On the border of ISIS territory, Iraqi civilians fight for their survival

[lostinblue 1,989]

wo months ago, Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish regional government, held a press conference on a hill overlooking Sinjar, a town in the northwestern corner of Iraq. The day before, following an intense bombardment by American warplanes, Kurdish forces had taken control of Sinjar for the first time since they were routed from it by the Islamic State, or ISIS, in August of 2014. As smoke plumes and helicopters ascended behind him, Barzani, standing at a podium of sandbags, declared the town “liberated.”

After a retinue of bodyguards spirited the President away in a sport-utility vehicle, the foreign correspondents and local journalists headed down the hill to view the damage. On the outskirts of Sinjar the road became impassable: damaged, clogged with military trucks, and littered with debris. My interpreter and I parked and continued on foot. The town, once home to a hundred thousand people, was devastated. ISIS had killed or displaced nearly all the inhabitants, most of whom belonged to Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority. It had burned down their houses, looted their shops, and blown up their shrines. Whatever remained the American air strikes had destroyed.

A lone man with a rifle seemed to know where he was going. We hurried to catch up with him.

“I’m checking on my uncle’s house,” he said.

His name was Azad—he wouldn’t give his family name—and he told us he grew up in Sinjar. When ISIS began seizing territory in eastern Syria and then across northern Iraq, two summers ago, troops with the Iraqi Kurdish armed forces, or peshmerga, were deployed in the town. That June, ISIS captured Mosul—the second-largest city in the country, eighty miles to the east—yet most residents still felt safe. But when ISIS moved into Sinjar the peshmerga withdrew. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Azad and his family were among some fifty thousand Yazidis who escaped into the Sinjar Mountains, a thirty-mile-long range that looms above the town. Most of the refugees were evacuated by helicopter or relocated to camps farther north, but many of them, including Azad’s family, chose to remain amid the frigid peaks, living in tents with little food or water, waiting for the day when they could return to their homes.

“That’s it,” Azad said. He nodded toward a narrow building with blown-out windows, a sagging roof, and caved-in walls. The ground floor had been a shop. Its metal shutter lay on the sidewalk in a heap, like unfurled cloth.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

Azad looked around. It was getting dark.

“Go back up the mountain,” he said. He turned and walked away.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/18/the-front-lines

A long read folks

Farther down the story it is always the same .....

ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’ ” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

The ordinary folk cannot have weapons. Weapons are a threat.....Whether European and American totalitarians or ISIS, guns have to go

[Darnell 8,479]

so, Kurds are coming into Europe, getting special asylum/refugee status ?

yes? no ?

if no, why no ?

[ready4ONE 5,400]

Jeebus that is a long way to go for a gun control diatribe. Cudos! Did not see that coming!