Residents of the village of Tal Ali in northern Iraq are worried about as many as 70 young people abducted by Islamic State in what might be a revenge attack.  The day before the kidnapping, Islamic State had fled the village fearing an Iraqi military attack that never came.  But during that time, the villagers took down the black IS flag and burned it along with anything the IS fighters had left behind.

The kidnapping illustrates the emptiness of Islamic State’s rhetoric about building a caliphate.  IS is a Sunni movement, and the village of Tal Ali is a Sunni village.  But if past patterns hold true, the men kidnapped likely faced the same sort of atrocities the terrorist group is known for inflicting on rival Shiites and other minority groups in the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria.

Amnesty International accuses IS of “systematic ethnic cleansing,” which includes persecution of religious minorities, and Human Rights Watch said it had uncovered new sites of mass killings in the Iraqi city of Tikrit.

Meanwhile, air strikes reportedly killed an IS military commander in Mosul, as well as a senior aide to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  The Iraqi military did not say if it or the US carried out the air strikes, but the US stepped up its response to IS last month.  The increased air power has allowed Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces to take back territory from IS.

US President Barack Obama and British PM David Cameron are pushing NATO members to back more strikes against IS.  The alliance has not yet taken a position, but Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says the international community has an “obligation” to stop Islamic State.