On Being a Storyteller, Not a Storytaker

Back in early August 2014, on a relentlessly hot day in northwestern Iraq, thousands of fighters loyal to the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), armed with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi soldiers who abandoned it, flooded into the district of Sinjar, about 75 miles west of Mosul, like a plague of locusts.