Yazidis Weren’t Stranded, Pentagon Looks for Other Missions

[KamaAina]

http://news.antiwar.com/2014/08/13/yazidis-werent-stranded-pentagon-looks-for-other-missions/

The 40,000 Yazidis stranded on the mountain. That was the pretext for US military intervention in Iraq, as set out by President Obama last Thursday. The air war was commenced, and officials were talking up sending ground forces for “rescue” operations as recently as this afternoon.

But a funny thing happened when the US “advisers” got to Mount Sinjar. There weren’t 40,000 starving Yazidis stranded there. In fact, the indications are that there never were, and the Pentagon quickly dropped the “rescue” plan.

What happened? It turns out there were Yazidis already living on the top of the mountain, and while there were some refugees who fled up there, the humanitarian crisis was never what it was made out to be, and an influx of Kurdish PKK fighters from Syria quickly broke the overblown siege.

The Pentagon is trying to manage the narrative by simply saying the rescue mission “appears unnecessary,” but the fact that it was used to start a US war remains, and the State Department is doubling down, trying to spin the lack of a crisis as vindication of the war.

Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin"? Mr. KamaAina can!

[Maedhros]

1. So the "genocide" really wasn't?

Color me flabbergasted.

[WilliamPitt]

2. Trying to contain my shock OK it's contained.

[former9thward]

3. One of a long list of military fabrications to start wars.

There have been quite a few in Iraq alone. WMD, Babies being bayoneted in incubators, etc.

[Autumn]

4. Well color me shocked and surprised.

As always they overplayed their hand. Poor incubator babies!!!! guess no one would have believed that again.

[mwrguy]

5. ISIS is dumping premature babies out of incubators!

[monmouth3]

10. OMG, is this true?

[gratuitous]

31. Does it matter?

If enough of the media report it, it becomes true.

[KamaAina]

12. DUzy!!

[malaise]

25. You have a good memory

The warning was clear for all from the first photo - it was identified as somewhere else

[BuelahWitch]

6. Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! n/t

[msanthrope]

7. What a pantload from antiwar.....It's like they are disappointed

we helped prevent a genocide.

Never mind the news reports and video from the evacuation last week.....150 Marines means Vietnam, all over again!! Instead of being happy that our airstrikes and humanitarian aid last week helped people, instead of being grateful we didn't have any Marine casualties, let's accuse the President of starting a war!

[atreides1]

16. Did we prevent anything or just delay it?

It's not as if the Yezidis are going to find a warm welcome from the Kurds either! The Kurds are still Muslim and the Yezidis are still considered by even moderate Muslims to be devil worshipers...I foresee a trip to a Western nation that will accept them, in their future!

If he's not trying to justify putting more boots on the ground then a re-deployment of those 150 "humanitarian" experts should be happening within the next week to 10 days, right?

[msanthrope]

23. They're already redeployed off of Mt. Sinjar. nt

[NuclearDem]

30. Except it was the Kurds who evacuated the Yazidi in the first place.

And not to mention the Yazidi in Sinjar are predominately Kurdish themselves.

[mopinko]

39. there is a good reason this site used to be prohibited here.

they make it up as they go along.

[msanthrope]

40. It's WSWS without the wit. nt

[bigtree]

8. right

. . . this was clear from the beginning - all through every excuse for escalating the force - bolstering the deployment's justifications with nonsense about their need to rescue the civilians from the latest violent manifestations of our own nation's persistent militarism in that country.

Now it's back to protecting and defending their own opportunistic presence and conducting this president's extension and co-opting of Bush's war-on-terror. ISIS/ISIL = al-Qaeda . . . get it?

[randome]

9. "...trying to manage the narrative..." by telling the truth.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]I'm always right. When I'm wrong I admit it.
So then I'm right about being wrong.[/center][/font][hr]

[Autumn]

11. So we have an incompetent Pentagon if they didn't know "that truth" at the start of this.

Spin, rinse, repeat. It's always worked well hasn't it. Funny thing is now they get caught a lot sooner.

[NuclearDem]

17. Get caught with what?

There were thousands stranded in the mountains, then the peshmerga found a way to get most of them down, and now a US-led evacuation is no longer necessary.

[Autumn]

20. Hell of a tactical force for the peshmerga to get them down since yesterday afternoon.

They were talking of sending in forces to rescue them then.

