Tag Archives: Civil War

When the U.S. military retreats: ISIS beheading Christian kids and kidnapping sex slaves

Fox News has the story, I doubt the rest of the anti-war leftist news media will cover this story – because they caused it. They wanted it. They lobbied for it.

Excerpt:

Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with “vicious plans,” an Iraqi official said Friday, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq’s minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.

Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of the captives from their families.

“We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them,” Amin told The Associated Press. “We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values.”

The U.S. has confirmed that the Islamic State group has kidnapped and imprisoned Yazidi women so that they can be sold or married off to extremist fighters, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information came from classified intelligence reports. There was no solid estimate of the number of women victimized, the official said.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled when the Islamic State group earlier this month captured the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border. The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that the Sunni Muslim radicals consider heretical.

The extremist group’s capture of a string of towns and villages in the north has sent minority communities fleeing for their lives. The Islamic state views Yazidis and Shiite Muslims as apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax.

About 50,000 Yazidis — half of them children, according to U.N. figures — fled to the mountains outside Sinjar where many of them remain, trapped and running out of food and water. Late Thursday, the U.S. military cargo jets dropped humanitarian aid to the mountains.

Amin’s comments were the first Iraqi government confirmation that some women were being held by the group. On Tuesday, Yazidi lawmaker Vian Dakheel made an emotional plea in parliament to the Iraqi government to save the Yazidi people, saying the “women have been sold in a slavery market.”

President Obama said the humanitarian airdrops were made at the request of the Iraqi government as the Islamic State militant group tightened its grip on northern Iraq. In his remarks late Thursday, he mentioned “chilling reports” of fighters with the group “rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yazidi women.”

And beheading Christian children, reports CNS News.

Excerpt:

“Christianity in Mosul is dead, and a Christian holocaust is in our midst,” said Mark Arabo, a Californian businessman and Chaldean-American leader. In an interview with CNN’s Jonathan Mann, he called what’s happening in Iraq a “Christian genocide” and said “children are being beheaded, mothers are being raped and killed, and fathers are being hung.”

“Right now, three thousand Christians are in Iraq fleeing to neighboring cities,” he told Mann. Arabo is calling on the international community to follow France’s lead and offer the Christians of Iraq asylum.

“You’re startling me with the severity of what you’re describing,” the CNN host said. “You said they are — beheading children?”

“They are systematically beheading children,” Arabo repeated slowly. “And mothers and fathers. The world hasn’t seen an evil like this for generations.”

“There’s actually a park in Mosul where they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick… this is crimes against humanity. They are doing the most horrendous, the most heart-breaking crimes that you can think of.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry was seen giving speeches critical of global warming. Priorities. We needed to pull out of Iraq after Bush won the war because we had to focus our government on more important things, like global warming.

I lay these tragedies at the feet of anyone who wanted to retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. This is what happens when American forces retreat from fighting evil. And make no mistake, these terrorists will be back in America, and this time, they’ll have money they seized from Iraqi banks and Stinger missiles they seized from Iraqi forces. And they’ll walk right across our southern border with those missiles, too.

I would recommend checking out The Weekly Standard podcast to get the real story on this, it’s my favorite political podcast and they have had wall-to-wall foreign policy for the last little while. Bill Kristol has just posted an episode on ISIS.

Over 99 percent of people in southern Sudan vote for succession

Map of Africa
Map of Africa

Great news in Sudan. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

More than 99 percent of Southern Sudanese voted to secede from the north, a referendum official said Sunday in the first official preliminary result announcement.

“The vote for separation was 99.57 percent,” said Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission that organized the referendum, to a crowd in the South’s capital of Juba, according to Reuters.

Voter turnout in the South was 99 percent, Madut said. And over 60 percent of Southern Sudanese living in the north turned out to vote, with 58 percent voting to secede, he stated.

Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, said 99 percent of the Southern Sudanese diaspora in eight nations also voted to secede.

After decades of civil war and ongoing tension between the northern and southern governments, it looks like the south will finally become its own country. The weeklong referendum, which began on Jan. 9, is called for by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended more than two decades of civil war.

[…]Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir, who is expected to lead the independent South, has called for Southern Sudanese to forgive the North for the years of violence during the civil war. Some 1.9 million people died during the war between the North and South and more than 500 churches were destroyed in the South.

“For our deceased brothers and sisters, particularly those who have fallen during the time of struggle, may God bless them with eternal peace,” said Kiir at Catholic Cathedral in Juba on Jan. 16.

“And,” he continued, “may we, like Jesus Christ on the cross, forgive those who have forcefully caused their deaths.”

Southern Sudan is the more Christian part of Sudan, so this is good news for Sudanese Christians.

Here’s a close up of southern Sudan:

Map of Southern Sudan
Map of Southern Sudan

Muddling linked to an interesting post providing more historical context for the referendum.

I’m still very worried about what is going on in Egypt and Pakistan. I am still trying to catch up on Egypt but the two posts linked by Gateway Pundit are the two best that I’ve seen.