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While there are a thousand reasons not to use military force in support of the tens of thousands of innocents “over there” who are being tortured, abducted, raped and murdered en-masse, one reason to do so — although many will say it is a flimsy one — is because our national psyche and our national conscience tells us that it is the right thing to do.
The rescue of an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 Yazidis who had fled to Mount Sinjar, where they languished for days in the heat without food, water or medicine until “Kurdish forces, aided by U.S. air strikes, managed to help most of them to escape either to Syria or Kurdistan,” is one of the rewards for having decided to do the right thing.
There are several more “rewarding stories” just as, sadly, there will be failures and losses.
Today, the Stars and Stripes printed a heart-rending account of the horrors the Yazidis have endured at the hands of ISIS and some of the reasons for the hate and prejudice towards the Yazidis by the Islamic extremists.
Please read the entire story here.
Here are some excerpts:
“They (the extremists) took 50 of our neighbors and buried them alive,” said Elias Shingal, a former Iraqi army sergeant and construction worker who arrived in Irbil after two days on Mount Sinjar with his wife and four sons, aged four through 14. The family made a white-knuckle drive through Islamic State lines to escape in the night, he said.
Still, Shingal, who said he worked for the U.S. Army in Mosul in 2004, and his family were the lucky ones. His neighbor’s sister was taken as a sex slave, he said.
“I will cry if I keep talking about this,” he added.
[..]
[A Yazidi family] was so traumatized that when Iraqi helicopters dropped food and water, they were afraid to eat and drink the humanitarian aid for fear it has been poisoned, she said.
In the Irbil camp and on Mount Sinjar, terrified Yazidis traded accounts of their own experiences, which only added to their horror.
Elias Shingal said that in one village, the Islamic State gave Yazidis the option of converting to Islam or death. Some converted, but about 300 who did not were slain, he said.
While Yazidi accounts cannot be independently verified, officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights say they have received “verified reports” that the Islamic State is “systematically hunting down members of minority groups … and giving them the ultimatum, ‘convert or die,’” according to the Stripes.
The U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, also cited “reports of women being executed and unverified reports that strongly suggest that hundreds of women and children have been kidnapped — many of the teenagers have been sexually assaulted, and women have been assigned or sold to fighters as ‘malak yamiin’ or slaves.”
Yes, the worst part of their nightmare is hopefully over, albeit thousands of them are now refugees with only the clothes on their backs and still fearful of Sunni extremists.
Read more here
Lead photo” File image of A C-17 Globemaster III airdropping a pallet.(U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Stephany Richards)
