Sen. Ted Cruz at Defeat Jihad Summit, You Tube, February 12, 2015
Posted tagged ‘Caliphate’
Sen. Ted Cruz at Defeat Jihad Summit
February 14, 20154-Star Admiral Slams Obama: Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrated All Of Our National Security Agencies
February 11, 20154-Star Admiral Slams Obama: Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrated All Of Our National Security Agencies, You Tube, January 28, 2015
During a press conference on how to combat radical Islamic extremism, Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons (U.S. Navy, Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, stated that under the leadership of Barack Obama the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated all of the National Security Agencies of the United States. Furthermore, Lyons said that Obama is deliberately unilaterally disarming the military and spoke to the need for the new GOP controlled congress and Military leaders to stand up to the administration and uphold their oaths.
What’s worse than no strategy?
February 11, 2015What’s worse than no strategy? Israel Hayom, Clifford D. May, February 11, 2015
It seems like only yesterday that U.S. President Barack Obama was being criticized for having no strategy to counter the jihadi threat. In fact, it was about 10 days ago. Peggy Noonan’s Feb. 1 Wall Street Journal column was headlined: “America’s strategy deficit.”
Since then, a different perception has been taking root: Obama does indeed have a strategy — a “secret strategy,” one that is alarmingly misguided.
According to this theory, he believes that fighting terrorism requires accommodating the regime long recognized by the U.S. government as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He may also see the Islamic republic not as a rival to the Islamic State group but as a more moderate alternative — despite the fact that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly declared hostility toward America the foundation of the Islamic revolution.
The president appears to believe that Sunni jihadis can be countered by Shia jihadis. Last week, Islamic State demonstrated its barbarism by immolating a Jordanian pilot. That should not cause us to forget that Iran’s rulers supplied militias in Iraq with improvised explosive devices used to immolate American soldiers, are supporting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad who has used chemical weapons to scorch the lungs of his opponents, and are continuing to illicitly develop nuclear weapons capable of immolating millions.
Dr. Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has not just speculated about Obama’s “secret strategy.” He has painstakingly combed through the record and produced a 9,000-word report persuasively establishing that Obama, since early in his presidency, has been in pursuit of a “comprehensive agreement” that would allow Iran to become what the president has called “a very successful regional power.”
Understand what that means: Iran would be the hegemon of the Middle East. Some states would accept Tehran’s authority, striking deals and kowtowing in order to survive. Europeans would accommodate Iran, based on its control of the flow of Gulf oil. Israel and Saudi Arabia, nations that Iran’s rulers have threatened to wipe from the map, would be left to fend for themselves.
And some Sunnis would almost certainly turn to al-Qaida and Islamic State to help defend them from Shia domination. Indeed, Islamic State rose in response to the extension of Iranian power in Baghdad after America’s withdrawal from Iraq, coupled with Obama’s decision not to support non-Islamist Syrians who had rebelled against the Assad dictatorship.
Doran cites evidence that in the first year of Obama’s first term, there were more White House meetings on Iran than any other national security concern. Detente with Iran was seen as “an urgent priority,” but the president “consistently wrapped his approach to that priority in exceptional layers of secrecy” because he was convinced that neither Congress nor the American public would support him.
A year ago, Doran further reports, Benjamin Rhodes, a member of the president’s inner circle, told a group of Democratic activists (unaware that he was being recorded) that a deal with Iran would prove to be “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” He made clear that there would be no treaty requiring the Senate’s advice and consent.
The president believes that “the less we know about his Iran plans, the better,” Doran concludes. “Yet those plans, as Rhodes stressed, are not a minor or incidental component of his foreign policy. To the contrary, they are central to his administration’s strategic thinking about the role of the United States in the world, and especially in the Middle East.”
Those plans also explain why the president has refused to use tough sanctions, or even the threat of tough sanctions, to force Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to choose between his nuclear weapons program and economic collapse. Doran writes, “For Obama, to force a confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a new Middle East order.”
Doran’s piece was published in the online journal Mosaic on Feb. 2. Four days later, Obama released his 2015 National Security Strategy. It contained nothing about the ”secret strategy.” In fact, it contained nothing that could be called a strategy.
