Islamic State (ISIS) fighters are only a mile away from Baghdad, according to a spokesman for the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.
Battles between ISIS and Iraqi forces have also been raging in the strategic city of Amiriyat al-Fallujah, 25 miles west of Baghdad.
"They said it could never happen and now it almost has," a spokesman for the organization, a Christian aid group, said in an interview. "Obama says he overestimated what the Iraqi Army could do. Well, you only need to be here a very short while to know they can do very, very little." So reports The Clarion Project, an organization that aims to "challenge extremism and promote dialogue," according to its website.
The spokesman, Canon Andrew White, said that the U.S. airstrikes had proven to be ineffective against the Islamic State and that they hadmerely killed civilians. Ground troops are needed, he said, to defeat the Islamic
Islamic State Committing Staggering Crimes In Iraq: UN Report
Battles between ISIS and Iraqi forces have also been raging in the strategic city of Amiriyat al-Fallujah, 25 miles west of Baghdad.
"They said it could never happen and now it almost has," a spokesman for the organization, a Christian aid group, said in an interview. "Obama says he overestimated what the Iraqi Army could do. Well, you only need to be here a very short while to know they can do very, very little." So reports The Clarion Project, an organization that aims to "challenge extremism and promote dialogue," according to its website.
The spokesman, Canon Andrew White, said that the U.S. airstrikes had proven to be ineffective against the Islamic State and that they hadmerely killed civilians. Ground troops are needed, he said, to defeat the Islamic
White clarified several important points. He said that Iraqi soldiers are simply not as motivated as are the ISIS terrorists, whom they greatly fear. In addition, he said, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for civilians to leave Baghdad at present, given ISIS control of key parts of Iraq.
ISIS terrorists have captured an Iraqi army base 50 miles northwest of Baghdad, while slightly to the east, a U.S.-backed Iraqi tribe in the Sunni Arab town of Dhuluiyah has held out under a two-week attack by Islamic State fighters.
It is believed that if Iraq falls to ISIS, it will be the first time in history that a terrorist movement will have control of a nation.
Islamic State insurgents in Iraq have carried out mass executions, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and used child soldiers in what may amount to systematic war crimes that demand prosecution, the United Nations said on Thursday.
In a report based on 500 interviews with witnesses, also said Iraqi government air strikes on the Sunni Muslim militants had caused "significant civilian deaths" by hitting villages, a school and hospitals in violation of international law.
At least 9347 civilians had been killed and 17,386 wounded so far this year through September, well over half of them since the Islamist insurgents also known as ISIL and ISIS began seizing large parts of northern Iraq in early June, the report said.
"The array of violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL and associated armed groups is staggering, and many of their acts may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein.
Islamist forces have committed gross human rights violations and violence of an "increasing sectarian nature" against groups including Christians, Yazidis and Shi'ite Muslims in a widening conflict that has forced 1.8 million Iraqis to flee their homes, according to the 29-page report by the UN Human Rights Office and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).
"These include attacks directly targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, executions and other targeted killings of civilians, abductions, rape and other forms of sexual and physical violence perpetrated against women and children, forced recruitment of children, destruction or desecration of places of religious or cultural significance, wanton destruction and looting of property, and denial of fundamental freedoms."
In a single massacre on June 12, the report said, about 1500 Iraqi soldiers and security officers from the former US Camp Speicher military base in Salahuddin province were captured and killed by Islamic State fighters.
However, the bodies have not been exhumed and the precise toll is not known. No one disputes that Iraqi military recruits were led off the base near Tikrit unarmed and then machinegunned in their hundreds into mass graves by Islamic State, whose fighters boasted of the killings on the internet.
Women have been treated particularly harshly, the report said: "ISIL (has) attacked and killed female doctors, lawyers, among other professionals."
In August, it said, ISIL took 450-500 women and girls to the Tal Afar citadel in Iraq's Nineveh region where "150 unmarried girls and women, predominantly from the Yazidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be given to ISIL fighters as a reward or to be sold as sex slaves".
Netanyahu Suggests Force On The Table If U.S. Agrees To 'Bad Deal' With Iran
Israel may consider the use of force against Iran if world powers accept a nuclear agreement that Jerusalem finds unacceptable, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu suggested on Wednesday.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Netanyahu said he hopes that US President Barack Obama shares his standards for a bad deal with Iran over its nuclear program.
Israel seeks the full dismantlement of Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure and its heavy-water plutonium reactor – what Netanyahu views as the guaranteed pacification of Iran’s nuclear program, which currently spans thousands of centrifuges.
Those centrifuges, he told Mitchell, “are only good for one thing: to make bombgrade material.”
Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 – the US, United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany – were a primary topic of conversation between the two leaders and their national security teams in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
“All I’ll say is, Israel always reserves the right to defend itself,” Netanyahu said, asked what his government would do if a bad deal was signed and sealed.
Iran must be contained along with the Islamic State terrorist organization, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday.
In an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren during his trip to the US, the prime minister warned that a radical Islamist ideology would be even more dangerous in the hands of a country possessing nuclear weapons.
On the heels of his address to the United Nations General Assembly Monday (full text here), in which he cautioned against the rise of militant Islam in all its forms, including the “fanatical creed” shared by both the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and Iran proxy Hamas in Gaza, Netanyahu said the “real war” must be waged not only against IS, but also against Iran’s attempts to acquire nuclear enrichment capabilities.
Though the prime minister said Israel “completely supports” the coalition led by US President Barack Obama to combat Islamic State and stop its murderous expansion, “defeating ISIS (the previous acronym of Islamic State) and letting Iran manufacture enough nuclear material for a bomb” would effectively mean that the war against radical and militant Islam would not be over.
“They’re trying to get a deal which will leave them with the ability to enrich enough uranium for a bomb — and have the tough sanctions lifted,” Netanyahu said of Iran’s stakes in the ongoing nuclear talks, the deadline for which was postponed to November amid incremental progress over the summer.
Of the deal Iran is hoping to ink with the P5+1 in Vienna, the prime minister said, “They shouldn’t get it.”
He explained that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were even more dangerous in view of the radical Islamist ideology espoused by its government — dangerous not just for Israel and the Middle East, but for the West as well.
The root of the problem, he said was the the goal of militant Islam “is to dominate the Middle East and then take over the world.” The top target? Not Israel, but the United States, which Netanyahu said “all factions” possessing radical Islamist ideologies, both Sunni and Shi’ite, call the “Great Satan.”
No comments:
Post a Comment