Aid to the Church in Need notes:
This
Thursday, August 6, will mark the first anniversary of the expulsion
from their convent of a group of Dominican sisters who had been serving
Christians on Iraq’s Nineveh Plain for many years. On that day, ISIS
forced the women religious into exile in Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Discovering
that Kurdish militia had fled the ISIS assault, the sisters decided to
leave their convent in Qaraqosh and march to safety along with thousands
of refugees; they had just 30 minutes to pack their things.
“We were panicked when they told us ISIS had gotten into the roads, so
many people left with even just their nightgowns on,” recalled Sister
Lyca.
“From
11:30 at night to the next morning we marched without any food or
water,” said Sister Diana, adding: “we’re talking about August when the
heat is unbearable: 100 degree temperatures, with no water.” The effects
of exhaustion and dehydration were compounded by horrible sights that
left powerful impressions on the sisters. “When we got into the streets
we saw thousands and thousands of people marching, cars and people
walking,” she said: “Cars meant for five people held eight to ten. We
heard children shouting and crying, very afraid.”
“When
we got [to Erbil], it was even more horrible to see people scattered
everywhere like sheep without a shepherd,” Sister Diana said. “Some of
these people had left behind mansions. They had so much. So much, and in
just a few hours they became homeless. We began to realize that our
displacement might not last days, but that it could take years and
years.”
Ever
since, the Church has provided the refugees with humanitarian aid,
eventually settling many thousands in apartments and opening a number of
schools. But the community’s needs go well beyond the material: “We
lost our dignity here. We have been humiliated in so many ways,” Sister
Diana said. “We are living day-by-day, but the fact is that deep down,
this is not the way that human beings should live. We’re living, but
it’s like living in a cage. We don’t have the power or strength to
stretch our wings where we want.”
The
sisters worry their efforts are not enough. “Our kids come to school
for two or three hours a day. It’s nothing. Our college students are
deprived of the chance to continue their studies. What ISIS is doing to
us is killing a new generation, because if this generation does not get
educated, neither will the next one,” said Sister Diana. On top of this,
hospitals lack the facilities to deal with all their patients, and
there are concerns that the flow of aid may not last. “To the government
and even the United Nations, we’re just numbers. We’re not considered
as human beings,” Sister Diana charged.
Is there a reason that the White House can and did come to the aid of the Yazidis but has failed the Iraqi Christians repeatedly?
"
Iraq snapshot" (The Common Ills):
Tuesday, August 4, 2015. Chaos and violence continue, the Yazidis carry
out their revenge attacks to do their part to continue the circle of
violence, Tony Blair's War Crimes gather attention, Haider al-Abadi
appears to be just another Nouri by another name, and much more.
Worldwide, he may have been so minor that he's seen as Bully Boy Bush's
lapdog but in England, he remains a focal point, rallying cry and all
around nuisance. War Hawk Tony Blair's crimes are not forgotten or
buried.
The Telegraph of London explains:
Labour leadership contender Jeremy
Corbyn has suggested that Tony Blair could be made to stand trial for
war crimes over the invasion of Iraq.
The veteran left winger said the 2003 conflict was an "illegal war" and
that the individuals who "made the decisions that went with it" should
face justice.
The remarks were made during an interview with BBC's Newsnight.
ITV notes this of the interview:
Asked whether Blair should be tried for war crimes, Corbyn said:
"If he's committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who's committed a war
crime should be.
"I think it was an illegal war, I'm confident about that, indeed
(former UN secretary general) Kofi Annan confirmed it was an illegal
war, and therefore he has to explain to that."
Pressed on whether he personally wanted to see Blair put on trial,
Corbyn said: "I want to see all those that committed war crimes tried
for it, and those that made the decisions that went with it."
Corbyn is far from alone in terming Tony Blair a War Criminal. And the
Iraq War has attached itself to Tony Blair in a way that rarely happens.
Henry Kissinger is haunted by his crimes and basically fenced in,
unable to travel freely throughout the world for fear of being arrested.
This appears to be the fate that awaits Blair at a minimum.
