US jets to protect Iraqi minorities, block progress of fighting

Mangalore Today News Network

Washington, Aug 09, 2014:  US President Barack Obama authorised air strikes on Iraq to protect Christians and prevent “genocide” of tens of thousands of members of an ancient sect sheltering on a desert mountaintop from Islamic State fighters threatening to exterminate them. 

In Baghdad, where politicians have been paralysed by infighting while the state falls apart, the top Shiite cleric all but ordered Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to quit, a bold intervention that could bring the veteran ruler down.

The US began to drop relief supplies to refugees from the ancient Yazidi sect.  Sunni fighters from the Islamic State (IS), an Al Qaeda offshoot bent on establishing a caliphate and eradicating unbelievers, have swept through northern Iraq since June. Their advance has dramatically accelerated in the past week when they routed Kurdish troops near the Kurdish autonomous region in the north.

  Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians and other minorities have fled from Islamic State fighters who have beheaded and crucified some of their captives and broadcast the killings on the Internet.

The retreat of the Kurds has brought the Islamists to within ahalf hour’s drive of Arbil, the prosperous capital of the Kurdish autonomous region and a hub for US and European oil companies, which ordered emergency evacuations of their staff.  “Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world, ‘There is no one coming to help’,” said Obama in a late night TV address to the nation on Thursday.

“Well, today America is coming to help.” While the relentless advance of Islamic State fighters has threatened to destroy Iraq as a state, bickering politicians in Baghdad have failed to agree on a new government since an inconclusive election in April.

Maliki, a Shi’ite Islamist whose foes accuse him of fuelling the Sunni revolt by running an authoritarian sectarian state, has refused to step aside for a less polarising figure, defying pressure from Washington and Tehran.

Over the past week, the fighters — deploying heavy weapons seized from fleeing government troops and flush with looted funds — turned against the Kurds, who have ruled themselves in comparative peace in three mountainous northern provinces while the rest of Iraq was torn by a decade of sectarian bloodshed.

 Attention has focused on the plights of Yazidis, Christians and other minority groups in northern Iraq, which has been one of the most diverse parts of the Middle East for centuries.   Advancing Islamic State fighters have filmed themselves massacring prisoners. Churches and Shiite mosques have been destroyed. Some victims have been crucified, beheaded or dismembered.

“The stakes for Iraq’s future can also not be clearer,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said Aug 8.  Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who practice an ancient faith related to Zoroastrianism, are among a handful of pre-Islamic minority groups who survived. The situation is grim and  action urgent.