Tag Archive for: Assyrian Christians

As Syrian Ceasefire Begins, Experts Warn Trump Admin. to Proceed with Caution

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A shaky ceasefire in southern Syria between warring Islamic factions appears to be holding after deadly violence erupted last week in the district of Suwayda, which provoked Israel to launch a series of strikes to protect the Druze minority in the region. Experts remain wary of the ability of the new Syrian government, with its roots in Islamist extremism, to maintain stability in the country.

On Sunday, reports indicated that an agreement orchestrated by the Syrian government for the Druze and Bedouin tribes to cease hostilities was reached, with no reported violence occurring as of Sunday. The violence began a week ago after a Druze merchant was reportedly abducted on the road to Damascus. As a result, Druze and Bedouin fighters began an armed conflict that was joined by Syrian government forces, with both sides claiming atrocities have been committed against them. The U.K.-based monitoring organization Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that over 1,120 people have been killed, including 427 Druze fighters and 298 Druze civilians as well as 354 government security personnel and 21 Sunni Bedouin.

The bloody conflict drew the attention of Israel, which launched strikes last week on 160 targets in the region on behalf of the Druze, a 150,000-person minority group within the Jewish state. According to Dr. A.J. Nolte, director of the Institute for Israel Studies at Regent University, the reason behind Israel’s intervention is rooted in a number of factors.

“There are a couple of dynamics, and some of them are emotional in terms of actually domestic politics and policy, and some of them are strategic,” he explained during “Washington Watch” Friday. “… The Druze populations in Galilee have been citizens of Israel for a long time. They are active in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. … There are also Druze communities in the Golan Heights, which, of course, Israel annexed in 1967. Those communities in the Golan have been divided from their family members. … [S]o for those Druze in the Golan who have been fairly loyal to Israel, they haven’t necessarily taken citizenship because they don’t want to fight their cousins, but they have been generally loyal. … [S]o these Druze were, let’s just say, very much agitating for Israel to defend their cousins, and many of them were, in fact, going across the border to see family, and also some youth were maybe going to potentially fight alongside the Druze in southern Syria.”

Nolte further detailed a “practical” reason for Israel’s Syria operations. “[T]he Golan Heights are part of Israeli sovereign territory, and so having a little bit of a buffer and having some Druze communities on the Syrian side of the border that would have positive feelings toward Israel provides defense and depth on that northern flank. … I think that one day there can be normalization with Syria, but from the Israeli perspective, hope is not a strategy. The Druze are a known quantity; their loyalty is known. And I think for [Israel], it’s a strategic choice between the Druze and the unknown.”

Meanwhile, a distressing account from the SOHR reported that 194 Druze civilians were “summarily executed by [Syrian] defence and interior ministry personnel.” In addition, 128,000 civilians living in Suwayda have been displaced by the violence, according to the U.N.

Still, the Trump administration is signaling its support of the new Syrian government, saying there is “no Plan B” for stabilizing the country after years of civil war. U.S. envoy Tom Barrack further criticized Israel’s intervention, saying that while the Jewish state has its own prerogative to defend itself, the strikes created “another very confusing chapter” and “came at a very bad time.” He also contended that Syrian authorities “need to be held accountable” for killings of civilians.

Nolte argued that the apparent differences between the U.S. and Israel are likely the result of strategic diplomacy that the Trump administration is attempting to carry out.

“I think we should always keep in mind with President Trump that he has a lot of irons in the fire in the Middle East,” he pointed out. “… [B]y criticizing Israel’s strikes on Damascus, he allows himself to be positioned as sort of an honest broker between Syria and Israel, because if he comes out in support of … Netanyahu’s strikes in Damascus on Syrian military targets … it becomes much more difficult for him to then try to negotiate between Israel and Syria as an honest broker. So I think there’s a lot of careful diplomacy that is going into the distance that appears to be publicly created. … I think Trump is playing Middle Eastern politics and is probably playing the hand he’s been dealt about as well as he can.”

At the same time, experts like John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during the first Trump administration, say that the new Syrian government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda member, has much to prove before it can be trusted.

“[I]t’s complicated like many things in the Middle East,” he acknowledged during “This Week on Capitol Hill” over the weekend. “You can say for sure, this new regime in Syria is very anti-Iran. That’s quite important to Israel to cut off the supply of weapons and other equipment to Hezbollah, one of Iran’s terrorist proxies in Lebanon. But the new government in Damascus itself has a history of terrorism. The new government is … saying they’re renouncing it to get better relations with the West. But the treatment of the minority of religious populations in Syria is a very important question.”

