David Cameron: Isis terrorists are planning attacks in Britain
- Thread starter Locutus
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Obama is right to help out the Christians and Yazidis who have been forced out of their homes and left stranded on a mountaintop by the brutal ISIS. I can't see what the problem is.
As Islamic thugs continue their brutal, medieval slaughter of Yazidis and Christians the first British aid plane arrives in Iraq.
The Daily Mail's Ian Birrell describes the horror......
Crucified by the Caliphate monsters: Iraq descends into apocalypse as Islamic State fanatics seize towns and tell terrified Yazidi 'Become Muslims by noon today... or we kill all of you'
Mail on Sunday reporter Ian Birrell gives shocking despatch from Irbil
Terrified residents see Islamic State (IS) jihadists capturing nearby towns
Refugees speak of being offered sinister ultimatum by advancing horde
IS has shocked the world again by capturing new swathes of Iraq
Came as U.S. stepped in and started bombing IS artillery and convoys
Meanwhile they surround Yazidi religious minority on barren mountainsideTerrified residents see Islamic State (IS) jihadists capturing nearby towns
Refugees speak of being offered sinister ultimatum by advancing horde
IS has shocked the world again by capturing new swathes of Iraq
Came as U.S. stepped in and started bombing IS artillery and convoys
Some of persecuted sect escaped today by helicopter and escort
They arrived bristling with heavy weapons and waving black flags from about a dozen Humvees, seized from the Iraqi army and supplied originally by the United States.
When the terrified residents looked out of their windows, they saw that Kosho, their traditional walled village in the mountains of northern Iraq, had been surrounded by jihadists. More than 200 bearded militants had besieged the village.
Then their leader – a local man from Mosul rather than the foreigners who make up more than a third of the ranks of the group now known as Islamic State – offered them a chance to save their lives.
Thousands of Yezidis, one of the world's oldest religions, are trapped in the Sinjar mountains as they try to escape from Islamic State (IS) forces
The Islamic State militants have already imposed a medieval-style Islamic caliphate on a slice of Iraq
‘He told us that either we become Muslims or they would kill us all,’ said Falah, mayor of the village made up mainly of members of the ancient Yazidi sect. ‘We offered money but they would not accept it.’
The deadline the people of Kosho have to meet is midday today. Since the residents refuse to betray their faith, it is feared an entire village of about 2,500 innocent people might be slaughtered in cold blood.
‘If we did not have families, we would try to escape,’ the stoical Falah told me yesterday. ‘But we have lots of women here and many children, along with all the old men and women of the village. How could we leave them?’
This is thought to be the first time these blood-drenched fanatics – who delight in boasting of their barbarism and posting sickening murder videos on social media – have threatened to wipe out an entire village.
Bloodied and stranded: Yazidi children weep on Mount Sinjar
Even by their own chilling standards, re-drawing the Middle East map with a rampage of rape, beheadings and revolting crucifixions, this marks a new low.
It comes at the end of a week during which the fanatics of Islamic State –formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) – shocked the world again by advancing further into Iraq, prompting the US to renew military operations there for the first time since 2011.
In other developments yesterday:
As U.S. air strikes continued, President Obama warned he will not allow jihadists to carve out a ‘caliphate’ straddling Syria and Iraq;
Islamic State fanatics kidnapped hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35;
Hundreds of desperate refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar scrambled to board a single helicopter laden with food and water – while 5,000 escaped down a new ‘safe’ route;
The UK sent two aircraft to help with the relief operation and promised further air-drops;
IS seized control of the vital Mosul Dam which supplies water and power to millions of Iraqis. There were fears its destruction would unleash a 65ft wave that would overwhelm Mosul and even cause flooding in Baghdad.
The Islamic State militants have already imposed a medieval-style Islamic caliphate on a slice of Iraq and Syria the size of Britain after seizing Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, in June.
Rudaw Exclusive: Aid for thousands of stranded Yazidi civilians
Desperate masses: Yazidi people stranded in the Sinjar mountains rush towards a helicopter laden with supplies
Now, having captured first the strategic city of Sinjar, then a string of other towns and the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, they are just 25 miles from Irbil.
This thriving city filled with Western oil firms is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, the solitary success story following the disastrous US-led invasion of 2003.
As US jets started bombing again to protect Irbil, I found its churches, construction sites and parks packed with thousands of Christians and Yazidis fleeing the feared Islamists.
Thousands more are trapped in searing heat on parched mountains to the west. The latest advance began a week ago when shots were heard in Sinjar late at night.
Four hours later, the feared Kurdish peshmerga forces retreated, much to everyone’s surprise – followed by 150,000 residents fleeing for their lives.
Sinjar is an historic centre of the Yazidis, one of the world’s oldest religions. Followers are seen as devil-worshippers by Islamic State because of their unique beliefs.
About five Yazidi and 40 Shia Muslim families were last night stuck in the city after failing to get out in time, hiding in fear from the bloodthirsty militants in their own homes.