That appraisal is widely shared. For example, David Rothkopf — who served in the Clinton administration, “voted for Barack Obama twice” and now edits Foreign Policy magazine — called the National Security Strategy “a brief filed by the president in defense of his record to date” and “a mishmash leavened by good intentions but unintentionally spiced up by oversights, misrepresentations, and a bad track record.”
Last Friday, National Security Adviser Susan Rice reassured an audience at the Brookings Institution that “the dangers we face … are not of the existential nature we confronted during World War II or the Cold War.” But if Iran becomes nuclear-armed, other despotic regimes will follow, greatly increasing the likelihood that terrorists will get their hands on nukes and, sooner or later, use them.
Remember that American leaders of both parties similarly minimized the threat posed by al-Qaida prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Is the lesson of that day, as Rice implies, that we should worry only about existential threats — confident that we can absorb lesser doses of death and destruction? Or should we have learned instead to do all we can to prevent our enemies from inflicting such punishment now and in the future?
This is a debate worth having. But it will be inhibited so long as the president insists on hiding his views, leaving it to a few exceptional scholars to read between the lines.
Columnist On Jordanian Daily: ISIS ‘Did Not Invent A New Islam’
February 11, 2015Columnist On Jordanian Daily: ISIS ‘Did Not Invent A New Islam,’ MEMRI, February 11, 2015
(It would be encouraging if such statements were more often made in the “legitimate news” media of the U.S. and the “free” world. — DM)
In a February 10, 2015 article in the English-language Jordanian daily Jordan Times, titled “We Have a Problem”, attorney and columnist Zaid Nabulsi wrote that Muslims must not suffice with protesting that “Islam is innocent” of the terrorists’ actions. They must also acknowledge that the extremism of terrorist organizations like ISIS emanates directly from the teachings of Wahhabi Islam that now permeate the Sunni world, and from messages spread by the Muslim Brotherhood and by prominent clerics like Yousuf Al-Qaradawi. He added that Muslims must be brave enough not merely to condemn the ideology of the terrorists, but also to renounce Islamic texts that are incompatible with basic human values, including certain hadiths that are erroneously attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the writings of certain prominent medieval scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyyah.
The following are excerpts from his article:
“Some Wahabist Teachings, Which Have Permeated The Air We Breathe In The Muslim World, Are Simply Irreconcilable With Decent Human Values”
“Enough is enough. It is time to speak out. ‘Islam is innocent’ is an incomplete sentence. Introspection is needed, for, if we shy away from reality, the alternative will be more images like those we witnessed last Tuesday night, when brave Lt. Muath Al-Kasasbeh was burnt to death in a cage…
“Some Wahabist teachings, which have permeated the air we breathe in the Muslim world, are simply irreconcilable with decent human values, especially the ones that declare that every non-Wahabist is a disposable body whose bloodletting is unproblematic. So enough of this burial of our heads in the sand. It has become tiresome to keep hearing the unproductive cliché that Islam is innocent after each atrocity committed by devout fanatics who did nothing except execute the exact letter of their textbooks, which order them to slaughter the infidels.
“The escapism that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with those atrocities does not hold water anymore because Wahabism and Islam have become indistinguishable. To understand the crisis of Muslims today, one has to remember that Wahabism exists in several textbooks containing the alleged sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, or books of ‘Hadith,’ revered by so many. What we must confront is the undeniable fact that it is from many stories found in these books that the unprecedented cruelty of groups such as the so-called Islamic State and Jabhat Al-Nusra emanates.
“The problem today has nothing to do with the original spirit of Prophet Mohammad’s message. Nor has it anything to do with the tumultuous history of Muslims over 14 centuries, parts of which were no doubt glorious and enlightened. The catastrophe today is with the visible manifestation of Islam in the modern world, as demonstrated by the prevalent beliefs and practices of many people who call themselves Muslims.”
