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| ISIS reintroduces crucifixion as punishment to its enemies |
Aided by U.S. Airstrikes, Kurdish Forces Retake 2 Towns
- Rod Nordland & Helene Cooper
With the support of American airstrikes, Kurdish forces counterattacked against Sunni militants of the Islamic State in northern Iraq, regaining control of two strategic towns about 20 miles from Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
(New York Times)
You Want Nazis? -Mark Steyn
There have been Christians in Mosul for just shy of two millennia, since the first century. There are none today.
The Yazidi are practitioners of Kurdistan's oldest religion, fire-worshippers whose presence in the region predates Islam. They're either being executed or starved to death on a mountain.
ISIS are fast-track Nazis. No messing about with a few property restrictions and intermarriage laws as a little light warm-up: They're only in the business of "final solutions", and they start on Day One and don't quit until the last Christian and Yazidi is dead or fled.
To put pressure on Netanyahu, you fly in John Kerry to bore him to death. To put pressure on ISIS would require a commitment the West is not willing to make. So Christians will vanish from the region, and the Yazidi will vanish from the world.
As much as Americans might wish it were so, this is not just a story of one bunch of obscure foreigners sticking it to another bunch of obscure foreigners. It's also a story of a dying superpower betraying its friends in retreat.
[Jewish World Review]
Threat of Islamic Terrorism Is Spreading - James Kitfield
The outgoing chief of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, said in an interview:
"In 2004, there were 21 Islamic terrorist groups spread out in 18 countries. Today, there are 41 Islamic terrorist groups spread out in 24 countries. A lot of these groups have the intention to attack Western interests, to include Western embassies and in some cases Western countries. Some have both the intention and some capability to attack the United States homeland."
"Unfortunately the [al-Qaeda] core ideology and belief system [of perpetual jihad] is spreading, not shrinking. Look at the unbelievably violent videos [of beheadings, executions, and the destruction of religious places] coming out of Iraq just in recent days."
"When Bin Laden was killed there was a general sense that maybe this threat would go away. We all had those hopes, including me."
(Breaking Defense)
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UPDATES:
Fuelling Genocide -Mark Durie
The United States has ironically called for greater cooperation [in northern Iraq]. UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, urged 'all parties to the conflict' to allow access to UN relief agencies. She called on Iraqis to 'come together' so that Iraq will 'get back on the path to a peaceful future' and 'prevent ISIL from obliterating Iraq's vibrant diversity'.
Of course it is not 'vibrant diversity' which is being wiped out in Iraq, but men, women and children by their tens of thousands. This is not about the failure of coexistence, and the problem is not 'conflict'. This is not about people who have trouble getting on and who need to somehow make up and 'come together'. It is about a well-articulated and well-documented theological worldview hell-bent on dominating 'infidels', if necessary wiping them off the face of the earth, in order to establish the power and grandeur of a radical vision of Islam.
The American administration, according to Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute, 'withholds arms from the Kurds while awaiting a new, unified Iraqi government with a new prime minister. Meanwhile … no Iraqi troops are in Nineveh province.' Only at a few minutes to midnight on the genocide clock has the US begun to launch military strikes against IS forces.
These events ought to be sobering to the West, not least because thousands of the IS jihadis were raised and bred in the mosques of Europe, North America and Australia, not to mention the madrassas of nations such as Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Having been formed by the theology of radical Islam in their home societies, would-be jihadis are flocking to Syria and Iraq where they seek victory or martyrdom, killing and raping as they go.
[Middle East Forum]
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| The Garwood, New Jersey home sporting an Islamic State flag |
Islamic State Flag Removed from New Jersey Home -
UN: "Barbaric" Sexual Violence in Iraq
"We are gravely concerned by continued reports of acts of violence, including sexual violence against women and teenage girls and boys belonging to Iraqi minorities," two senior UN officials said in Baghdad.
"Atrocious accounts of abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner."
Some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian persons may have been forced into sexual slavery.
(UN News Center)
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Hillary got it right -Charles Krauthammer, MD
"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle."— Hillary Clinton, The Atlantic, Aug. 10
Leave it to Barack Obama's own former secretary of state to acknowledge the fatal flaw of his foreign policy: a total absence of strategic thinking. Yes, of course everything Hillary Clinton says is positioning. [B]ut sincere or not — she's right.
Why did Obama wait seven months after the IS takeover of Fallujah and nine weeks after the capture of Mosul before beginning supplying the Kurds with desperately needed weapons? And why just small arms supplied supposedly clandestinely through the CIA? The Kurds are totally outgunned. Their bullets are bouncing off the captured armored Humvees the IS has deployed against them. The Pentagon should be conducting a massive airlift to provide the pesh merga with armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles and other heavier weaponry.
And why the pinprick airstrikes? The IS-Kurdish front is 600 miles long, more than the distance between Boston and Washington.
The Pentagon admits that the current tactics — hitting an artillery piece here, a truck there — will not affect the momentum of the IS or the course of the war.
But then again, altering the course of a war would be a strategic objective. That seems not to be in Obama's portfolio.
[Jewish World Review]
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