After victory in key Iraqi town, time for revenge
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Source: Reuters
After helping government forces break Islamic State's grip over a strategic town just south of Baghdad on Saturday, Shi'ite militias decided it was time for payback.
A Reuters witness saw the fighters in green camouflage uniforms scream and swear at members of the Islamist group as they kicked and struck them with rifle butts in Jurf al-Sakhar.
As the angry crowd of militiamen around the unarmed militants swelled, shots rang out. The three men lay soaked in blood in the dirt with gunshot wounds to the head.
"Those dogs are Chechens. They don't deserve to stay alive. We took confessions from them and we don't need them anymore," said one of the Shi'ite militiamen.
The victory could allow Iraqi forces to prevent the Sunni insurgents from edging closer to the capital, sever connections to their strongholds in western Anbar province and stop them infiltrating the mainly Shi'ite Muslim south.
Asked why the three men were executed, an army officer in Jurf al-Sakhar said: "We don't need them anymore. Why should we keep them alive?"
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/_eTRSGydtemRECMy1ShYuw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTI5NjtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz00NTA-/
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/26/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-executions-idUSKBN0IF0W120141026
I guess this war has its own rules.
msongs
(67,199 posts)flamingdem
(39,304 posts)that since there aren't any new mass religions taking hold - the current ones may burn out.
DreamGypsy
(2,252 posts)...its own rules?
The apocryphal "battle of Waterloo was won on the the playing fields of Eton" does not mean that Napoleon and Wellington et al agreed to a victory based on the strict rules of polo.
There is, I suppose, a meta-rule for war:
Devise, implement, and deploy evermore cruel, effective, and anonymous means to damage, demoralize, and destroy your fellow men/women, identified as 'enemies".
Hence, poison gas, atomic bombs, biological warfare, drones, and ...
Here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generations who are butchered and damned.
Phil Ochs wrote about his song, Draft Dodger Rag:
In Vietnam, a 19-year-old Vietcong soldier screams that Americans should leave his country as he is shot by a government firing squad. His American counterpart meanwhile is staying up nights thinking up ways to deceptively destroy his health, mind, or virility to escape two years in a relatively comfortable army. Free enterprise strikes again.[/blockquoteSo I wish you well, Sarge, give 'em hell
Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
I'll be the first to go.
flamingdem
(39,304 posts)is a nice idea anyway.. Love Phil Ochs, never fully understood the lyrics since I was pretty young during Vietnam but the intensity was easy to get.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)About as compelling a sob story as Gestapo officers who fell into Soviet hands.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)More from the article:
The bodies of more than 50 Islamic State fighters were scattered across Jurf al-Sakhar, on streets, in trenches, near houses and on the beds of pickup trucks, many of them charred.
The dead included 15 militants whose hands were tied behind their backs, lying in farmland.
The stench of death was everywhere as flies covered bodies.
Asked why government forces had not buried the bodies of men who were killed a day before, an Iraqi army colonel said: "Those terrorists do not deserve to be buried. Let the dogs eat their flesh. Many of our men were killed by them."
<snip>
But then came a reminder of the determination of Islamic State militants to expand their reach to Baghdad in pursuit of a powerful caliphate.
As Iraqi government soldiers and militias savored their victory and were taking photographs of the bodies, mortars fired by Islamic State fighters who had fled to orchards to the west rained down on the town.
The blast hit the militiamen, killing dozens and scattering body parts. Soldiers who moments before were celebrating now screamed out in fear.
flamingdem
(39,304 posts)heads. Isis is relentless, they are uber driven and their propaganda is better.
flamingdem
(39,304 posts)about beheading.
I haven't quite stooped to Isis jokes, yet.
progree
(10,864 posts)Party philosophy towards many of their fellow citizens. Certainly Reagan's attitude to AIDS patients.
Warpy
(110,913 posts)only now they can up the slaughter with better and better weapons.
We really need to get the hell out of this one. We have no dog in this fight.