“[The] Negative Image Of Muslims Is Not All Just Smoke And No Fire”
“[But] this negative image of Muslims is not all just smoke and no fire. This is what those 120 Islamic scholars who sent a letter to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi last year could not fathom. [ISIS] did not invent a new Islam. On the contrary, its followers are strict adherents of the same textbooks quoted in that long letter (bizarrely addressed to ‘Dr Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri,’ Baghdadi’s real name, bestowing intellectual respectability upon this mass murderer, as if one were writing a letter to the mayor of Copenhagen). In fact, the scholars’ letter was a misguided attempt to disinfect Wahabism, to cleanse it from itself, by claiming that IS simply misinterpreted texts that are otherwise compatible with human decency. In that sense, the letter squabbled over the semantics of the alleged instructions by the Prophet to spread Islam by the sword, but it did not dare renounce the authenticity of those same sayings…
“If we truly want to defend Islam, we need to perform a much more invasive surgery. Take the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of the prevalence of the Wahabist teachings among Muslims today. The Brotherhood is the virtual womb that incubated all the current jihadist groups, including Al-Qaeda itself (Al- Zawahiri hailed from the Egyptian MB offshoot that murdered president Anwar Sadat). Yet, when Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006, the three most senior leaders of the MB in Jordan brazenly visited the condolence house in Zarqa and announced to the media that Zarqawi was a martyr in the eyes of God, despite Zarqawi having blown up three hotels in Amman the previous year, killing scores of Jordanians going about their lives or celebrating a peaceful wedding…
“The orgy of decapitations in Syria over the last four years was promoted by very rich Sunni clerics such as Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and Mohammad Al-Uraifi, aided by the countless satellite stations openly calling for the murder of Alawites and Shiites, and financed by billions from extremely wealthy but hateful Muslims. So, enough with the denials. It is time to raise the alarm. We have a problem!”
“If We Really Want To Defend Islam As A Religion Of Mercy… We Have To Muster The Courage To Identify The Specific Texts That Actually Defame Islam, Denounce Them And Permanently Cleanse Islamic Tradition Of Them”
“There is obviously a propensity towards eliminating ‘the other’ imbedded deep within Wahabist ideology. It is not only foolish to deny this fact, it is also dangerous, for we would be covering the cancerous tumour with a bandage. What we cannot deny is that many of the Wahabist textbooks are the same operating manuals that Islamist butchers use to justify their savagery. For example, very few people know that while [the Jordanian pilot] Muath was being set on fire in that macabre video, the voiceover was a recitation of an Ibn Taymiyah fatwa deeming the incineration of unbelievers a legitimate act of jihad. Ibn Taymiyah is not some obscure scholar on the fringe of Sunni Islam. In the Sunni world, he is universally venerated with the title ‘Sheikh of Islam,’ elevating him to an almost infallible clerical status.
“If we really want to defend Islam as a religion of mercy, if we really want to be believed when we proclaim the innocence of this religion, we need to do more than just repeat this meaningless mantra about us having nothing to do with [ISIS]. We have to muster the courage to identify the specific texts that actually defame Islam, denounce them and permanently cleanse Islamic tradition of them.”
Iran’s Moves in the Middle East and Why You Should Care.
February 10, 2015Qatar, Egypt on a collision course
February 9, 2015Qatar, Egypt on a collision course, Israel Hayom, Dr. Reuven Berko, February 9, 2015
This anti-Egypt agenda, which seems to be shared by Turkey, is fueled by the desire to realize the dream of installing a Sunni Islamic empire, all while undermining moderate Arab regimes and giving a nod to Iran, as a way of covering all bases — just in case.
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Qatar and Egypt are at odds, and the attempts by the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to facilitate a reconciliation between them have failed.
Qatar’s relentless efforts to overthrow Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s regime and reinstate the Muslim Brotherhood to power are evident from the programs airing on the Doha-controlled Al-Jazeera television network, and from the publication of doctored wiretaps featuring the Egyptian president and his advisers, who allegedly “stole” Egypt away from the Muslim Brotherhood and the “holy” Mohammed Morsi.
This anti-Egypt agenda, which seems to be shared by Turkey, is fueled by the desire to realize the dream of installing a Sunni Islamic empire, all while undermining moderate Arab regimes and giving a nod to Iran, as a way of covering all bases — just in case.
Egypt’s decision to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood has resulted in increased incitement by Qatar as well as in an escalation in terrorist attacks in Egypt and Sinai. Egyptian intelligence has linked the latest series of attacks to Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, an offshoot of the Islamic State group, as well as to Hamas’ Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. Hamas and the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades are very much Qatar’s “babies,” and their involvement in these terrorist attacks has prompted Egypt to outlaw both.