I spoke to one Yazidi woman, living largely in one back room with her 60-year-old mother, two sisters and one brother eking out dwindling supplies of bread, rice and water while keeping lights turned off to avoid attention.
Her hushed voice quivering, she told me of hearing frequent gunshots and seeing Islamic State vehicles patrolling the streets outside. ‘We are just sitting and trying not to move too much,’ she said. ‘We feel so scared.
We do not know what to do. We cannot fight them and if we leave the house we will be killed or kidnapped. Afterwards, her despairing cousin, an engineer in his mid-twenties, told me in flawless English that their family felt helpless but could not mount an escape bid.
A respected local leader told me how Islamic State turned up at two Yazidi villages last week, telling residents they would be left alone if they surrendered all their weapons.
At the first village of Qana, the militia then killed 32 men before taking away the women. At Hezan, the second one, all the women were reportedly stripped naked before about 70 men were shot dead.
One terrified woman in her sixties jumped off the third-storey roof of her home, preferring suicide to seizure. Another, a newly-married woman aged 26, is said to have stabbed herself to death. It is impossible to verify such stories. But alarmingly, there are growing claims from a multitude of sources that Islamic State is kidnapping ‘infidel’ women for sexual slavery.
An official for Amnesty International who has spent the past few days with refugees confirmed that both men and women were being kidnapped by the militants: ‘People fear the women are being raped and sold into slavery but we just do not know the truth yet.’
Many of the worst scenes are on the mountain range near Sinjar. A doctor there with 5,000 other Yazidis told Human Rights Watch that ten to 15 people were dying daily, mainly from dehydration. ‘No water, no food, no rescue, no way out,’ he said.
Resala Shangali, a 26-year-old journalist, spent four days without food and just one slug of water desperately avoiding the advancing Islamic State forces with hundreds of other Yazidis.
She saw one infant die of dehydration and have to be dumped on the ground by his fleeing mother, another two-year-old fall over and die of a head injury, then five old people die one night alone.
On the second day, a woman gave birth, then both she and the baby died within half an hour despite several women trying to save them.
‘That night was the worst because my clothes were covered with blood from trying to help her and I could not sleep,’ she said.
Thousands of Christian, Yazidi and Kurdish refugees have lost everything and suddenly find themselves living in rubble-strewn building sites and crammed churches and feeling bewildered and betrayed.
Again and again yesterday I heard tales of families fleeing for their lives, many forced to pay huge sums for their survival to a group estimated to be the world’s wealthiest jihadist gang thanks to kidnapping, extortion, bank raids and oil sales.
Often they were given a choice to pay money, convert to Islam or die. Among them was Elias Ibrahim, a Christian taxi driver from Mosul who earned $500 a month. He was told he could stay if he handed over $450 a month to the insurgents.
VIDEO OF THE FIRST UK AID DROP IN NORTHERN IRAQ
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As thousands of Yazidis and Christians, whose ties to that land stretch back to times before Islam even existed, are being slaughtered by Muslim thugs in northern Iraq, Lord Glasman, a former adviser to current Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, a senior lecturer in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University, and Director of its Faith and Citizenship Programme, says Britain cannot remain neutral any longer in this battle for civilisation. Britain's strategy should be pro-Kurdish, pro-Iranian and pro-Christian.
MAURICE GLASMAN: This is a battle for civilisation... the UK cannot remain neutral
Last week, the Christians of Qaraqosh, the heart of Christian civilisation in the Nineveh region for almost 2,000 years, were given a choice; convert to Islam, leave or be executed.
The same thing happened to the Christians of Mosul. They had been living there for 1,700 years and still speak a form of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
They tell a story of an ancient Christian community linked by blood, language and tradition to the earliest Church. They have lived through Babylonian and Persian Empires, the birth of Islam, the Crusades, through the conquests of Genghis Khan and the spite of Saddam Hussein.
They cannot, however, live in the newly established caliphate.
As they left Mosul by foot, on their refugee march towards Kurdistan, they were robbed of all they carried, dispossessed of the remnants of their inheritance lasting nearly two millennia. Their bibles were burnt and their churches destroyed.
They joined a growing train of refugees, the final exit of the most ancient Christian congregations from their ancestral lands.
There was no one to protect them, no one to answer their cry of despair. They were abandoned to their fate.
Today, we learn of more horrors taking place in the region – of beheadings and crucifixions, of women being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
How did it come to this? How did we move from the ‘liberation’ of a decade ago to the domination of a group so violent and extreme that Al Qaeda fight against them?
Christians and Yazidi are being slaughtered by Muslim terrorists in the ancient Nineveh region of northern Iraq, where they have lived for millennia
And what happened to the trillion dollars invested by us and the United States in ‘upholding the territorial integrity of Iraq’ and ‘training and equipping’ the Iraqi army?
The answer seems to be that we unwittingly armed and funded the army of the Islamic State.
It started with a group of 70 vehicles leaving Eastern Syria carrying about 800 soldiers. Within 72 hours they had conquered a land mass four times the size of Britain.
