“Iraq is Dangerous. Go Anyway.”

That’s the bold slogan adopted by the U.S.-based charity Servant Group International to recruit teams working in its schools and in displaced camps in northern Iraq, home to the majority of Iraq’s 3.3 million internally displaced, or IDPs. Executive Director Dave Dillard told me the direct approach has generated the most response and interest of any ad campaign they’ve tried.

“As you can imagine, we have a very hard time finding team members to serve in Iraq. There are several people with the heart, but in increasing measure their families and churches point them in other safer, more predictable directions,” Dillard said. “We thought, maybe let’s just hit this head-on and acknowledge the obvious.”

After car bombs exploded in Baghdad’s Karada district July 2, ripping multistory storefronts from their support beams and sending flames high into the sky, killing more than 200 people, Americans may wonder: What are smart people doing in a place like this?

‘Thousands have fled and few are helping. ... We can get in where people hate each other.’

Bomb blasts and suicide attacks in Iraq this year—eight so far, five in Baghdad—have killed more than 600 people. If you’re following recent stats, that’s like four Paris attacks, 17 Brussels attacks, 42 San Bernardino attacks, or 12 Orlando attacks.

It should tell you something that the more than one dozen groups we feature on our website giving aid in Iraq (world.wng.org/iraqaid) are working there anyway. What you need to know, too, is they are filling critical gaps. Gaps not only other Americans or other Christian-led NGOs aren’t filling. These groups are filling gaps no one else is filling.

The Kurdish areas where Servant Group works have seen no terrorist activity recently, but ISIS front lines in some cases are less than 30 miles away. Still, the group year after year sends trained teams providing vital help to four Iraqi-led schools, including one serving Yazidi and Arab Muslim families driven out by ISIS in 2014.

Further south, Jeremy Courtney’s Preemptive Love Coalition was the first nongovernmental organization to get food deliveries into Fallujah. His trucks first reached the city following the Iraqi government’s ouster of ISIS last month and the surprising discovery that up to 90,000 residents there desperately need food and supplies.

On June 30 the morning news reports in America showed how U.S. aircraft destroyed an ISIS convoy attempting a retaliatory strike after its losses in Fallujah. What those reports didn’t show was how two Preemptive Love Coalition trucks loaded with 100,000 pounds of food were trapped in that firefight.

“About 80 ISIS vehicles came on our position and stopped while three of our team tried to hide themselves in the dirt,” the team’s Ben Irwin told me by email the next day. ISIS militants were so close the aid team could hear them talking on their phones. When U.S.-led fighter jets overhead locked on to the ISIS positions, the aid teams also came under fire: One round hit within 15 feet of a car where the aid workers had taken cover. “We were almost killed,” a frightened, breathless aid worker said as he sent footage of the episode via his phone.

The aid workers had permission to be there from local and Iraq army authorities. Courtney plans to continue working with them to feed families displaced by the recent fighting, he told me, despite the obvious risks.

Iraq’s persecuted Yazidis “feel betrayed on all sides,” worker Joel Dokkestul told me (see "Where the rubble speaks" in this issue). But Dokkestul and others testify to the Yazidis’ budding trust of Christians and the opportunity it represents to reach one of the world’s little-noted unreached people groups.

“They will say to me, ‘You are the ones who are standing with us,’” Dokkestul said.

“As ISIS gets pushed back, another humanitarian disaster awaits us,” said David Eubank, founder of Free Burma Rangers, who has taken what he’s learned working among refugees in Burma and is using it to help Iraq’s Yazidis.

“Thousands have fled and few are helping,” said Eubank. “There’s a humanitarian gap, and it opens a suitable role for the church. We can get in where people hate each other.”

Getting into places where people hate each other. That’s a powerful slogan, too.

Email mbelz@wng.org