Islamic State (IS) has adopted rape and sexual enslavement as a weapon of war, a recruiting tool, and even a religious obligation. The very worst treatment is reserved for the Yazidis, followers of a syncretistic religion based in Iraq. Kyle Orton reports:

IS has used the enslavement of Yazidi women to recruit more foreign fighters. Casual sex, Western-style, does not exist in the Islamic world, and even prostitution isn’t easily accessible. With the youth unemployment rates of the Muslim world, many men do not have the money for a brothel. But IS promises young men guaranteed access to sex and religious permission to do exactly as they wish. . . .

Sexual slavery has been completely normalized in IS-held areas. . . . Individual Yazidi slaves are held in homes. . . . Other slaves are kept in public brothels.

“Men would come to buy girls [at slave markets] to rape them. . . . Once they took the girls out, they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The girls’ ages ranged from eight to thirty years,” a Yazidi girl who managed to escape IS is recorded as saying in an intensely detailed report by Human Rights Watch. . . .

[Nor is] IS . . . the only actor using sexual violence. The Assad regime has used rape as a weapon of war on a scale that at the very least matches, but probably exceeds, what IS has done. Sexual torture . . . has been reported from regime prisons. The regime was also using rape against male children, usually in front of their families, in the earliest months of a peaceful uprising.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.