Hulk
(6,699 posts)And we want to get involved in those barbaric wars? This whole mess is a nightmare for anyone who picks up a weapon, and anyone who is near those who do. Hell on earth. Welcome to their "holy islam".
rafeh1
(385 posts)but these characters are worse. Bush really f d the country
AtomicDryad
(9 posts)...keep in mind what the Daesh 'victims' do to 'heretics' like Shi'a or 'satanists' like Ezidi. We're talking about a genocidal, expansionist, misogynist, rape-happy horde of bigoted pedophillic sex slavers. As the article quotes:
Responding to the same question, a senior member of a local Shi'ite militia said: "When we liberated Jurf al-Sakhar we found the skeletons of innocent people they killed and never buried. They should face the same fate."
In this particular incident, I don't think it's accurate to say their hate was religious in nature, nor fair to hint they're like Daesh, and just the other side of the same coin.
...when or if they kill sunni civilians, then that's another story.
And yes killing POWs isn't a good thing.
AtomicDryad
(9 posts)
Kurdish grocer Cuneyt Hemo remembers the moment he crossed paths with a jihadist ISIS prisoner inside the besieged Syrian town of Kobane.
He begged us to kill him so he could go to paradise and be rewarded, Hemo told AFP, in a rare glimpse of life inside the town which has been fought over street by street for nearly a month.
Hemo, 33, is one of an estimated 200 000 mainly Kurdish Syrians who have fled the onslaught of Islamic State (ISIS) militants on Kobane to the relative safety of Turkey.
The jihadist was captured by Kurdish fighters during fierce close-quarters fighting for control of the town on the Turkish border.
He was held for a day and, according to Hemo, was ultimately killed by his captors.
We captured him in the street, said Hemo, dragging on a cigarette in the Turkish border town of Suruc, where along with other Kobane refugees, he has found sanctuary.
He said he came from Azerbaijan. He was in his 20s and spoke to us in Arabic, he added. The fighter was dressed in full camouflage gear.
The extraordinary encounter - which AFP cannot independently verify - marked a rare moment that a Kurdish civilian stood face-to-face with an ISIS fighter, who have been glimpsed by the outside world largely only as distant figures seen from theTurkish border.
Hemo stayed in Kobane longer than most civilians, only moving over the Turkish border last week, some three weeks after the attack by the jihadists begun.
He said he was not one of the fighters battling with the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) against the ISIS extremists. Before the conflict, he worked at a grocery store in Kobane. But as a man of fighting age, he helped with supplies.
It was in that capacity that Hemo had the encounter with the jihadist, who was captured by the YPG during the street fighting for the western part of the town.
The bearded jihadist explained at length to his captors how he had come to Kobane to deliver it from the kuffar (the infidels).
We asked him him why the jihadists were attacking us. He replied that we were kuffar [the infidels] and they had received the order to put us on the path of true Islam, he said.
Not scared of dying
Attempting to show the captured man that they were all adherents of the same religion, Hemo said that the YPG fighters took the man to a mosque in Kobane.
But even as a captive, the man remained inflexible, he said.
We tried in vain to help him find reason. But he did not want to know anything, said Hemo.
He said again and again that we were the infidel and he wanted to go to paradise to find the 40 women who had been promised to him, he added.
When his captors offered him something to eat and drink, the man refused and said that should he manage to escape he would blow himself up like his brother suicide bombers.
Hemo said he had still not understood the stubbornness of the jihadist and his disdain for death.
He told us several times that he was happy for his brothers who had become martyrs and he would join them in paradise.
The jihadists are reported to have repeatedly used suicide bombing as a tactic in the standoff, with a young woman fighting for the YPG having reportedly used the same tactic against them.
The Pentagon said on Wednesday it believed that U.S.-led air strikes had killed several hundred ISIS fighters in and around Kobane, but warned it was still possible that the town could fall to jihadists.
Hemo said that in the end the prisoner was killed by his captors with a shot to the head, although it has not been possible to independently verify the account.
He said that there had been no initial plan to kill the jihadist but concern had grown among the YPG fighters as the extent of his fanaticism became clear.
He was not scared of death, Hemo said, adding he was shot in the street the day after he was captured.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)LeftishBrit
(41,192 posts)re-post in GD.