Boots-on-the-Ground Marines Deployed to Evaluate and Coordinate Possible Airborne Rescue of Besieged Yazidis

Boots on the ground, now.

ISIS killed an unspecified number of men, and then captured 100+ women and children.

Let me quote AllahPundit here:

I can imagine what they have planned for the women they've captured but I can’t bring myself to imagine what they intend to do with the children. They've made money ransoming prisoners in the past. Let's hope that’s all they have in mind.

Let me quote him on further bizarre things. Obama has apparently ruled out reintroducing any ground forces into Iraq. Which makes the story that ground forces have been introduced into Iraq very odd.

Allah thinks he's been watching Captain Bullshit long enough to have this figured out:

Obama could, I suppose, send troops to evacuate the Yazidi while insisting that they’re not "combat troops" because they're not under orders to engage the enemy, but as Noah said on Twitter, whether we engage the enemy isn’t up to us. If ISIS engages, then those troops become combat troops.

But then that's not "combat." That's just "self-defense in a limited kinetic operating theater."

In an earlier post, I asked, "Why are we being cagey about arming the Kurds?"

@rdbrewer4 answered: "Because of The Base."

Correct, that's what I was getting at. Obama is essentially now in the position of fighting a war while pretending to not be fighting a war, because of The Base.

That should go well for all of us!

And on that same point, Ted Cruz thinks Obama needs a new AUMF to take action against ISIS. The Iraq AUMF authorized action against the government and armed forces of Iraq, which ISIS is plainly not.

Cruz is right: Obama must secure this from Congress.

It would, furthermore, be easy to get.

But he won't. I'll bet you anything he won't.

Because, again: He is now fighting a war that he wishes, for domestic political reasons, to pretend isn't happening at all.

Update: We've had special forces boots-on-the-ground at Sinjar hill for days, it turns out.

Their mission: Find a way to get tens of thousands of weak, dehydrated, and dying people off a mountaintop (where the temperature’s well over 100 degrees, by the way) when there are well-armed barbarians waiting below. One option is to lead them down the mountain on foot and into Kurdistan by land, but that’s tricky. ISIS is down there, of course, and the road south to Kurdish territory would take them through territory held by the jihadis. Who’s going to do the fighting if U.S. "combat troops" aren’t available and there aren’t enough Peshmerga to shoulder the load?

I have a terrible feeling that the Yazidis are going to be wiped out, almost entirely, due to Obama's fundamental refusal to commit to an actual path forward.

The Yazidis have been persecuted and slaughtered by Muslims since the 12th century for their alleged "demon worship." Their religion is syncretic and includes both ancient pagan nature-gods as well as Zoroasterism and the god of the neighboring monotheistic religion (Allah, I mean) as well as, oddly enough, Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.

But one of their ancient gods -- actually, not a god, but an angel beneath God's command -- is a Peacock Angel, and the Muslims claim he's "Satanic,"* and so these people have been chased out of the cities and forced to take refuge in remote mountains, harassed and killed for one thousand f***ing years all because of a Peacock, and now they're going to be butchered even up there on their shitty, no-one-else-would-live here mountain.

* Why is he claimed to be Satanic? Because the Yazidi myth of this Peacock Angel comes within striking distance of the Satan story, but with important differences.

The Peacock Angel was proud, as peacocks are, so proud, in fact, that God punished him, by, I'm guessing, sending him away from Heaven for a time.

But the Peacock Angel repented, and was allowed to serve God once again. In their myths, God assigned the Peacock Angel the task of being the watchman over creation.

Or something like that.

As you can see, the "rebelled against God" is somewhat close to the Satan story, and Satan has certainly been depicted as a prideful angel, ergo, the Peacock Angel must be Satan -- even though, in their religion, the story is completely different. The Peacock overcame his pride (see Thor) and now serves again as an angel.

So over this point of religious disagreement, these people have been harassed and forbidden to live in Muslim cities, and now are being buried alive in mass graves, and are so famished that parents are cutting their hands so that their children can drink their blood (which does contain protein and water, but this method of keeping your kids alive can't last forever), and will in all likelihood be slaughtered en masse.

Information about the Yezidis' and Their Thousand-Year Persecution: Here; hit translate.

posted by Ace at 06:00 PM

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