ISIS & Sunni Militants Begin Ethnically Purging Shiites from Areas Under Their Control

This probably surprises no one, except maybe the Commander in Chief.

KIRKUK, Iraq – The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages.

Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages.

...

"They hit us with mortars and mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian. The Shiites, out," he said.

In an assassination with a great deal of psychological importance, ISIS kidnapped, and then executed, the judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death after a trial in 2006.

"Iraqi revolutionaries arrested him and sentenced him to death in retaliation for the death of the martyr Saddam Hussein," [Jordanian PM Khalil] Attieh wrote on his Facebook page.

They also hailed Hussein as "a martyr."

There were no US troops based in Iraq the last several years because Obama failed to secure a SOFA which included immunity for US soldiers. Without that, soldiers could be accused, tried, and hanged by Iraq whenever it became politically popular to do so.

The special forces now going to Obama by his personal diktat will have no such immunity.

Obama is now willing to accept an informal handshake deal on such matters.

"We believe we need a separate set of assurances from the Iraqis," one senior U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast. This official said this would likely be an agreement or exchange of diplomatic notes from the Iraq’s foreign ministry. "We basically need a piece of paper from them," another U.S. official involved in the negotiations told The Daily Beast. The official didn’t explain why the parliamentary vote, so crucial three years ago, was no longer needed.

AllahPundit speculates that Obama might not think the parliamentary vote is important because Iraq only exists as a democracy -- or even a country -- on a notional level.

I would add that Obama has gotten accustomed to ruling by diktat. If it works so grandly for America, why not Iraq?

ISIS has all but won the war there, as the Iraqi army is also now chiefly a notional matter:

Experts told the NYT that the Iraqi army is a "defeated force," with one estimate claiming that fully a quarter of all battalions have deserted and more than a third of the army’s divisions are "combat ineffective." Other experts tell Fox News that Iraq has a "limited number" of helicopters and just two planes that can fire Hellfire missiles from the air. That's why Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, sent down the word for Shiites to start volunteering to defend Baghdad.

With the Kurds' president Barzani now openly announcing that it's time for the Kurdish state to split off and be formally a separate nation from Iraq, and the Sunnis ethnically cleansing Shiites, and, coming soon I'm sure, the Shiites ethnically cleansing Sunnis, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that a state resembling Iraq survives the year.

posted by Ace at 05:59 PM

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