Turkish forces are reportedly forcing refugees fleeing the chaos of the Middle East to turn back from the border with Bulgaria. According to reports, as many as 600 refugees, including women and children, are being forced to return to their camps in Turkey now.
Germany is expected to train a Yazidi force in northern Iraq to seize back their homeland from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), German television channel N24 reports.
SINJAR, Iraq– Yazidi men and women are taking up arms and joining the Peshmerga to help in defeating Islamic State, as thousands of refugees continue to take shelter on Sinjar Mountain, ten months after President Obama declared the mountain had evaded humanitarian disaster.
According to Kurdish media network Rudaw, seventeen-year-old “Suzan,” a Kurdish Yezidi girl was kidnapped, gang-raped, enslaved, and impregnated by ISIS warriors. Incredibly, she managed to escape and has told her story to Delal Sindy, a Swedish-Kurdish activist living in a Kurdish region.
While the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS) has made major inroads in the city of Ramadi and territories increasingly close to the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Kurdish forces backed by American airstrikes have reported major progress in the north of the country, with the Iraqi government reporting that an American airstrike has killed the ISIS governor of Mosul.
The Yazidi fighters that have managed to oust the Islamic State from their home in Sinjar, northern Iraq, are clamoring for help in organizing their own militia, asserting that they cannot trust Arabs or even Kurdish Muslims after the massacre the tiny religious minority endured last summer.
The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday calling for the protection of Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in the Middle East from the depredations of the Islamic State. A call for the establishment of safe havens for ethnic and religious minorities in the Nineveh Plains is part of the resolution.
When one hears a story of Western civilians heading to the Middle East to volunteer for combat duty, one thinks of the hideously successful ISIS recruiting drive. However, as Reuters reports, “a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting” with a Christian militia group called Dwekh Nawsha, “citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.”
Former Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and his Wilberforce Initiative has released a report titled “Edge of Extinction: Plight of Iraqi Christians,” which documents the grave situation of the Christian and other minority communities in the country.
The atrocities of ISIS have gone almost beyond the power to shock, but it’s still jarring to see so much depravity collected into a single report. The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child speaks of the Islamic State selling young children into slavery, pressing mentally handicapped kids into service as suicide bombers, using them as human shields against American air strikes, and conducting mass executions of children by beheading them, crucifying them, and burying them alive.
The savage Muslim persecution of Assyrian Christians and Yazidi (Zoroastrian/Hindus) by Sunni Muslims in the Middle East and in Shiite Iran has reached fever-pitch. ISIS has systematically murdered, tortured, captured, and enslaved Yazidi girls and women. They have done likewise to the Assyrians in Syria and Iraq. Iran has persecuted Assyrians as well.