In response, Al-Jazeera has begun portraying Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades’ operatives, who have denounced Sissi as a traitor to Islam and Arabs everywhere, as heroes fighting for the liberation of “Palestine.” The Qatari television station has also been obsessively covering the riots and unrest instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine the regime, intimidate foreign investors, and reverse the image of stability Sissi’s government is trying to convey to the world.
The airing of secret wiretaps, on which Sissi is heard mocking the wealthy Persian Gulf states, at this time seeks to pit Cairo against the Gulf states, ahead of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, which is scheduled to convene in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt, in late February, and where Egypt will lobby for aid.
Sissi’s assertion about the current situation in the Middle East is correct: Sunni Arab states are being offered as sacrifice to Iran, which is pursuing its nuclear endeavors uninterrupted. These states understand that Egypt’s stability is a prerequisite for their own national security, and therefore aiding Cairo is a favor that could only work to their advantage.
At the end of the day, in a reality where Iran poses an existential threat to other Arab countries, pointing to the emir of Qatar as a leader drowning in gold while millions of Egyptians go hungry — as heard on the wiretaps — may prove to be a double-edged sword, which may end up striking Qatar itself.
Obama’s conciliatory approach
February 8, 2015Obama’s conciliatory approach, Israel Hayom, Omer Dostri, February 8, 2015
Instead of taking a determined, aggressive stance against Islamic extremism and openly condemning the religion that gives it moral, spiritual, and material support, Obama is opting for more concessions and far-reaching conciliation. And absurd as it might seem, this is seen by Islam as weakness and provides an incentive for its operatives to attempt to undermine the principles of the West: liberalism and democracy.
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On Thursday, in an almost unprecedented declaration, U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, attacked claims that the vicious terrorist acts we are witnessing today are “unique to some other place” (meaning, to the Middle East and Islamic regimes), while comparing the acts of Christians during the Crusades to the acts of the Islamic State group today.
When you first hear these remarks, the sheer amazement makes it seem like you need to listen to them again. But the more one delves into Obama’s foreign policy and the more his conduct since being elected president is analyzed, the sense of shock subsides, and the picture becomes clearer and more comprehensible. From the start, Obama has stood for progressive policy, seen in some circles as “enlightened.” In practice, this means that Obama has steadfastly refused to discuss the problem of “extremist Islam” and “world terrorism.” Likewise, in September 2014, Obama declared that “the Islamic State does not reflect Islam.” These remarks join the famous Cairo speech in which Obama tried to make a new start with the Muslim world and brand the U.S., a superpower, as on the same level while presenting an accepting, conciliatory policy without any misgivings about or criticism of the sickness in the Islamic religion.
This policy is indicative of Obama’s ideology, which includes universalism, postcolonialism, and hints of Marxism and highlights the supposedly weakened “victims of imperialism.” This ideology drops the U.S. from its position as the greatest superpower in the world to that of an equal to non-Western nations that are the result of “oppressive” cultures, all in the name of optimistic equality. This is also one of the main reasons for the absence of American leadership in the world and why anti-democracies like China and Russia and countries that provide a haven for terrorism — such as Iran and Qatar — are trying to take control of the void.
But it’s clear that Obama’s behavior reached an apex with his recent declaration, when U.S. citizens found themselves witnessing the leader of the free world, who stands at the head of a liberal-democratic superpower, standing there trying to find justifications for the barbaric, murderous terrorist acts from the House of Islam. The fact that Obama needed events that took place nearly 1,000 years ago to compare with things that are happening in our time, in the cultured, democratic world, didn’t faze him for an instant. Nor did the facts that the Crusades were launched in opposition to aggression by the same murderous Islam operating today; or that they focused on Jerusalem and not conquering the world, like Islam.
For centuries, some Christians toiled brutally and murdered a not inconsequential number of people — including many Jews, of course. But while Christianity progressed and expressed remorse and the Catholic Church (that same violent, corrupt entity that was responsible for so many wars) weakened as Protestantism grew stronger, Islam has remained in the same darkness, loyal to its utopian and intolerant approach that sees every non-Muslim as a heretic. It’s us or them — the original version.