[NuclearDem]

33. Or Intel hadn't expected the Kurds to be so successful

and thought up until the recent visit to the mountains that there were far more than there actually were.

Or it's Gulf of Tonkin and incubators all over again.

[KG]

13. heh.

color me surprised. not.

[NuclearDem]

14. Oh, all the misleading bullshit in that article...

Considering Kurdistan has been evacuating the Yazidi on the mountain by the thousands since airstrikes stalled the IS advance, no shit there's no longer 40,000 stranded on the mountain.

[eissa]

15. Sorry, but this is complete bullshit

The ethnic cleansing of Yazidis and Assyrian/Chaldean populations in Iraq and Syria is VERY real. They have slaughtered thousands, and caused thousands more to flee in terror with little more than the clothes on their back. This isn't some made-up narrative for a pretext to war, or any such thing. The Assyrian Aid Society, a charity group I've been involved with, is on the ground in Iraq trying in vain to supply humanitarian aid to terrified people hiding out in churches (if they're lucky to find space) or just sleeping on the ground near security stations hoping they'll offer some protection against these savages. My own in-laws are stuck in a town in southeastern Syria with ISIS just miles away trying to make their way in, while the local population tries desperately to find a way out (there are checkpoints all over the region; the closest airport is in Qamishli -- if you can make it there, good luck to you.)

I've always been anti-war. Always. I've always been vocal about the stranglehold the military industrial complex has had on our government, the way the Defense Department sucks billions from our GDP at the expense of nearly every other program, and I've taken part in my fair share of anti-war demonstrations. I hate being placed in the position of advocating for military intervention, but a situation like this warrants it. I wish it didn't fall on the US. I wish Germany, Australia, Norway -- anyone really, would step up and shoulder this crisis. But they haven't, and in their absence we can't allow the ethnic cleansing of innocents to continue at the hands of these criminals.

[cpwm17]

27. Tragically it is all too real

and it appears the US has gone out of its way to do the worst thing possible in everything it does in the ME. It's a huge fiasco.

The US should at least do something to help save these poor people. But unfortunately the US generally makes things much worse when it intervenes.

[KoKo]

28. There are humanitarian needs...as you say...and Christians and other

sects are in dire need.

I think the article is saying that all the focus on the "estimated/reported," 40,000 stranded in the Mountains gave USA a humanitarian reason to regain flagging American citizen support for more intervention in Iraq to support targeting ISIL. It's probably true that the numbers and situation were probably inflated for propaganda purposes. Once Obama sent more advisers in to assess the situation they realized that the situation on the mountain wasn't what it was hyped to be they suddenly discontinued the aid. That would seem to say that most had gotten off the mountain and the air lifts had supplied enough food to sustain them until they did.

Unfortunately all the other displaced people who had to flee their homes from ISIL have businesses/homes destroyed plus lack of food and resources...and many have no place to go. BUT THEY aren't getting the food drops and attention. It was those on the mountain.

What a mess. And we still don't know the collateral damage extent of the bombing and how many refugees are suffering with no where to go or hunkered in bombed out homes. Who will help all those displaced by ISIL..are there any relief agencies who can get in there given the unstable situation or will it be the UN?

[Chathamization]

35. The “ISIS is hunting them down for extermination right now!” line is also suspect

I’ve never heard it explained why IS/ISIS/ISIL didn’t just go into the mountains and kill them all if that really was their primary intent. Note that this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any danger; they are in a war zone where sectarian killings are common (across the board). The false “Iraqi soldiers killing incubator babies” story didn’t make the Iraqi army pussycats either. But it would be nice if Americans at least asked some questions when told by their leaders that there was a dire crisis and that we must get involved militarily right this moment to avoid catastrophe.

[conservaphobe]

18. They were before we intervened. This article is bullshit. nt

[KamaAina]

19. Would any of you three care to explain exactly what is BS?

[babylonsister]

21. They weren't? Apparently the Kurdish

foreign minister thought it was a crisis...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chaos-in-iraqs-north-as-yazidi-minorities-starve-and-islamic-state-presses-kurds/2014/08/06/0d7dc428-1da3-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html

The United Nations says the Iraqi government has yet to take up an offer of technical assistance for airdrops, which are being coordinated with local authorities in the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northeastern Iraq.

Falah Mustafa Bakir, the Kurdistan region’s foreign minister, argued that Iraq simply lacks the capacity to provide aid and needs international help. “This is not a time for technical assistance,” he said. “This is a time for immediate action. Children are dying.”

