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Iraq is in chaos these days due to Turkey's military intervention there and the economic situation and the citizens there are turning to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in his name:Take us to Israel and agree to give us political asylum. Watch:https://t.co/dTU3aF8Y8H

“I have taken on the role of father and mother to my younger sisters,” says Yezidi survivor “Hala Safeel,” who lives with her family in a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Hala Safeel fled from the grip of the Islamic State (ISIS), , which committed genocide against her Yezidi people, four years ago, after she suffered through three years of ISIS captivity. But she is still living through the period of imprisonment, as the fate of her parents and three of her siblings is still unknown. Safeel says: “Despite everything, and despite what...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s threat to remove any mayors chosen in local elections next March deemed to be “contaminated by terrorism” is a rejection of democracy and an attempt to scare voters away from the main pro-Kurdish party, one of its members of parliament said. Turkish authorities stepped up pressure on the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) following the breakdown of a ceasefire with Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants in July 2015. The government says the HDP is, in effect, the political wing of the PKK. The crackdown gained momentum after a failed coup a year later that...

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – Syria’s Kurds “have been great partners,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday evening in Washington DC, as he addressed a conference of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA.)Pompeo affirmed that the Kurds would be party to negotiations over Syria’s political future.“We are now driving,” he said, stressing that last word, “to make sure that they have a seat at the table.”Pompeo is the most senior US official to affirm a long-term commitment to Syria’s Kurds.Previously, Amb. James Jeffrey, who was appointed Pompeo’s Representative for Syria Engagement in late August,...

Evangelical leaders have responded to the New York Times' claim that the Trump administration is undermining its own priority of protecting religious freedom by emphasizing the policy priorities of evangelical Christians. On Saturday, The New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece titled "A Too-Narrow Vision of Religious Freedom." The piece essentially argues that although "the Trump administration embraces a laudable desire to expand religious tolerance" across the globe, it is the administration's "own intolerance toward some" that "undermines the message." For examples of intolerance, NYT mentions "Trump's disgraceful attempts to ban Muslims from some countries from entering the...

American evangelicals and human rights advocates are encouraging the United States to pressure Turkey to release American missionary Andrew Brunson, who faces ridiculous allegations of complicity in Kurdish terrorism. Are they right to do so, even if the price is estrangement with a key NATO member and harm to US regional interests? How should Christians in their political witness balance Christian causes versus the wider national good? The president, vice president and secretary of state have all denounced Turkey's imprisonment of Brunson. Economic sanctions have been levied against Turkish products, and personal sanctions have targeted two Turkish officials. Congress has...

By releasing the grisly videos of the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, ISIS has altered the political landscape here and across the Middle East. America is on fire. "This is beyond anything that we've seen," said Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, "ISIL is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen. ... They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess." Sen. Lindsey Graham calls ISIS an "existential threat." Even Rand Paul has caught the war fever: "If I were president, I would call a joint session of Congress. I would...

The U.S. is weighing a military mission in Iraq to rescue thousands of Yazidi refugees, a move that risks putting American forces in direct confrontation with Sunni fighters for the Islamic State. The proposal is still under development and hasn't been approved by President Barack Obama. U.S. officials said the rescue mission is one of many options the U.S. military is weighing after dropping food and water to dying refugees over the past six days. "People are looking at ways to do something more than just drop water and supplies," one senior U.S. official said. "You can only do that...

Pundits and news agencies have questioned the validity of reports that the Islamic State is beheading children in its conquest of Syria and Iraq. But there is one fact that can't be contested: The Sunni-dominated al-Qaida splinter group is on a war rampage using some of the most heinous and barbaric means to exterminate anyone who opposes it, particularly Christians. In 2011, President Barack Obama declared, "The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year." The only thing he didn't count on was that the terrorist enemies of the U.S. decided not to...

First Appearance of ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi (English Subtitles) So overnight the crisis on Mount Sinjar is, well, over. The president's vacation may now continue uninterrupted by videos on CNN of kids being tossed into helicopters that land briefly, are overwhelmed by a mob, and fly away with a cohort of sobbing women and children. The world's media has been dismissed by U.S. officials speaking on background to the New York Times. No more fall of Saigon analogies please! The Times' references to "the secret team of Marines and Special Operations forces [that] were already on Mount Sinjar,...

Remember the Yazidis? The last we heard about them from the Obama administration, the religious minority had been largely rescued from the genocidal maniacs of ISIS, which had trapped most of them on Mount Sinjar without food and water. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case; thousands of them remained trapped and re-encircled, as the Washington Post reported at the time while the White House insisted any further rescue missions were unnecessary.Four months later, the Kurdish peshmerga finally got them off the mountain:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO A lightning two-day attack by Kurdish peshmerga forces broke the siege of Mount...

