On a scale of 1-10 how large a threat is ISIS?

[frazzled]

15. What an insensitive question

You might as well have asked what threat the Ferguson police department is to me, an older white woman who lives in an entirely different city and state. Well, none, obviously. Does that mean I don't think the Justice Department should not be devoting time and resources to investigating (and possibly prosecuting) them?

ISIS is a large threat to those who happen to be non-Sunni Syrians or Iraqis. Let's recall the current toll:

Start with Monday’s testimony before the U.N. Human Rights Council. The documented incidents include 1,700 captives executed in Tikrit, Iraq, and 650 in Mosul, Iraq. Some 1,000 Turkmen massacred, including 100 children. More than 2,000 women and children kidnapped. “Systematic hunting of members of ethnic and religious groups.” Women raped and sold. Young boys executed. Girls enslaved for sexual abuse. Children recruited as suicide bombers. More than 1 million refugees, half of them kids.

Then read the report Amnesty International issued Tuesday. Its title is “Ethnic Cleansing on Historic Scale: The Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq.” The report details, with eyewitness testimony, several more ISIS atrocities in Iraq. At least 100 men and boys herded together and shot to death in Kocho. “Scores of men and boys” summarily executed in Qiniyeh. More than 50 men “rounded up and shot dead” near Jdali.

Human Rights Watch also released a report on Tuesday. It offers new evidence about the massacre in Tikrit. “Information from a survivor and analysis of videos and satellite imagery has confirmed the existence of three more mass execution sites,” says the report. That brings the death toll to “between 560 and 770 men.” The captives were shot dead while lying in trenches with their hands bound.

For a more complete tally of the carnage, check out the U.N.’s latest casualty figures for Iraq. The 1,265 civilians killed in August, combined with 1,186 in July and 1,531 in June, yield a total of 6,861 so far this year, and 9,826 over the last 12 months. The report doesn’t specify how much of the killing was done by ISIS, but it does say that “thousands continue to be targeted and killed by [ISIS] and associated armed groups simply on account of their ethnic or religious background.” These figures don’t include the uncollectible data from Anbar province—which covers half the Syrian border and nearly one-third of Iraq—or any of the nearly 200,000 people killed in the Syrian civil war.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/09/don_t_watch_isis_s_murder_of_steven_sotloff_honor_him_by_remembering_the.html

Your question should rather be: what is the best way to proceed (or not) to prevent more killings and ethnic cleansings. Who cares what threat ISIS poses to any one of us?