Posted on 08/12/2014 11:14:27 AM PDT by No One Special
The way Baba Sheikh sees it, there are only two options left to save Iraqi’s persecuted Yazidi minority from certain death at the hands of the self-declared Islamic State: Either evacuate Iraq en masse or have international peacekeepers carve out protected territory.
“The important thing is that our people are saved,” says Baba Sheikh, the spiritual leader of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority, whose desperate plight helped galvanized the Obama administration into action last week.
US air strikes, and Kurdish peshmerga forces, have partially broken a siege on Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of Yazidis had fled. The United Nations' refugee agency said Tuesday that around 35,000 people had crossed into Kurdish-controlled Dohuk in the past 72 hours.
Some of the displaced have reached Sheikhan district and taken refuge in Lalish, home to the tomb of the main figure of the Yazidi faith. For now, they are safe. But Derman Rasha Adi, a member of the peshmerga forces who has overseen security here for a decade, says IS forces are just 15 miles away.
“The Peshmerga are positioned in strategic locations to block their passage, but in all honesty there is no such thing as safety in this situation,” he says.
Sheikhan was home to 16,000 people before the start of the IS assault last month. Today fewer than 500 residents remain, all men who've stayed to protect their homes. The rest of the town's residents are now in areas where Iraqi Kurdish forces are firmly in control.
Dressed in a white robe held together at the waist by a black rope, the sheikh, whose given name is Khurto Hajj Ismail, stares into space, the fatigue of eight sleepless nights kicking in. He is a man on a mission who relays the...
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
sorry Obama is on the back 9 right now
Barry on the links is the modern equivalent of Nero fiddling while the world burns. What a flop of a president.
we need to stay out of it
I’m sick of America being the world police.
Fight your own d@mn battles.
Notice that the Turks, who are but a stone’s throw away from the Yazidis, do totally nothing.
amen
and pixx on all the iraqis who were brave enough to bitch over mint tea about american occupiers and sneak out at night to plant ieds to blow up our troops while they were trying to restore civility and order
“we need to stay out of it
“
Why?
we cannot civilize a culture that cannot civilize itself unless it is enslaved under a despot
which we are not willing to do
therefore quagmire
You ready to die for a yazidi or send your child to do so?
Go for it
You don’t even know what’s going on. This is about a rescue mission, not civlizing a culture. 40,000 people stand to be slaughtered or starved to death unless they receive enough support to stop it. Every member of our military wishes to aid these poor people.
Plus he has that call-in with "Pimp with a Limp."
I have had an epiphany. Trade. Send everyone that lives in Gaza to Iraq where they should get on great with ISIS. Send the Yazidis to Gaza where they should get on great with Israel. This would resolve two terrible problems at one time.
There. Problem solved.
Meanwhile Fox News was all Robin Williams.
no thanks
Bush mission failure after al that time and expense and death proved we can’t save them, we can only delay their fate or add them to some plantation of transplanted helpless misfits
We are not the keepers of the world
obama told everyone and he believes it
so we all need to get used to this idea
Otherwise we’d be kicking aXX in North Korea, they are good people too and there are a LOT more of them suffering a lot longer
Of course we can save them. You are just opposed to doing so.
Fight your own d@mn battles.
Yea, you and the rest of the leftwing libtards............
I'm sure the citizens of France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc.....would have something to say about your feelings.......LOL!
There's nothing wrong with supporting democracy in foreign countries, to the extent that such democracy would apply to their own political structure such as in the middle east.
The problem today is that this present administration is clueless on which side to support.........the so called Syrian rebels, now known to make up ISIS, is the best example.....
The problem is that a thread such as this receives basically no replies when 40,000 people are starving, under homicidal threat and cowering in fear. It is our fault they are there. But apparently no one here cares enough to even pay lip service.
What do you have against Christians?
But to answer your question, perhaps you should direct your angst to the thousands of American soldiers who volunteered for the Iraq war...............Do you have a problem with them too?
Since they volunteered while YOU SAT HOME, you have no horse in this race..........
That is unimportant. The problem is ours and we have the resources to save lives and do alot more.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.