The very fact that Obama is digging around in history and looking for moral justifications for the Islamic State’s deeds highlights the danger of his policy, which is reflected in his pursuit of a bad deal with Iran, in his ignoring that same Iran’s terrorist activity throughout the world, in his attempts to join forces with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and in his soft policy toward extremist Islam, which he sees as part of a general cultural problem and not as a specific one.
Instead of taking a determined, aggressive stance against Islamic extremism and openly condemning the religion that gives it moral, spiritual, and material support, Obama is opting for more concessions and far-reaching conciliation. And absurd as it might seem, this is seen by Islam as weakness and provides an incentive for its operatives to attempt to undermine the principles of the West: liberalism and democracy.
What Is the Islamic State Trying to Accomplish?
February 7, 2015What Is the Islamic State Trying to Accomplish? National Review on line, Andrew C. McCarthy, February 7, 2015
(As soon as Obama defeats climate change, he may begin to focus on other less important problems. — DM)
(Image: ISIS video)
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.
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The Islamic State’s barbaric murder of Lieutenant Mouath al-Kasaebeh, the Jordanian air-force pilot the jihadists captured late last year, has naturally given rise to questions about the group’s objectives. Charles Krauthammer argues (here and here) that the Islamic State is trying to draw Jordan into a land war in Syria. It is no doubt correct that the terrorist group would like to destabilize Jordan — indeed, it is destabilizing Jordan. Its immediate aim, however, is more modest and attainable. The Islamic State wants to break up President Obama’s much trumpeted Islamic-American coalition.
As the administration proudly announced back in September, Jordan joined the U.S. coalition, along with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. The only potential value of the coalition is symbolic: It has enabled the president to claim that Muslim countries were lining up with us against the Islamic State. Militarily, the coalition is of little use. These countries cannot defeat the Islamic State.
Moreover, even the symbolism is insignificant. Symbolism, after all, cuts both ways. As I pointed out when the administration breathlessly announced the coalition, our five Islamic partners have only been willing to conduct (extremely limited) aerial operations against the Islamic State. They would not attack al-Qaeda targets — i.e., the strongholds of al-Nusra (the local al-Qaeda franchise) and “Khorasan” (an al-Qaeda advisory council that operates within al-Nusra in Syria).
Obviously, if the relevance of the five Islamic countries’ willingness to fight the Islamic State is the implication that the Islamic State is not really Islamic, then their unwillingness to fight al-Qaeda equally implies their assessment that al-Qaeda is representative of Islam. The latter implication no doubt explains why the Saudis, Qatar, and the UAE have given so much funding over the years to al-Qaeda . . . the terror network from which the Islamic State originates and with which the Islamic State shares its sharia-supremacist ideology.
I’ll give the Saudis this: They don’t burn their prisoners alive in a cage. As previously recounted here, though, they routinely behead their prisoners. In fact, here’s another report from the British press just three weeks ago:
Authorities in Saudi Arabia have publicly beheaded a woman in Islam’s holy city of Mecca. . . . Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a Burmese woman who resided in Saudi Arabia, was executed by sword on Monday after being dragged through the street and held down by four police officers.
She was convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of her seven-year-old step-daughter.
A video showed how it took three blows to complete the execution, while the woman screamed “I did not kill. I did not kill.” It has now been removed by YouTube as part of its policy on “shocking and disgusting content”.
There are two ways to behead people according to Mohammed al-Saeedi, a human rights activist: “One way is to inject the prisoner with painkillers to numb the pain and the other is without the painkiller. . . . This woman was beheaded without painkillers — they wanted to make the pain more powerful for her.”
The Saudi Ministry of the Interior said in a statement that it believed the sentence was warranted due to the severity of the crime.
The beheading is part of an alarming trend, which has seen the kingdom execute seven people in the first two weeks of this year. In 2014 the number of executions rose to 87, from 78 in 2013.
Would that the president of the United States were more worried about the security of the United States than about how people in such repulsive countries perceive the United States.
In any event, the Islamic State is simply trying to blow up the coalition, which would be a useful propaganda victory. And the strategy is working. It appears at this point that only Jordan is participating in the airstrikes. While all eyes were on Jordan this week for a reaction to Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s immolation, the administration has quietly conceded that the UAEsuspended its participation in bombing missions when the pilot was captured in December.