ISTANBUL — Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate conditions. On Wednesday, the United States military said that a small team of 18 Marines and Special Operations soldiers had completed an assessment of conditions on Mount Sinjar and found that most of the Yazidis, a small Iraqi religious minority, had succeeded in escaping, and the numbers remaining were in the low thousands. American...

Islamists from the Islamic State (IS) killed 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in a northern village on Friday, sources told Fox News. The Kurdish-speaking ethnic and religious group, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, has been persecuted in the north by IS, with at least 500 killed prior to Friday's news, according to Iraq's human rights minister. The latest killings came just a day after President Obama said U.S. air strikes and humanitarian aid drops on Sinjar mountain, where thousands of Yazidi have been stranded in an Islamic State siege had been ended. "They arrived in...

A push to take back the Iraqi town of Sinjar from ISIS by Peshmerga forces has begun, the Kurdistan Region Security Council said Thursday. "Operation Free Sinjar will include up to 7,500 Peshmerga from three fronts to cordon off Sinjar city, take control of ISIL's strategic supply routes and establish a significant buffer zone to protect the city and its inhabitants from incoming artillery," the council statement said. Coalition warplanes will provide close air support to Peshmerga forces throughout the operation, it said. The world watched in horror last year as some 50,000 Yazidis scrambled up Mount Sinjar in northern...

Hopefully, the shaky truce between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko, brokered in Minsk by Angela Merkel, will hold. For nothing good, but much evil, could come of broadening and lengthening this war that has cost the lives of 5,400 Ukrainians. The longer it goes on, the greater the casualties, the more land Ukraine will lose, and the greater the likelihood Kiev will end up an amputated and bankrupt republic, a dependency the size of France on the doorstep of Europe. Had no truce been achieved, 8,000 Ukrainian troops trapped in the Debaltseve pocket could have been forced to surrender...

Discussing Iraq last month on Washington Journal, C-SPAN's live call-in program, two callers — one American and one British — telephoned to ask whether I was Jewish. I am and said so. Both suggested that Jews were responsible for sending American soldiers into harms way. This was ironic since I volunteered for duty in Iraq, and then lived outside the security parameters enjoyed by other Coalition employees. One questioned whether I was part of a secret cabal operating for other than American interests. At the suggestion that his question might be anti-Semitic, the caller insisted my religion was a valid...

Obama continues to insist on leading from behind; that's the most He can do. Who in his right mind would follow Him were He to try to lead from the front?"Moderate" IslamistsCommander in Chief Juilation T. Cornpone Obama, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Hero of the Obama Nation, has His own ideas about the "non-Islamic" Islamic State (IS) with which He is or isn't at war (or going to war) with the help of "moderate" Islamists. It is not out of ignorance that President Obama and Secretary Kerry are denying the Islamic roots of the Islamic State jihadists. As I argued...

Ashwaq was only 14 when Islamic State fighters stormed into northern Iraq, including the heartland of the Yazidi people. They took thousands of women as sex slaves, including Ashwaq - sold for $100 to a man named Abu Humam. Raped and beaten, she managed to escape three months later and then went to Germany with her mother and one brother. A few months ago, on the street outside a supermarket, she heard someone call out her name. She says it was Abu Humam - and he said he knew where she lived. Düzen Tekkal, an activist and the founder of...

The incident occurs after a meeting between Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Tuesday. ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turkish warplanes have conducted airstrikes in the Yezidi (Ezidi)-populated city of Shingal in northern Iraq; sources told Kurdistan 24 on Wednesday. According to the sources, there were some airstrikes to the west of Baraa village, located close to the border with Syria. Snip- In April 2017, Turkish airstrikes supposedly targeting the PKK-affiliated YBS killed five Peshmerga soldiers and wounded nine others, as well as causing extensive damage to the area, resulting in condemnation from...

Pro-Turkey Syrian rebel fighters of the Euphrates Shield Brigades. File photo The Kurdish National Council in Syria (KNC) on Monday accused Turkey-backed rebel groups of displacing hundreds of Yezidi civilians from the village of Elî Qîno, in Syria’s northwestern Aleppo province.Furthermore, the KNC also accused pro-Turkey Islamists of kidnapping Kurdish civilians in northern Aleppo.Yezidi villagers of Elî Qîno, which belongs to the Afrin district, were given one hour to empty the village. After this the properties were confiscated, including olive groves, livestock and furniture.The KNC did not blame a specific rebel group, but said that the residents were forced...