But there are those who believe and/or hope that Blair will stand trial
for his War Crimes. Jeremy Corbyn's words will give them some
encouragement and validation. Of the interview, N
icholas Watt (Guardian) adds:
Corbyn said he expects the eventual publication of the Chilcot report
will force Blair to explain his discussions with President Bush in the
runup to the war.
He said: “The Chilcot report is going to come out sometime. I hope it
comes out soon. I think there are some decisions Tony Blair has got to
confess or tell us what actually happened. What happened in Crawford,
Texas, in 2002 in his private meetings with George [W] Bush. Why has the
Chilcot report still not come out because – apparently there is still
debate about the release of information on one side or the other of the
Atlantic. At that point Tony Blair and the others that have made the decisions are then going to have to deal with the consequences of it.”
He hopes it comes out soon?
Not a smart move to count on the Chilcot report. The Iraq Inquiry
stopped holding hearings in 2011. The report was supposed to have come
out long ago.
Instead, four years later and still no report.
Four years later and nothing.
Patrick Wintour (Guardian) reports:
An impatient David Cameron
will demand Sir John Chilcot names the date by which his report into
the British invasion of Iraq will be ready for publication.
The prime minister is expected to tell Chilcot he wants to see the
report as soon as possible. “Right now I want a timetable,” he told
journalists.
Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, points out that he
cannot force the independent body that is the Iraq Inquiry to release
the report but he can ask for a date for when the body will release the
report and thereby create a timetable.
Dropping back to the
Tuesday, July 21st snapshot:
Alsumaria offers video
of a Baghdad protest that took place on Monday as people gathered to
demand the release of artist Namir Abdel Hussein who was arrested in a
sweep that included the security forces arresting over 700 hotel workers
when the hotels were stormed.
Why were they stormed?
The Shi'ite militias are again in charge, that's why.
And they don't like a Baghdad night life.
This happened repeatedly under Nouri -- and it was illegal then.
Now it's happening under Haider al-Abadi.
But let's keep pretending he's representing some form of change and a new direction for Iraq.The Ministry of the Interior, Monday night, announced that they had released the artist as well as the hotel workers.
Friday,
Mushreq Abbas (Al-Monitor) covered the subject:
Despite official declarations such as that of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi July 20, the attacks and violations have not stopped. Before storming the nightclubs, a military force raided the Union of Writers Club in Baghdad June 19 and attacked a group of writers on accusations of alcohol consumption.
On July 25, an unidentified military force stormed a family restaurant in central Baghdad and attacked patrons.
The rule of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (2006-2014)
witnessed an array of similar attacks that targeted the same type of
sites as well as liquor stores. These places are currently confined to
the Karrada district
of central Baghdad by the constant attacks against them elsewhere and
amid the spread of a religious tide in the rest of the capital’s
districts.
Some of these attacks have turned deadly. In July 2014, armed militias carried out a terrifying massacre, killing about 30 women in a residential apartment in Zayouna district in eastern Baghdad that they claimed were showing "immoral behavior."
In the latest incident, as in all of the previous ones, the Interior
Ministry formed a committee under Abadi's direction to investigate the
issue, but no investigations have been announced, and the ministry has
not produced any perpetrator of an attack on public freedoms for
prosecution, implying some sort of solidarity with the perpetrators.
Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry claimed that bars and nightclubs are under constant attack because they were never granted official licenses to conduct business.
Such licenses are usually granted by the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism,
which, ever since the change of the political system in Iraq after the
US occupation in 2003, has granted no official licenses to sell alcohol
or open establishments dedicated to alcohol use. Iraq's Law No. 6 of 2001 regulates these places and was preceded by Law No. 82 of 1994.
Nothing's really changed in Iraq.
Haider al-Abadi replacing Nouri al-Maliki was supposed to mean change.
But there's been no change.
For example, today,
Al Arabiya News reports:
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs, Bahaa al-Aaraji, said
the former government of Nouri al-Maliki has wasted around $1 trillion
of public funds.
