Reports of mass murder, torture, slavery, rape, child sex abuse, brainwashing and imprisonment haven’t been enough for President Barack Obama to rescue the Syria civilian population in living hell from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. White House officials can’t even get the acronym right, calling the world’s most deadly terror group ISIL against the global consensus. Obama and his Secretary of State john Kerry won’t even call the outlawed group Islamic terrorists, citing concerns about offending Muslims. Limiting U.S. actions to air strikes and Special Forces, Obama sits idly by while the population controlled by ISIS is systematically terrorized by a regime no different than Adolf Hilter’s Third Reich. With horror stories surfacing everyday, White House complacency blackens U.S. leadership on the world stage, much like allowing the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews in WWII.
Recently escaped 22-year-old housewife named Fatima from Mosul confirmed the use of the “Biter” or “Clipper” used by ISIS henchmen against Syrian and Yazizi women that don’t properly cover. She describes the device as a kind of tooth-like jaw mechanism that removes chunks of flesh from the human body, leaving brutal wounds and eventual scars. “The Biter has become a nightmare for us,” Fatima told reporters at the Mabrouka refugee camp near the Kurdish-controlled area in Northeast Syria. ISIS insists that women completely cover bodies with loose or baggy pants, socks and gloves in keeping with strict Sharia Islamic law. What doesn’t the White House get about the intent of ISIS to enforce the most extreme form of radical Islam? Refusing to label ISIS a radical Islamic terror group causes confusion in the public’s mind, trying to find a responsible solution.
Bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria since Sept. 2014 hasn’t stopped the terror group from continuing its inhumane and barbaric treatment of Syrian citizens since seizing Mosul’s 664,000 residents June 13, 2014. Hearing about systematic torture, rape and mass murder of Syrian civilians should have prompted the White House to act more decisively. “My sister was punished last so harshly last month because she had forgotten her gloves and left them at home,” Fatima reported. U.S. officials heard reports of ISIS taking various groups of Christians, Muslims and Yazidi women as sex slaves. ISIS self-ordained caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi routinely takes underage minors as his sex slaves, setting the example for ISIS’s rank-and-file. U.S. officials know that civilians trying to escape ISIS face torture and certain death, attesting to the regime’s inhuman brutality.
Embroiled in the Syrian sectarian quagmire with U.S. Special Forces playing a minor role, Obama has refused to put troops on the ground to once-and-for-all end the ISIS blight on humanity. Complicating the picture are competing interests from Russia, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Aligned to wipe out the Shiite regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the Saudi’s and Turks have no real interest in battling ISIS because of their Sunni Islamic roots. Obama and Kerry find themselves at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, both trying to save al-Assad’s Shiite regime. Because of strong financial ties to Saudi Arabia and NATO’s ties to Turkey, the White House has backed the Saudi proxy war against Damascus. Saudi’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has stated openly the Kingdom’s backs Syrian rebel attempts to topple al-Assad.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the U.S. routinely call the mess a “civil war,” when they know it’s a classic sectarian proxy war pitting Wahhabi insurgents against al-Assad’s Shiite government. Instead of siding with Putin, Obama and Kerry have rubber stamped the Saudi proxy war that’s killed 250,000, displacing some 5 million more into neighboring countries and Europe. With Russian air support, the Syrian military was poised to besiege Aleppo, the bastion of Saudi-backed rebel forces. Facing certain defeat, Kerry called for an urgent ceasefire to give Saudi-and-U.S. backed rebel forces time to regroup. While agreeing in Moscow Dec. 15, 2015 with Putin to let al-Assad stay in power, the official U.S. policy—like the Saudis, Turks and European Union—is regime change in Damascus. Putin warned the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 28, 2015 that toppling al-Assad would repeat the mistakes of Iraq and Libya.
Coming around slowly to ISIS’s unthinkable barbarism in Iraq and Syria, Kerry now says the U.S. considers labeling ISIS atrocities “genocide.” “None of us have ever seen anything like it in our lifetimes,” Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Feb. 25. Why there’s anything different from the more glaring ISIS atrocities over the last 30 months, including public beheadings, mafia-style executions, public incinerations, etc., is anyone’s guess? Labeling ISIS atrocities “genocide” would trigger a 1948 international treaty against genocide, following the world’s slow response to stop the Nazi genocide of European Jews in WWII. Violence “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical (sic) or religious group,” qualifies under the treaty’s definition of genocide. ISIS atrocities against Muslims, Christians and Yazidis more than qualify as “genocide.”
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