World Evangelical Alliance<\/a> Religious Liberty Commission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201cThe world hasn\u2019t seen an evil like this for a generation.\u201d This is how the national spokesman for Iraqi Christians in the United States described atrocities by ISIS terrorists in northern Iraq, which include beheading of children and their mothers and fathers, and forcing almost all Christians in the region to flee. While the United States has resumed military action to deal with the crisis in Iraq, its commitment reflects half-heartedness and fails to match the enormity of suffering and potential threats.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are systematically beheading children, and mothers and fathers \u2026 There\u2019s actually a park in Mosul that they\u2019ve actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick,\u201d Mark Arabo, the spokesman for Iraqi Christians, told CNN. \u201cThis is crimes against humanity. The whole world should come together. This is much broader than a community or faith … They are doing the most horrendous, the most heart-breaking things you can think of.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Episcopal Vicar of Iraq, Canon Andrew White, recently visited the town of Qaraqosh, which like many other towns and cities has been captured by the ISIS, to assess the situation. \u201cThe majority of the town\u2019s 50,000 people have fled, fearing that, like other Christians in this region, they will be massacred. The militants, in a further act of sacrilege, have established their administrative posts in the abandoned churches,\u201d he said, according to Catholic Online.<\/p>\n
Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako of Baghdad has called for \u201cinternational support and a professional, well-equipped army,\u201d saying the situation is \u201cgoing from bad to worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s announcement last week about the American military involvement in Iraq acknowledged the suffering of minorities. \u201cThese terrorists have been especially barbaric toward religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis,\u201d Obama said, but while carefully underlining the humanitarian nature of the intervention. He said it was meant only to prevent the likely advancement of ISIS terrorists toward the U.S. embassy in Baghdad or the U.S. consulate in Arbil, and to help save Iraqi civilians stranded in the Mount Sinjar region.<\/p>\n
Obama referred to the more than 50,000 people from the Yazidi ethnic minority, who like Christians were forced to flee their villages and are now trapped on the Sinjar mountains with ISIS men surrounding them. The subtext of his statement was a promise only of a short-term, limited involvement.<\/p>\n
It is, of course, a moral obligation of Washington not to leave Iraq in the lurch after its 2003 invasion and subsequent pull-out of its forces. But in fulfilment of this moral obligation also lie America\u2019s interests.<\/p>\n
The U.S. took on al-Qaeda and its former leader Osama bin Laden, but now its offshoot, the ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State, has emerged as far more brutal and powerful \u2013 and therefore a likely threat to America in the days to come.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a strategic development, not a tactical development, because this is a group that has lots of money and lots of arms and an image of success they are trading on right now,\u201d former U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross recently told Defense One. \u201cUltimately what they want to do is show how they are able to take us on. And so we will be drawn into this more and more inevitably because we will have to interrupt their ability to plan and operate lest they become a threat to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The agenda of ISIS is to create a caliphate in the Middle East and beyond. The group has already established control of an adjoining territory comprising much of north-western Iraq and eastern Syria, declaring it a caliphate. Jordan, Lebanon and other nations might be its targets in the near future, causing a strategic havoc for the United States.<\/p>\n
ISIS, a Sunni group that was earlier known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has recruited thousands of fighters having European and U.S. passports, as well as people from the Arab world and the Caucasus. And it initially raised money through rich people in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are all U.S. allies, as Daily Beast journalist Josh Rogin recently wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it\u2019s coming from the Arab Gulf,\u201d Rogin quoted Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, as saying. \u201cKuwait\u2019s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not difficult to foresee foreign ISIS fighters returning \u201chome\u201d and threatening the security of some Western nations, including the U.S., from within.<\/p>\n
Moreover, ISIS is eyeing a region that is vital to global energy resources.<\/p>\n
More than any other foreign power, the United States knows that the Iraqi government and its military do not have the capability to defeat ISIS. Iraq is afflicted with political divisions and crisis along with social divisions along religious and ethnic lines.<\/p>\n
When ISIS first captured the city of Fallujah in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, earlier this year, Washington chose to ignore the threat or was oblivious.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a real opportunity when Fallujah fell,\u201d former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey recently said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know how bad the Iraqi army really was, but we knew they weren\u2019t very good. The administration had the warning and it didn\u2019t act and that is really a tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Obama perhaps has two worries about another long-term involvement in Iraq. One, the possibility of the United States weakening the integrity of Iraq by giving weapons to the Kurdish army, which is seeking independence from Iraq. This is especially a concern because the break-up of the Shia-majority nation can be an advantage to Iran, one of the major enemies of America. Two, a weakened ISIS could mean strengthening of the regime of Syria\u2019s embattled President Bashar al-Assad, who is also from a Shiite sect.<\/p>\n
However, Kurdish independence is fast gaining acceptance internationally. Besides, strengthening of the Syrian regime is unarguably a lesser evil than the strengthening of ISIS in Syria.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s insistence on no American boots on the ground in Iraq is understandable. But widening the scope of the U.S. intervention without American troops on the ground could be an option. In other words, the United States must do whatever it takes \u2013 within the consensus of the international community \u2013 to deal with the growing threat of ISIS. At stake are international security and the human cost of ISIS terrorism, global energy needs and the lives of hundreds of thousands of members of religious minorities, including Christians.<\/p>\n
This report was researched and written by Fernando Perez, and moderated by the WEA-RLC Executive Director, Godfrey Yogarajah.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A special report from the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission. \u201cThe world hasn\u2019t seen an evil like this for a generation.\u201d This is how the national spokesman for Iraqi Christians in the United States described atrocities by ISIS terrorists in northern Iraq, which include beheading of children and their mothers and fathers, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2995,"featured_media":21330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5885],"tags":[3241,5886,3591,5887,5888],"ppma_author":[4542],"class_list":["post-21329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-living-the-faith","category-summer-2013","tag-christians","tag-iraqi","tag-lives","tag-minorities","tag-save","author-fernandoperez"],"authors":[{"term_id":4542,"user_id":2995,"is_guest":0,"slug":"fernandoperez","display_name":"Fernando Perez","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/shiloutte_man.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/shiloutte_man.jpg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2995"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21329"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/km7.a6a.mytemp.website\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=21329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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