“The former government (of Maliki) has wasted
around $1 trillion. $800 billion came from Iraq’s oil budget since 2004
till 2014 while $200 billion came from donations and aid,” Aaraji told
reporters on Friday according to a report by Asharq al-Awsat.
Nouri is a thug. And he needs to be held accountable for all the money he fleeced.
But it's doubtful he will be.
Despite receiving applause for supposedly attempting to address
corruption, new prime minister Haider al-Abadi has done damn little.
Address it? He can't even answer a basic question.
This was obvious
last April when Der Spiegel's Susanne Koelbl interviewed him:
SPIEGEL: Iraq is at war, but it is not the only crisis affecting
the country. Many residents of Baghdad use the word "thieves" when they
talk about your politicians. How corrupt is your government?
Al-Abadi: We have problems and the way I am dealing with them is
to start by admitting them. Corruption is a huge issue. It has to do
with the society, which has changed -- both during the times of Saddam
Hussein's regime and after. Also, the sanctions had an adverse effect on
society in nurturing this culture of corruption. During the 1960s or
1970s, bribery was very rare in Iraq. The number of government employees
was very small and usually they were the elite. But then they
incorporated millions of people into the government -- not to better run
the state, but to control the people. We are in the process of
implementing a number of processes and procedures that aim to curb the
extent of corruption.
SPIEGEL: One of your first actions after you took office was to
close the office of your predecessor's son, who is said to have provided
huge government contracts to people who were ready to pay the most for
them. Young college graduates claim they had to pay officials $10,000 to
$20,000 in order to obtain government jobs. Why should Iraqis have any
faith in this government?
Al-Abadi: We need to flip the system. Four years ago, the
government tried to stop the corruption at the Passport Office, where
people pay $400 to $500 just to get their passport issued. Every day
they were arresting so many people and it did not have much of an
effect. But if you ease the procedure, for instance making the document
available online, it puts an end to it altogether. I don't want to fill
our prisons with people who ask for petty cash while we are facing this
major terrorist threat to the country. I want to keep these prisons for
the actual criminals who are killing people or for people who are
stealing vast amounts of money from the people. I want to change how we
run the government in Iraq.
Did you notice it? Serious talk.
Until the interviewer notes
Ahmed al-Maliki, Nouri's son.
He never comments on that: "One of your first actions after you took
office was to close the office of your predecessor's son, who is said to
have provided huge government contracts to people who were ready to pay
the most for them."
He just sidesteps it, ignores it. He's asked "how corrupt is your
government" and responds directly without any offence. But he can't
answer about Ahmed al-Maliki?
Let's stop pretending anything's changed with regards to Haider.
There's a lot of pretending going on.
For example,
at The Conversation, Tyler Fisher, Muslih Mustafa, Nahro Zagros want
to note a year since Mount Sinjar, when Yazidis were trapped on the
mountain and being attacked, the incident that led Barack to start
bombing Iraq. The three write:
The crisis in Sinjar is subsiding, and the Peshmerga have gradually
retaken some of the areas that IS had overrun. But the atrocities are
still a relentless daily reality for thousands of Yazidis still in
captivity, for those in precarious refugee camps and for their relatives
abroad, bereaved or longing to be reunited.
Several thousand remain in the mountains, cut off from humanitarian aid – and the threat of annihilation has not abated.
Credit to the three for not pretending all Yazidis were rescued.
How sad that Barack's actions last August have still not paid off.
But there's another detail and Mitchell Prothero was noting it in his
Here & Now interview yesterday.
Sinjar itself?
Still under Islamic State control all these months (12) later.
Twelve months after Barack began bombing Iraq and nothing has changed.
Sinjar remains occupied, Yazidis remain trapped.
Some do.
Some practice vengeance.
A combination of airstrikes and ground action by a
number of different forces has seen the Islamic State, or IS, group
expelled from parts of the territory. And supposedly those areas would
now be safe enough
for the residents to return to, if they were alive and able to.
However, as is happening in other areas of the country where the IS
group's activities only deepened existing enmities between different
ethnic and religious groups, there are acts of revenge occurring and
extrajudicial “justice” being meted out.