The explanation for this is obvious: The Islamic countries in the coalition know they can’t stop the Islamic State unless the United States joins the fight in earnest, and they know this president is not serious. The White House says the coalition has carried out a total of about 1,000 airstrikes in the last five months. In Desert Storm, we did 1,100 a day.
Seven strikes a day is not going to accomplish anything, especially with no troops on the ground, and thus no search-and-rescue capability in the event planes go down, as Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s did. With no prospect of winning, and with a high potential of losing pilots and agitating the rambunctious Islamists in their own populations, why would these countries continue to participate?
The Islamic State knows there is intense opposition to King Abdullah’s decision to join in the coalition. While the Islamic State’s sadistic method of killing the pilot has the king and his supporters talking tough about retaliation, millions of Jordanians are Islamist in orientation and thousands have crossed into Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. There will continue to be pressure on Jordan to withdraw. Without a real American commitment to the fight, this pressure will get harder for Abdullah to resist.
Jordan has no intention of getting into a land war the king knows he cannot win without U.S. forces leading the way. But the Islamic State does not need to lure Jordan into a land war in order to destabilize the country — it is already doing plenty of that by intensifying the Syrian refugee crisis, sending Jordanians back home from Syria as trained jihadists, and trying to assassinate Abdullah.
I will close by repeating the larger point I’ve argued several times before. We know from experience that when jihadists have safe havens, they attack the United States. They now have more safe havens than they’ve ever had before — not just because of what the Islamic State has accomplished in what used to be Syria and Iraq (the map of the Middle East needs updating) but because of what al-Qaeda has done there and in North Africa, what the Taliban and al-Qaeda are doing in Afghanistan, and so on.
If we understand, as we by now should, what these safe havens portend, then we must grasp that the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the global jihad constitute a threat to American national security. That they also (and more immediately) threaten Arab Islamic countries is true, but it is not close to being our top concern. Ensuring our security is a concern that could not be responsibly delegated to other countries even if they had formidable armed forces — which the “coalition” countries do not.
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.
The Plight of the Yazidis
February 7, 2015The Plight of the Yazidis, Front Page Magazine,
(They are probably doomed unless the relevant U.N. high commissioner decrees that they are endangered by climate change rather than by the forces of “peaceful” Islam. Then Obama and Kerry, who claim that climate change is the greatest threat of all, might help. — DM)
Despite the current focus on ISIS, the ongoing barbarity inflicted against the Yazidis, a group of people who have inhabited Iraq’s mountainous northwestern region for centuries, remains largely below the radar. And while this estimated population of approximately 500,000 has been the target of hatred by Muslims who see them as heretical devil-worshipers, ISIS has upped the ante. While the world largely looks away, a genocidal level of extermination proceeds apace. “Our entire religion is being wiped off the face of the earth,” warned Yazidi leader Vian Dakhil—last August.
Early August was the time the carnage ramped up in earnest. Approximately 40,00 Yazidis, including many women and children, were trapped in nine locations around Mount Sinjar, identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark. Sinjar was once home to as many as 300,000 Yazidis, but as ISIS advanced, 130,000 fled north to Dohuk, capital of the Dohuk governate of Iraqi Kurdistan, or to Irbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region and its largest city. Since last June authorities in Irbil have been forced to deal with one of the largest and most rapid refugee movements in decades. As of now approximately 350,000 Yazidis are encamped around Dohuk.
Those remaining behind faced a terrible choice of death by dehydration, or death at the hands of ISIS, who murdered 500 Yazidis, including 40 children, in an initial killing spree. By October the death total inflicted by ISIS had reached into the thousands. U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic aptly described what was occurring. “The evidence strongly indicates an attempt to commit genocide,” he said, adding that the only options being given to the Yazidis are “to convert or be killed.”
Not quite. As ISIS has boasted in its propaganda magazine Dabiq, around 300 Yazidi women and girls were abducted, subjected to sexual assault and subsequently sold as slaves to its fighters in Syria. The Islamist terror group considers the women and girls to be “al Sabaya,” defined by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) as “women captured in war.”
The main reason the Yazidis have slipped below the media radar is because they apparently believe President Obama sufficiently addressed the problem last August, when he announced airstrikes aimed at a twofold purpose: protecting U.S. personnel stationed in Erbil, and saving those Yazidis trapped in around Sinjar without food or water. “People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide,” Obama said at the time. “And when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.”
