surrounding them that is...
Posted on 08/06/2014 4:47:38 PM PDT by mojito
Stranded on a barren mountaintop, thousands of minority Iraqis are faced with a bleak choice: descend and risk slaughter at the hands of the encircled Sunni extremists or sit tight and risk dying of thirst.
Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians remain trapped on Mount Sinjar since being driven out of surrounding villages and the town of Sinjar two days earlier. But the mountain that had looked like a refuge is becoming a graveyard for their children.
Unable to dig deep into the rocky mountainside, displaced families said they have buried young and elderly victims of the harsh conditions in shallow graves, their bodies covered with stones. Iraqi government planes attempted to airdrop bottled water to the mountain on Monday night but reached few of those marooned.
[...]
Most of those who fled Sinjar are from the minority Yazidi sect, which melds parts of ancient Zoroastrianism with Christianity and Islam. They are considered by the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State to be devil worshippers and apostates.
The dramatic advance of the extremist Sunni fighters has torn the ethnic and religious fabric of the country, with Christians and Shiites also uprooted from cities and towns. Advertisement
The Islamic State’s takeover of Sinjar, the first major setback for Kurdish forces protecting the country’s north, sent about 200,000 people fleeing, according to the United Nations. Some 147,000 have arrived in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, flooding refugee camps.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Prayers for the Yazidis. Hard to believe there’s no country that would airdrop some supplies to them - even harder to believe we aren’t doing that for them or for the Christians of the region.
Bump
surrounding them that is...
If these evil scum are sitting at the base of the mountain they would be sitting ducks for a drone strike. ................... We could entertain the Yazidis on the mountain with a Arc Light show at the base, where they can watch the IS insurgents flying in the air.
Whaaa? They can’t recognize hope and change when they see it?
Many predicted this chaos in Iraq. This blood is Obama Obama’s hands.
Obama IS doing something - he had Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, meet with the representatives of the Chaldean and Assyrian Iraqis on July 31.(insert extreme sarcasm tag here)... Whoo-wee a meeting with the White House Chef would have carried as much clout as a meeting with Ben Rhodes. Obama just can’t be bothered with the genocide of Christians.
well, I don’t know if this means anything, but Malaki has ordered air support for the Kurdish peshmerga.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/04/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0G40ZY20140804
hopefully somebody can get some water/food drops worked in, too.
Well, there was the holocaust aftermath of Desert Storm, when GHW Bush enticed the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and then did nothing while Hussein slaughtered them in the open fields. Of course he did later send C-130's with pallets of food to be dropped from altitude on desperate Kurds' heads.
Several things are perhaps becoming apparent to more people, that have been apparent to many of us for a while now. All of these awful events follow logically from wrong choices made in Libya, Syria and (for some in our western world) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Obviously, we should have left good enough alone in Libya and Syria and backed their leaders, rather than meddling and creating power vacuums that very dangerous forces have easily begun to dominate.
Now we are making the wrong choice in not striking with lethal force at ISIS. They should be lured into a trap and wiped out, at least to the 80 or 90 per cent level, and then maximum vigilance should follow to track and eliminate any remnants. Just turning away and letting them run amok like this is inevitably going to lead to massive bloodshed and it may spill out into regions such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and then into the partially autonomous or occupied territories around Israel.
It sounds very much like a scenario like Armageddon and thus perhaps we cannot intervene to stop that which is inevitable. However, I don’t believe we can design foreign policy around interpretations of Biblical prophecy. We need to do the right thing now and worry about the longer term prophetic significance when urgent problems have been addressed.
Here we see the imminent slaughter of many thousands of complete innocents. Whatever we think of this religious group, they are innocents and apparently without much support from any other groups. If there’s forty thousand of them, that is not such a huge number that the western world could not easily absorb them, perhaps in several different places.
If the administration responds and does something then in this one case I believe we as conservatives should hold our fire and support what they do, if it seems effectual. But if not, it needs to be considered that the administration is so out of touch with global realities that some kind of adult supervision or “intervention” option should be considered by the Congress. Impeachment would be too slow a process to solve these problems in the short time that is probably left to avert a huge human catastrophe.
American leadership would seem to be required but perhaps there again, six or seven other NATO countries could manage this task, and the most likely nations to offer leadership at this point might be Britain and Canada. Perhaps those countries should start thinking about how they could take on ISIS with or without the United States. This seems rather like 1914 all over again.
Not like they're Ukrainians being threatened by great evil, ya' know?
If they'd just agree to party like it's 799, after a few hundred examples were made and the rest suffered some major abuse, the majority would be free to go with seldom more than the loss of a hand or foot.
They're just being intrasigent and refusing to accept compromises.
They are not muslim, so nobody cares. The “outraged” people are focused on the only democratic and civilized country in the middle east - Israel. The UN is busy helping Hamas fight a war.
No. The UN is more interested in killing infidels. It is essentially a Moslem and Islamist organization, especially since America became an Islamist power in its foreign policy.
Not s slowly now, I think.
So sad. The Yazidi follow a very old and particularly interesting religion, and they are anything but warlike. I fear this will effectively wipe out their religion. :(
It is not hard to believe. Our Emir, Hussein, is a Moslem “activist.”
You’ve definitely got that jerk’s number.
Notice Johnnie and Linda are keeping their yaps shut lately.
We are dealing here with a religion that worships the devil as its god.
Those airdrops need to include AKs & ammo, as well. For every one of them.
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