Yazidis who lived in the area say that their Arab
neighbours didn’t help them when the IS fighters arrived and, in fact,
in some cases, collaborated with them. The Iraqi Kurdish military have
been faced with similar accusations and criticised for using the
security crisis for their own ends – that is, claiming more land in
northern Iraq under the guise of protecting locals.
“All the houses in our village look as though a violent
earthquake destroyed them,” says Ahmad Ali, who is originally from the
Arab village of Sibaya, north of Sinjar mountain.
In January the 34-year-old fled the village along with 14 members of his family because Yazidis attacked them.
Amnesty International
reported at the time that the Yazidi militia “killed 21 civilians, half
of them elderly men and women and children, in what appear to have been
execution-style killings,
and injured several others, including three children. The gunmen also
abducted some 40 residents, 17 of whom are still missing and feared
dead”.
Ali now lives near the Rabia district and in a telephone
interview he told NIQASH that he recently watched acts of vengeful
destruction with binoculars.
“In the space of a week, bulldozers, protected by the
Yazidi militia, demolished all the village houses, including the school,
the health clinic and the mosque,” Ali reports. “Then they went to a
nearby village called Sayer. There are other villages that will have the
same fate,” he concluded.
Nothing changed -- even the cycle of revenge remains the same.
Yet today's big news?
BBC reports:
The RAF Tornado mission against
Islamic State militants in Iraq is to be extended by an extra year,
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said.
The jets - due to be
disbanded last March - are to be kept in service until "at least" March
2017 to continue air strikes, he said on a visit to Iraq.
No real success to point to from August 2014 to the present but the plan
or 'plan' is to continue this through at least March 2017.
Anyone going to have the guts to ask: Why?
Bill Van Auken (WSWS) reminds:
It was only a year ago that Obama told the American public that he
was ordering air strikes in Iraq and sending in a small contingent of
Special Operations troops for the sole purpose of rescuing the Yazidis, a
small religious community in northern Iraq, from a supposedly imminent
massacre at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
This Sunni Islamist militia had overrun roughly a third of Iraq the
previous month, routing US-trained Iraqi troops that fled in disarray.
This debacle was the product of the past US interventions, which had
killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left behind a shattered
society divided along sectarian lines.
ISIS itself bore the stamp “Made in the USA,” having enjoyed the
backing of the CIA and Washington’s principal regional allies, Turkey,
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in the war for regime change in Syria. It was
also strengthened by the 2011 US-NATO war to topple and murder Libya’s
Muammar Gaddafi. That neocolonial enterprise relied upon similar Al
Qaeda-linked Islamist militias, many of whose members—along with huge
stocks of captured Libyan weapons—were funneled into Syria.
The fate of the Yazidis has long been forgotten. Subsequent attempts
were made to sell the new war as an existential struggle against
terrorism—that is, against the very terrorists the US had been
supporting in Libya and Syria—exploiting the fate of captive Americans
beheaded by ISIS.
A year, billions spnet, so many killed and nothing to show for it.
Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 37 violent deaths across Iraq today.
iraq
wsws
bill van auken
antiwar.com
margaret griffis
mushreq abbas
Tuesday, August 4, 2015. Chaos and violence continue, the Yazidis carry
out their revenge attacks to do their part to continue the circle of
violence, Tony Blair's War Crimes gather attention, Haider al-Abadi
appears to be just another Nouri by another name, and much more.
Worldwide, he may have been so minor that he's seen as Bully Boy Bush's
lapdog but in England, he remains a focal point, rallying cry and all
around nuisance. War Hawk Tony Blair's crimes are not forgotten or
buried.
The Telegraph of London explains:
Labour leadership contender Jeremy
Corbyn has suggested that Tony Blair could be made to stand trial for
war crimes over the invasion of Iraq.
The veteran left winger said the 2003 conflict was an "illegal war" and
that the individuals who "made the decisions that went with it" should
face justice.
The remarks were made during an interview with BBC's Newsnight.