The strikes and humanitarian aid were initially successful in alleviating some of the suffering, and also opened up an escape route allowing many of those trapped to flee. Yet by October, with U.S. attention diverted elsewhere and airstrikes dwindling, ISIS surrounded Mount Sinjar again. More than 10,000 Yazidis were once again trapped, and ISIS reprised its bloody rampage, capturing one mountain village after another, killing the men and selling the women and children into slavery.
Furthermore, the humanitarian airdrops were also halted. Iraqi helicopters were employed to pick up the slack, but they are old and fly only once or twice a week, according to Sameer Karto Babasheikh, the son of the Yazidi Supreme Religious Council leader, who met with a contingent of senior White House and State Department officials that same month to discuss the problem. “Our hostages, children, women, and girls, between 4,000 and 5,000 of them, have been captured by ISIS and sent to other areas. We need help to rescue these hostages,” he explained. “In Mosul, they opened a market to sell Yazidi girls. Some of them ended up in Fallujah, some of them were taken to Saudi Arabia and Raqqa in Syria.”
Kamal Elias, a Yazidi activist who was part of the delegation that came to Washington, put the crisis in far blunter terms. “President Obama promised that they are not going to let ISIS get any more land, that they are not going to let them get another genocide on the Yazidis,” he said. “But this is going to be worse than in August. If ISIS gets to the mountain, all of these people are going to be slaughtered, and then it’s going to take years for the U.S. or anyone else to get them out of the mountain.”
Elias also illuminated another facet of the problem. “Most of the ISIS members are from the towns around ISIS,” he said. “They were our neighbors. We lived with them for hundreds of years. Now all of a sudden they are ISIS. They joined ISIS.”
The animus directed towards the Yazidis spans centuries. “To this day, many Muslims consider them to be devil worshipers,” says Thomas Schmidinger, an expert on Kurdish politics the University of Vienna. “So in the face of religious persecution, Yazidis have concentrated in strongholds located in remote mountain regions,” he adds.
In fact Yazidis whose total population is around 700,000, the vast majority of whom have been concentrated in northern Iraq around Sinjar, are predominantly Kurdish. But they remain religiously distinct from Iraq’s Sunni Kurdish population. Some scholars contend the religion was founded during the 11th century by an Ummayyad sheikh. Others attribute its origins to Sufi leader Adi ibn Musafir, who settled in Kurdistan in the 12th century and founded a community mixing elements of Islam with local beliefs that predated it. The faith combines elements of Zoroastrianism, a 3500 year old monotheistic religion founded by the Prophet Zoroaster in ancient Iran, with elements of Christianity and Islam. Thus Yazidis embrace Christianity’s sacrament of Baptism, Islam’s tenets on circumcision, and Zoroastrianism’s belief that fire must be revered as a manifestation from God.
The devil-worshipping accusations derive from their worship of a fallen angel, Melek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel. Unlike the permanent fall from grace of Satan in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Melek Tawwus is forgiven by God and returned to heaven, becoming a force for good in Yazidism.
Nonetheless, beginning around the late 16th and early 17th centuries, accusations of devil-worship arose because Muslims believe the story of Tawwus Melek resembles the Qur’an’s Shaytan, a rebellious “djinn” (Muslim spirit) who leads men away from goodness.
Unfortunately, goodness is currently in short supply in among the members of the international community. There is no doubt they are aware of the Yazidi’s continuing plight, but they continue to fail those who are facing imminent extermination.
Murad Ismael, a Yazidi activist in the Sinjar Crisis Group, reported on his December journey during which he reached Sinjar accompanied by Peshmerga forces who have seen 999 fighters killed, and 4596 wounded since they began standing against ISIS last June. It was the first time Yazidis had reached Sinjar since the mass exodus last August.
