There has been a lot of focus on the transnational implications of Daesh, and I think it's very important that we have that focus. What's problematic is that in thinking about the solutions and what's needed on a local level to protect minorities going forward, you have to look at the local context. When I interview Yazidis or Christians, they talk very much about the need to feel safe and secure in order to return home. The only way they're going to feel safe and secure is in knowing that their neighbours, who they believe committed crimes against them, will be held responsible and that steps will be taken to ensure that their neighbours don't, yet again, resort to either supporting an extremist group or being complicit in the commission of crimes.
That speaks to changing local dynamics. The majority of the people I interviewed, even those from the worst massacres that were committed against Yazidis, when I would ask them about the dialect, when I would ask them about where the individuals were from who committed the crimes, nine times out of ten it was someone from their own region, their own part of Iraq, who had committed the crimes.
I think we have to look at what the incentives and motivations are of local individuals to participate in and support ISIS, and that's where we need to start changing. We can talk about the military fight—and that has to happen—but we should also be talking about local level reconciliation, because people are going to have to live next door to each other again. What that means is we have to start finding the money to invest in booking local mediators on the ground, shoring up opportunities for aggrieved Sunni Arabs to find economic opportunity, and finding ways to ensure that local police forces are representative of the communities that are there.
That's why I put the emphasis on the local. When we think about the solutions, I think we tend to focus so much on how to dissuade foreign fighters from supporting ISIS rather than on how you dissuade a neighbour from turning on a neighbour.