ITV notes this of the interview:
Asked whether Blair should be tried for war crimes, Corbyn said:
"If he's committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who's committed a war
crime should be.
"I think it was an illegal war, I'm confident about that, indeed
(former UN secretary general) Kofi Annan confirmed it was an illegal
war, and therefore he has to explain to that."
Pressed on whether he personally wanted to see Blair put on trial,
Corbyn said: "I want to see all those that committed war crimes tried
for it, and those that made the decisions that went with it."
Corbyn is far from alone in terming Tony Blair a War Criminal. And the
Iraq War has attached itself to Tony Blair in a way that rarely happens.
Henry Kissinger is haunted by his crimes and basically fenced in,
unable to travel freely throughout the world for fear of being arrested.
This appears to be the fate that awaits Blair at a minimum.
But there are those who believe and/or hope that Blair will stand trial
for his War Crimes. Jeremy Corbyn's words will give them some
encouragement and validation. Of the interview, N
icholas Watt (Guardian) adds:
Corbyn said he expects the eventual publication of the Chilcot report
will force Blair to explain his discussions with President Bush in the
runup to the war.
He said: “The Chilcot report is going to come out sometime. I hope it
comes out soon. I think there are some decisions Tony Blair has got to
confess or tell us what actually happened. What happened in Crawford,
Texas, in 2002 in his private meetings with George [W] Bush. Why has the
Chilcot report still not come out because – apparently there is still
debate about the release of information on one side or the other of the
Atlantic. At that point Tony Blair and the others that have made the decisions are then going to have to deal with the consequences of it.”
He hopes it comes out soon?
Not a smart move to count on the Chilcot report. The Iraq Inquiry
stopped holding hearings in 2011. The report was supposed to have come
out long ago.
Instead, four years later and still no report.
Four years later and nothing.
Patrick Wintour (Guardian) reports:
An impatient David Cameron
will demand Sir John Chilcot names the date by which his report into
the British invasion of Iraq will be ready for publication.
The prime minister is expected to tell Chilcot he wants to see the
report as soon as possible. “Right now I want a timetable,” he told
journalists.
Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, points out that he
cannot force the independent body that is the Iraq Inquiry to release
the report but he can ask for a date for when the body will release the
report and thereby create a timetable.
Dropping back to the
Tuesday, July 21st snapshot:
Alsumaria offers video
of a Baghdad protest that took place on Monday as people gathered to
demand the release of artist Namir Abdel Hussein who was arrested in a
sweep that included the security forces arresting over 700 hotel workers
when the hotels were stormed.
Why were they stormed?
The Shi'ite militias are again in charge, that's why.
And they don't like a Baghdad night life.
This happened repeatedly under Nouri -- and it was illegal then.
Now it's happening under Haider al-Abadi.
But let's keep pretending he's representing some form of change and a new direction for Iraq.The Ministry of the Interior, Monday night, announced that they had released the artist as well as the hotel workers.
Friday,
Mushreq Abbas (Al-Monitor) covered the subject:
Despite official declarations such as that of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi July 20, the attacks and violations have not stopped. Before storming the nightclubs, a military force raided the Union of Writers Club in Baghdad June 19 and attacked a group of writers on accusations of alcohol consumption.
On July 25, an unidentified military force stormed a family restaurant in central Baghdad and attacked patrons.
The rule of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (2006-2014)
witnessed an array of similar attacks that targeted the same type of
sites as well as liquor stores. These places are currently confined to
the Karrada district
of central Baghdad by the constant attacks against them elsewhere and
amid the spread of a religious tide in the rest of the capital’s
districts.
Some of these attacks have turned deadly. In July 2014, armed militias carried out a terrifying massacre, killing about 30 women in a residential apartment in Zayouna district in eastern Baghdad that they claimed were showing "immoral behavior."
In the latest incident, as in all of the previous ones, the Interior
Ministry formed a committee under Abadi's direction to investigate the
issue, but no investigations have been announced, and the ministry has
not produced any perpetrator of an attack on public freedoms for
prosecution, implying some sort of solidarity with the perpetrators.
Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry claimed that bars and nightclubs are under constant attack because they were never granted official licenses to conduct business.
Such licenses are usually granted by the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism,
which, ever since the change of the political system in Iraq after the
US occupation in 2003, has granted no official licenses to sell alcohol
or open establishments dedicated to alcohol use. Iraq's Law No. 6 of 2001 regulates these places and was preceded by Law No. 82 of 1994.
Nothing's really changed in Iraq.
Haider al-Abadi replacing Nouri al-Maliki was supposed to mean change.
But there's been no change.
For example, today,
Al Arabiya News reports:
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs, Bahaa al-Aaraji, said
the former government of Nouri al-Maliki has wasted around $1 trillion
of public funds.
“The former government (of Maliki) has wasted
around $1 trillion. $800 billion came from Iraq’s oil budget since 2004
till 2014 while $200 billion came from donations and aid,” Aaraji told
reporters on Friday according to a report by Asharq al-Awsat.
Nouri is a thug. And he needs to be held accountable for all the money he fleeced.
But it's doubtful he will be.
Despite receiving applause for supposedly attempting to address
corruption, new prime minister Haider al-Abadi has done damn little.
Address it? He can't even answer a basic question.
This was obvious
last April when Der Spiegel's Susanne Koelbl interviewed him:
SPIEGEL: Iraq is at war, but it is not the only crisis affecting
the country. Many residents of Baghdad use the word "thieves" when they
talk about your politicians. How corrupt is your government?
Al-Abadi: We have problems and the way I am dealing with them is
to start by admitting them. Corruption is a huge issue. It has to do
with the society, which has changed -- both during the times of Saddam
Hussein's regime and after. Also, the sanctions had an adverse effect on
society in nurturing this culture of corruption. During the 1960s or
1970s, bribery was very rare in Iraq. The number of government employees
was very small and usually they were the elite. But then they
incorporated millions of people into the government -- not to better run
the state, but to control the people. We are in the process of
implementing a number of processes and procedures that aim to curb the
extent of corruption.
SPIEGEL: One of your first actions after you took office was to
close the office of your predecessor's son, who is said to have provided
huge government contracts to people who were ready to pay the most for
them. Young college graduates claim they had to pay officials $10,000 to
$20,000 in order to obtain government jobs. Why should Iraqis have any
faith in this government?
Al-Abadi: We need to flip the system. Four years ago, the
government tried to stop the corruption at the Passport Office, where
people pay $400 to $500 just to get their passport issued. Every day
they were arresting so many people and it did not have much of an
effect. But if you ease the procedure, for instance making the document
available online, it puts an end to it altogether. I don't want to fill
our prisons with people who ask for petty cash while we are facing this
major terrorist threat to the country. I want to keep these prisons for
the actual criminals who are killing people or for people who are
stealing vast amounts of money from the people. I want to change how we
run the government in Iraq.
Did you notice it? Serious talk.
Until the interviewer notes
Ahmed al-Maliki, Nouri's son.
He never comments on that: "One of your first actions after you took
office was to close the office of your predecessor's son, who is said to
have provided huge government contracts to people who were ready to pay
the most for them."
He just sidesteps it, ignores it. He's asked "how corrupt is your
government" and responds directly without any offence. But he can't
answer about Ahmed al-Maliki?
Let's stop pretending anything's changed with regards to Haider.
There's a lot of pretending going on.
For example,
at The Conversation, Tyler Fisher, Muslih Mustafa, Nahro Zagros want
to note a year since Mount Sinjar, when Yazidis were trapped on the
mountain and being attacked, the incident that led Barack to start
bombing Iraq. The three write:
The crisis in Sinjar is subsiding, and the Peshmerga have gradually
retaken some of the areas that IS had overrun. But the atrocities are
still a relentless daily reality for thousands of Yazidis still in
captivity, for those in precarious refugee camps and for their relatives
abroad, bereaved or longing to be reunited.
