The ISIS has to be stopped

The Urdu adage “ der aaye durust aaye ”, which is often loosely translated as ‘better late than never’ but actually means ‘though late, you’ve come at the most appropriate moment’, fits perfectly the US decision on aerial intervention in Iraq to contain, and hopefully end, the existence and spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria.

As the Sunni ISIS hoodlums made frightening gains in Iraq, mercilessly butchering Iraqi military personnel and even civilians, who were shot at point-blank range and dumped in mass graves, one crucial question begged an answer. If the US could bring on board western nations such as the UK, Germany, Poland and so on and launch a war on the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, why did it stand on the sidelines and watch for so long the gory violence unleashed by the ISIS terrorists in that country? Should the ISIS not have been challenged much earlier, and its menace nipped in the bud?

The delayed American reaction has led to murmurs that the trigger for the superpower’s intervention was provided only when the ISIS accelerated its atrocities on the Christian population in the areas under its control in Northern Iraq. Christians were warned by the ISIS right from June when its assault began and when it captured Mosul that they’d have to either convert to Islam or face annihilation. This started the flight of Christians from the region. But a much stronger assault on Christians first and the Yazidis next, came in the first week of August when ISIS Islamists overran a cluster of predominantly Christian villages in Iraq bordering the Kurdish region, which is semi-autonomous and not under Baghdad’s control.

As tens of thousands of civilians, most of them Christians, fled the area, devastating images surfaced of ISIS terrorists pulling down crosses from churches and burning Christian manuscripts. Next came the persecution of the Yazidis, a religious minority inhabiting the mountains of northwest Iraq and which has been persecuted for centuries as it is regarded by most Muslims as “devil worshippers”. There are around 500,000 Yazidis in Iraq, concentrated in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, west of Mosul, and in the Kurdish-controlled region further north. This region has the Yazidi holy shrines and is of religious significance to them just as the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf are sacred to Shia Muslims.

When Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, the Kurds were given autonomy, but Sinjar, where the Yazidis are concentrated, and many border regions remained an area of dispute between the Kurds and Baghdad. The ISIS’s virulent persecution of the Yazidis has shocked the world. According to the Iraqi human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the ISIS has already butchered or buried alive about 500 Yazidis, and has celebrated their killing with “cheers and weapons waved in the air”.

“Some of the victims were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar,” he said, claiming that as the Yazidis fled towards the mountains to escape the advancing Islamists, the ISIS managed to capture about 300 women, whom they have kept as slaves.

While the US has begun aerial assaults to destroy the ISIS’s weaponry, President Barack Obama has cautioned the world that there is no “quick fix” to this menace that threatens to tear Iraq into several pieces, and the assault might have to continue for months and not merely weeks.

Both the Kurds and the Baghdad government, finding the ISIS growing from strength to strength, are urging the US to do much more than confine its anti-ISIS operation to aerial assaults. But it is unlikely that their demand for boots on the ground from the Obama administration will cut much ice, particularly as the US withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2011.

Humanitarian aid is being given to thousands of starving Yazidis who have sought shelter in the mountainous region on the Kurdish border, with food and water being air-dropped to them. Many Yazidis have taken shelter in the Kurdish city of Dohuk.

So who are Yazidis, and what is their faith all about? And why should the Sunni ISIS abhor them so much? An article in the National Geographic says of this ancient faith that it “mixes with Islam some elements of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion, and Mithraism, a mystery religion originating in the Eastern Mediterranean. This combining of various belief systems, known religiously as syncretism, was part of what branded them as heretics among Muslims”.

Both the minorities — Christians and Yazidis — have suffered in Iraq from the ISIS onslaught. While those Christians who have managed to flee and reach the shores of countries such as France are being welcomed and given refuge, what will happen to the hitherto unknown Yazidis is anybody’s guess.

A significant side-story in this entire development was Obama’s response to a reporter during his White House briefing on Saturday on the US military action against the ISIS. Asked if he now regretted the withdrawal of troops from Iraq given the speedy gains made by the ISIS in that country, he quipped: “As if this was my decision. Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government.”

Once again he reiterated, without naming the Iraq government, that the US could have kept its troops in Iraq only on an invitation from the Iraqi government, and an assurance that they would be immune from prosecution under the “Iraqi judicial system” if for some reason they got into a firefight with the Iraqis to protect themselves!

Neither such an invitation, nor any such blanket assurance, had been forthcoming, we’ve been told umpteen times in the past. But the pity is that a once prosperous country has been nearly destroyed and a proud people devastated by the US’ one-point agenda — to remove Saddam Hussein, either to avenge Bush senior’s bloodied nose in the first Gulf War, or for oil.