...embracing their inner Islamic Brute...in northern Iraq.
In a largely deserted landscape, we entered the area around Mount Sinjar where 30 mass graves of victims of ISIS crimes would eventually be found.
Disputed between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Sinjar district in Nineveh province is still central to securing Iraq against an ISIS return.
Despite promises of a return to relative stability following ISIS’s territorial defeat, Duraid Hikmat, Nineveh’s director of agriculture, said in July that more than 30,000 hectares (75,000 acres) of crops had been destroyed in recent fires ‐ about a third by criminals and
In Sinjar, the blazes have severely harmed the livelihoods of Sunnis and Yazidis who had begun to return after ISIS drove them out in 2014.
Sinjar is also a strategic area that forms a border with Syria, where both US forces and Iran,
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire...
and other regional powers are vying for influence. Four recent explosions of munitions stored at bases of Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias have led to rumors of foreign
...
KABOOM!...
s in Iraq, with fears that a new conflict with Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for
spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan,the abbreviation
IRGCis a cognate form of
Stürmabteilung (or SA),the term
Supreme Guideis a cognate form of either
Shahor
Führeror maybe both, and they hate
could develop.
What follows is an excerpt from my new book, After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (Gefen Publishing House, 2019).
From Dohuk in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region there are two roads to Sinjar, where ISIS carried out genocide against Iraq’s Yazidi minority.
| Long excerpt — you’ll want a cup of coffee or the equivalent and a comfortable chair for reading this, dear Reader. |