Several thousand remain in the mountains, cut off from humanitarian aid – and the threat of annihilation has not abated.
Credit to the three for not pretending all Yazidis were rescued.
How sad that Barack's actions last August have still not paid off.
But there's another detail and Mitchell Prothero was noting it in his
Here & Now interview yesterday.
Sinjar itself?
Still under Islamic State control all these months (12) later.
Twelve months after Barack began bombing Iraq and nothing has changed.
Sinjar remains occupied, Yazidis remain trapped.
Some do.
Some practice vengeance.
A combination of airstrikes and ground action by a
number of different forces has seen the Islamic State, or IS, group
expelled from parts of the territory. And supposedly those areas would
now be safe enough
for the residents to return to, if they were alive and able to.
However, as is happening in other areas of the country where the IS
group's activities only deepened existing enmities between different
ethnic and religious groups, there are acts of revenge occurring and
extrajudicial “justice” being meted out.
Yazidis who lived in the area say that their Arab
neighbours didn’t help them when the IS fighters arrived and, in fact,
in some cases, collaborated with them. The Iraqi Kurdish military have
been faced with similar accusations and criticised for using the
security crisis for their own ends – that is, claiming more land in
northern Iraq under the guise of protecting locals.
“All the houses in our village look as though a violent
earthquake destroyed them,” says Ahmad Ali, who is originally from the
Arab village of Sibaya, north of Sinjar mountain.
In January the 34-year-old fled the village along with 14 members of his family because Yazidis attacked them.
Amnesty International
reported at the time that the Yazidi militia “killed 21 civilians, half
of them elderly men and women and children, in what appear to have been
execution-style killings,
and injured several others, including three children. The gunmen also
abducted some 40 residents, 17 of whom are still missing and feared
dead”.
Ali now lives near the Rabia district and in a telephone
interview he told NIQASH that he recently watched acts of vengeful
destruction with binoculars.
“In the space of a week, bulldozers, protected by the
Yazidi militia, demolished all the village houses, including the school,
the health clinic and the mosque,” Ali reports. “Then they went to a
nearby village called Sayer. There are other villages that will have the
same fate,” he concluded.
Nothing changed -- even the cycle of revenge remains the same.
Yet today's big news?
BBC reports:
The RAF Tornado mission against
Islamic State militants in Iraq is to be extended by an extra year,
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said.
The jets - due to be
disbanded last March - are to be kept in service until "at least" March
2017 to continue air strikes, he said on a visit to Iraq.
No real success to point to from August 2014 to the present but the plan
or 'plan' is to continue this through at least March 2017.
Anyone going to have the guts to ask: Why?
Bill Van Auken (WSWS) reminds:
It was only a year ago that Obama told the American public that he
was ordering air strikes in Iraq and sending in a small contingent of
Special Operations troops for the sole purpose of rescuing the Yazidis, a
small religious community in northern Iraq, from a supposedly imminent
massacre at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
This Sunni Islamist militia had overrun roughly a third of Iraq the
previous month, routing US-trained Iraqi troops that fled in disarray.
This debacle was the product of the past US interventions, which had
killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left behind a shattered
society divided along sectarian lines.
ISIS itself bore the stamp “Made in the USA,” having enjoyed the
backing of the CIA and Washington’s principal regional allies, Turkey,
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in the war for regime change in Syria. It was
also strengthened by the 2011 US-NATO war to topple and murder Libya’s
Muammar Gaddafi. That neocolonial enterprise relied upon similar Al
Qaeda-linked Islamist militias, many of whose members—along with huge
stocks of captured Libyan weapons—were funneled into Syria.
The fate of the Yazidis has long been forgotten. Subsequent attempts
were made to sell the new war as an existential struggle against
terrorism—that is, against the very terrorists the US had been
supporting in Libya and Syria—exploiting the fate of captive Americans
beheaded by ISIS.
A year, billions spnet, so many killed and nothing to show for it.
Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 37 violent deaths across Iraq today.
iraq
wsws
bill van auken
antiwar.com
margaret griffis
mushreq abbas
UNAMI