The Iraqi army dissolved in a puff of smoke. Not only did more than 50,000 soldiers desert their posts and run but they abandoned all the new, expensive kit that we had bought for them: fleets of white land rovers (1,500, I was told by a senior Kurdish general), hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, tanks, ammunition and artillery.
The Islamic State also took all the money from the banks, calculated to be at least $500million.
The outcome of our Middle East policy over a bloody and treasure-spending decade has been to arm and fund the greatest threat to peaceful co-existence that exists in the world.
It is the biggest foreign policy failure since Appeasement.
We have refused to sell weapons to the Peshmerga, the Kurdish Army, because doing so would ‘undermine the territorial integrity of Iraq’.
We have armed our enemies and refused arms to our friends. This madness has to stop.
Two months ago, I visited the Kurdish region with Tobias Ellwood, who is now the Minister for the Middle East. It is clear what the Government needs to do.
There must be an immediate intensification of humanitarian aid to the Kurdish Regional Government. Solidarity with the abandoned and forsaken Christians and Yazidis should take immediate priority in our approach.
We should offer asylum priority to these dispossessed people and let them know that they are not alone in this world.
Thousands of fleeing Iraqis take refuge in city of Arbil
Many of the Iraqi Christians who fled the violence have arrived in the Kurdish city of Erbil
Iraq's Christian population has plummeted in recent years as a result of Islamic terrorism
The Christians of Nineveh do not speak words of violence or revenge. They have sent no rockets and planted no bombs but they have been forced from their homes for not renouncing Jesus. We should extend our hospitality to those who have been left with nothing.
It is to be noted that the Shia Muslims in the south of Iraq have taken in nearly 20,000 Christian refugees, opening up mosques and homes.
We need to look at Iran with fresh eyes and explore the possibility that they are our partners in defence of peaceful co-existence and the pursuit of the good.
Then we should intensify intelligence, security and military co-operation with the Kurdish Peshmerga and regional government and drop all illusions about the ‘territorial integrity of Iraq’.
There is a battle for civilisation that is forming before our eyes and we cannot be neutral. Our strategy should be pro-Kurdish, pro-Iranian and pro-Christian.
We have never been in greater need of the nourishment that the Christian tradition brings in terms of building a common good between those who wish to build it.
That is the basis of a realistic and right strategy and the Government should take a lead in building it. It is in all our interests to do so.
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A long while ago I made a post here about Iran giving refuge to many Afghanis, Kurds, Iraqis, and other minorities. Indeed, that country has taken in more refugees from conflict than any other country in the region. Despite that, for the longest time we had several anti-Iranian threads - many of which were filled with hostility toward Teheran and baseless accusation that it was about to launch WW III and Armageddon. In fact, the only other subject that caused more vilification was the incessant amount of Islamophobic threads. People here used to applaud all the hate filled garbage from the John McCains, the Hillary Clintons, and the Jerusalem Post with their deranged calls for war on Iran despite the lack of any evidence to support the "justifications" those warmongers were spewing. It's good to see that all of that war garbage has finally come to an end.
Aren't you glad now that Washington DC did not heed those stupid calls for war on Iran when not one shred of evidence was ever presented to prove the idiotic claim that they had nukes and were about to bomb NYC???
The last serious black flag was the Swastika and we knew what that was about
These people are not as powerful in the world yet but they are the same thing.
Nothing worse than religious fascists.
Yes its propaganda and beating faintly the drums of war.
In the early 1920's no one took the Beer Hall Putsch seriously either. In and of
itself no big deal. However it embolden the movement to strive to bigger things
without being checked or challenged. The time has come to decide what to do
with these people. They are accountable to no one, they don't subscribe to any
law what so ever.
They commit acts of war demonstrations of murder and their intent is to enslave
entire peoples or wipe out entire ethnic minorities. Sound familiar? We have to
decide whether to let them build up and have their revolution spread or deal with
the issue once and for all.
These people will soon have sympathizers in our streets no doubt and we have
no uniform to concentrate on. Unwillingly we have been at war since 2001 with
elements of this and other movements and we better wake up and smell the
crap they intend to deliver.
These people are not as powerful in the world yet but they are the same thing.
Nothing worse than religious fascists.
Yes its propaganda and beating faintly the drums of war.
In the early 1920's no one took the Beer Hall Putsch seriously either. In and of
itself no big deal. However it embolden the movement to strive to bigger things
without being checked or challenged. The time has come to decide what to do
with these people. They are accountable to no one, they don't subscribe to any
law what so ever.
They commit acts of war demonstrations of murder and their intent is to enslave
entire peoples or wipe out entire ethnic minorities. Sound familiar? We have to
decide whether to let them build up and have their revolution spread or deal with
the issue once and for all.
These people will soon have sympathizers in our streets no doubt and we have
no uniform to concentrate on. Unwillingly we have been at war since 2001 with
elements of this and other movements and we better wake up and smell the
crap they intend to deliver.