtain fake Islamic I.D. papers.
However, she said she still does not feel like a free woman.
"I was freed, but I do not (have) the feeling of the freedom because those who have committed these crimes have not been held accountable," she said.