[Bluenorthwest]

22. What a mountain of bullshit this is.

nt

[SidDithers]

24. antiwar.com. LOL...

Last edited Thu Aug 14, 2014, 03:35 PM - Edit history (1)

Justin Raimondo and his band of happy nutcases.

Justin Raimondo (born Dennis Raimondo; November 18, 1951) is an American author and the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He describes himself as a "conservative-paleo-libertarian."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Raimondo


Apparently, conservative paleo-libertarian attacks on Obama are where "the left" is going now. Any port in a storm, eh?

Sid

[NuclearDem]

34. Pat Buchanan for president!

[HERVEPA]

26. The site is bullshit

[La Lioness Priyanka]

29. i dont believe this unless you think there is a collusion between the BBC and the pentagon. nt

[NickB79]

32. The plight of the Yazidis is well-documented by international observers and reporters

As was the stream of refugees from the mountains, AFTER US airstrikes and Kurdish assaults cleared the way for them to leave.

The US advisers arrived AFTER the bulk of the Yazidi had managed to flee. The "indications" that there never were 40,000 refugees is utter bullshit repudiated by the Kurds, the Yazidis themselves, the US and the UN.

Some people are so desperate to undermine President Obama that it appears they'd rather see thousands of women and children slaughtered or starved than admit the airstrikes were the right idea.

[reorg]

36. But what about the women sold into slavery?

"We spoke to some of the Yazidis who fled from Sinjar. We have dozens of accounts and witness testimonies describing painful scenes of how Islamic State fighters arrived and took girls from their families by force to use them as slaves," Sudani said.
http://www.firstpost.com/world/isil-killed-500-yazidis-took-300-women-as-slaves-iraq-govt-1658713.html


300 of them, in other articles it's up to 500, sometimes the "girls" are described as "women under 35", though.

Their price on the slave market varies:

Islamic State Selling Captured Yazidi Girls For $10
http://pamelageller.com/2014/08/islamic-state-selling-captured-yazidi-girls-10.html/

On Saturday reports emerged that hundreds of women and girls had been kidnapped by the jihadists and sold into sex slavery for as little as $5 (£3, $3.75).
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/iraq-crisis-yazidi-women-leap-off-mount-sinjar-cliffs-escape-sex-slavery-by-islamic-state-1461007


Oops, now the number of them has increased:

THOUSANDS of captured women from the Iraqi Yazidi sect are being held as domestic slaves or sold to traffickers to work in brothels across the Middle East, Kurdish intelligence sources say.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/yazidi-women-sold-to-brothels-across-the-middle-east-kurds-say/story-fnb64oi6-1227024752361?nk=7a41cd464831f649001f67ac07634161#


The UN confirm:

Two U.N. officials say they’ve received accounts of “barbaric acts” of sexual violence including “savage rapes” being used as weapons of war against women and teenage girls and boys belonging to the Yazidi, Christian, Turkomen and Shabak minority groups in Iraq. As many as 1,500 Yazidis and Christians may have been forced into sex slavery and human trafficking, the UN reports.
http://www.newsweek.com/women-and-teens-suffer-barbaric-rape-islamic-state-fighters-264523

However, it also has been reported that

False images used to ‘prove’ slavery, genital mutilation under ISIS

The savagery of ISIS jihadists rampaging through Syria and Iraq is well known. But dozens of photos circulating on social media networks and the media claiming to show the barbaric acts of the Islamist group are, in fact, fake.

While ISIS has claimed responsibility for multiple acts of horrific violence, many of the shocking images published online and attributed to the jihadist group have actually been taken out of context and falsely labelled.

http://observers.france24.com/content/20140812-slavery-genital-mutilation-collective-marriage-fake-isis-images

as I noticed myself when I did this little trick of doing reverse image search with the pictures on this site:

Images of Christians/Yazidi Women being sold as slaves (Graphic contect)
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=99b_1407766209

Not a single one of them from Yazidis in Iraq.

Ah, the blessing and the curse of "social media"...

[kentuck]

37. More like Grenada...

when we had to go in to rescue all those students on that island? This was just days or hours after our marines were blown up in Beirut.

[Kurska]

38. This is the stupidest dreck I've ever seen.

There weren't 50,000 people living on the side of a damn mountain and even if they were they wouldn't have started starving within days cause ISIS showed up, they woulda had food.