generalspeaking

Saturday, August 09, 2014

A Humanitarian Catastrophe

"There could be a humanitarian catastrophe there. The president is weighing both passive and active options. More active, we could target the ISIL elements that are besieging the base of the mountain."
U.S. administration official

"[The United States is troubled by] cold and calculated [attacks by ISIS on religious minorities in Iraq]."
"These actions have exacerbated an already dire crisis, and the situation is nearing a humanitarian catastrophe. [The campaign of attacks] demonstrates a callous disregard for human rights and is deeply disturbing."
"There are many problems in Iraq. This one is a particularly acute one, because we're seeing people persecuted because of their ethnic or religious identities."
"There are no American military solutions to the problems in Iraq These problems can only be solved with Iraqi political solutions."
Josh Earnest, White House press secretary

Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters look on as smoke billows from the town Makhmur, about 175 miles north of Baghdad, Saturday. Wall Street Journal

The U.S. administration's vacillation over how, when and whether to intervene in Iraq has finally come to a head. With a big toe thrust into the odiously messy waters of sectarian violence and triumphalism resulting in the deaths of Christian Chaldean Iraqis and their Yazidi counterparts, fleeing their ancestral homes in the country they have always believed was theirs as much as that of the Sunnis and the Shiites who ruled it.

President Obama's idea of intervention was to come only with the stepping down of Nouri al-Maliki, and the entrance of a new, interim-emergency shared-unity administration. But Mr. al-Maliki's tenacity and the urgency of the plight of Iraq's civilian population at the bloodthirsty hands of the invading Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, could no longer await the optimum political moment.

The Mount Sinjar crisis with the deaths of Yazidi children from privation and starvation when 40,000 people fled from their town of Sinjar with the Islamic State advance, left few other options but to fly humanitarian emergency food and medical rations over the area, and the authorization of several aerial strikes to slow the advance of the Islamist terrorists. The former has as yet been inadequate to the need, and the latter has yet to be effective.

The dams and reservoirs and oilfields sized by the Islamic State has given them the impetus they sought to control the large areas of Iraq they plan to absorb into their Caliphate. The originally al-Qaeda-authorized group, now famed for the level of their lethal atrocities giving no quarter, leaving no hope, straining the bounds of thousands of years of civilization in their barbarism, vows to continue "the march in all directions".

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and Kurdish fighters alike fled from the advanced military weapons the Islamic State militias had taken possession of when Iraq's military had fled before the onslaught of IS, leaving their U.S.-provided armoured vehicles behind. Cut off from water and food in the Sinjar mountains, the Yazidi in particular are facing doom should no further arrive. Children are dying from parched thirst and heat.