“We did not see any civilians in Sinjar, except for a few Yazidis who had returned there to retrieve some of their personal belongings,” Ismael revealed to Aljazeera America. “For the 150 kilometers to the Mount Sinjar area, all has been abandoned. No sign of life, except for the forces defending the roads.” Ismael also downplayed reports stating Kurdish fighters had re-captured most of Mount Sinjar in December. “The peshmerga and the Yazidi volunteers did get inside the city of Sinjar.,” he explained. “About three-quarters of the city has been recaptured. However, there are still ISIL (ISIS) snipers. ISIL have been cleared from the northern side of the mountain, but they left behind IEDs. The southern side of the mountain is not safe.”
Ismael also revealed what ISIS left behind. “At least three mass graves have been found,” he said. “Seventy-five bodies have been found. Another mass grave of about 25 or 26 people. I did not get to that location. We saw evidence of destruction. People’s clothes alongside the road. My town, Khanasour, to see how it is now — it’s emotionally overwhelming. Everything’s been burned. All Islamic State banners or writing on the walls. Lots of mass graves, lots of people dead inside the houses. We didn’t look inside.”
Mass grave sightings were confirmed by the Peshmerga four days ago.
The plight of those in the aforementioned refugee camps has been largely ignored as well. Bill Devlin, a co-pastor of the Infinity Bible Church in the Bronx, New York who travelled with Ismael, was appalled. “We visited three camps today, with approximately 5,000 people each,” he said “They’re living in unfinished buildings, living in the street, living with literally nothing. We’ve been going from house to house of unfinished buildings. No food, no kerosene heaters—it’s beyond belief. Some one million Yazidis are dispersed outside the official camps. The need is critical. The issue is dire.”
Co-traveler Lee Mason, a producer for Cumulus Media, illuminated the details, noting there are three types of camps. The first type consists of tent cities organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Yet that organization is belied by dirt streets, no hot water and latrines as much as a half mile away. The second type consists of unofficial camps where people put up tarps or plastic sheeting to protect from the freezing rain. There are dangerous makeshift electricity systems and self-created toilet systems consists of sheds covered with blankets, but no running water. The last group of camps consists of unheated, abandoned buildings with similar makeshift electrical systems.
Last December, Yazidi women who escaped from ISIS detailed their abuse to the BBC. “They said: ‘Yazidis are infidels,” a woman using the pseudonym “Hannan” reported. “Now you will live as Muslims.’ They took many girls for sex. They told us: ‘Forget the life you knew.’” She further reveals that ISIS took the younger girls first and sent many of them to the Syrian city of Raqqa ISIS considers its capitol. Many of women grew so desperate from the abuse they considered suicide a viable alternative. One actually carried it out. “She slashed her wrists,” Hannan revealed “(ISIS) didn’t let us help her. They put us in a room and shut the door. She died. They said: ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll just dump the body somewhere.’”
Upping the ante on depravity, ISIS has published guidelines on the “proper” use of women as slaves, including a Q&A pamphlet, a video of men awaiting their turn at the slave market, and a statement in Daqib describing the events:
“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to Sharia [Islamic law] amongst the fighters of Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations…Before Satan sows doubt among the weak-minded and weak-hearted, remember that enslaving the kuffa [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly-established aspect of Sharia.”
The Yazidis blame several entities for their current predicamen,t including an Iraqi government that has never sufficiently protected them, Kurdish forces who abandoned the fight for Sinjar last August—and an Obama administration whose lack of continuity has given ISIS the impression they can exterminate Yazidis with impunity.
Last month Ismael traveled to Baghdad to plead for help. He met a list of VIPs that included U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Stuart E. Jones, French Ambassador to Iraq François Bartley, Iraqi President Fuad Masum and Minister of Women’s Affairs Bayan Nouri. Al Jazeera America columnist John Batchelor confirms from a separate source that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is also aware of the Yazidis’ precarious circumstances. Yet he further notes that she and her staff have “several explanations for why so little has been done for the Yazidis, including the lack of security without U.S. forces in the region.”
No doubt. In the meantime, hundreds of Yazidi women abducted by ISIS remain unaccounted for, children in refugee camps freeze to death, and the Peshmerga remain without the necessary firepower to limit ISIS’s gain, much less defeat them.
Yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama once again reminded the world how far he was willing to push the boundaries of moral equivalency in order to spare bloodthirsty Islamists from being singled out. “Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Those would be the very same Christians, much like the Yazidis, currently being eliminated in the Middle East—even as the same can be said for leadership and morality in the White House.
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