Bolton continued, “My personal view is the new regime in Syria has really not proven satisfactorily that it has renounced its terrorist past, and this is important because you don’t want a new Syrian government to consolidate control over the whole territory, including in the northeast, where American allies — Kurdish fighters — are holding approximately 10,000 ISIS terrorist prisoners. We don’t want that to happen unless we’re really sure that this regime wants to turn a page. We don’t need another terrorist government in the Middle East. We don’t need an Afghanistan on the Mediterranean. So I think we should be cautious. I certainly welcome the regime being against Iran, but there are just a significant number of other questions that remain unresolved.”

Bolton, who formerly served as ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, went on to argue that there is much that the Syrian government can do to prove that they are not a threat to the West, including opening the books on the regime of former dictator Bashar al-Assad and booting out Russia.

“I’d like to know … everything in the Assad regime files on American hostages that were taken over the past many years, or the hostages really from anywhere else,” he observed. “I’d like to know about the Assad government’s pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. Open the files. If you’re not a terrorist yourself, you don’t have any need of chemical or biological weapons. Let’s find out where the Assad regime purchased some of the critical elements of that program. And it would be nice as well to kick the Russians out of their naval base at Tartus and their air base in Latakia province in Syria, while we’re at it. So there’s some concrete things the new regime could do, I think, to establish their bona fides. But they haven’t done it yet.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Moderate Act Has Failed

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In Latakia, the stronghold of the Alawites, jihadists belonging to Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s government and unaffiliated Sunni gunmen as well have been fighting with the locals, and so far have murdered 340 Alawite civilians. These civilians are being held collectively responsible for the atrocities carried out by Bashar Assad, who is himself an Alawite and relied on his Alawite-officered army to suppress the Sunnis during Syria’s long civil war, that lasted from 2011 to the end of 2024. More on the fighting in Latakia can be found here: “Over 340 civilians killed by Syrian government-linked gunmen – report,” Reuters, March 8, 2025:

Syrian security forces and affiliated gunmen killed more than 340 civilians, the vast majority of them from the Alawite minority, over the last two days, Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters on Saturday.

Other Syrian sources have reported casualties somewhere between 180-200.

The state media, now run by the victorious Sunni rebels, headed by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose rule has replaced that of Assad, is claiming that the Alawite civilians were killed not by the government’s security services, but by “individuals” who, it did not need to be said, were exacting revenge for relatives murdered by the Alawite-dominated Assad regime.

Syrian state media on Thursday cited an interior ministry source as saying “individual violations” had occurred during a government operation to crack down on terrorists linked to the ousted Assad regime and said it was working to address the incidents….

Ever since the 1930s, when the French, then holders of the League of Nations Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, favored the Alawites as enforcers of government decrees, for they were deemed less hostile to the French than the Sunnis i helped to make them a military caste, the Alawites have been the backbone of the Syrian army. Now the Alawites are bottled up in Latakia, but many still have their weapons from their army days, and have been ambushing the new government’s jihadist military, that has arrived in Latakia to crush them. And those forces, as well as individual Sunnis, have responded with massacres of Alawite civilians. More than 340 Alawite civilians are reported to have been killed by March 8, and the killing in Latakia continues. Other reports claim that 1,800 civilians, mostly Alawites but including some Greek Orthodox and Melkites, have now been killed by the security services of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Sunni security services.

They included at least two dozen male residents of the Alawite town of Al Mukhtareyah killed by gunmen on Friday, the Observatory and two Alawite activists said, citing contacts in the region and video footage from the scene.

In his first comments on the violence, interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa said government forces would pursue “remnants” of the ousted Bashar al Assad government and bring them to trial. He also said that those who assaulted civilians would be held accountable.

Ahmed al-Sharaa is himself a Sunni jihadist, though he presents himself to the world as a “moderate” who long ago ended his earlier connections to both ISIS and Al-Qaeda. He will do little to stop, or to punish, members of his own security services, or Sunni individuals who have been massacring Alawite civilians.

“We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime .. . We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria,” Sharaa added in a pre-recorded speech.

Syrian authorities said the violence began when remnants loyal to Assad launched a deadly and well-planned attack on their forces on Thursday.

Perhaps Assad loyalists were the first to launch attacks in this latest phase of the fighting. Ot it may have been the army of Sunni jihadists sent by Al-Sharaa’s government to quell an incipient Alawite rebellion. It’s not possible to know for certain who started the fighting. But it is known that among those killed have been at least 340 Alawite civilians. Some Christians — Greek Orthodox — have also been murdered by the security services, and they had at no time attacked the Sunni military. They have been murdered by the jihadists simply for being Christians.

The violence has shaken Sharaa’s efforts to consolidate control as his administration struggles to get US sanctions lifted and grapples with wider security challenges, notably in the southwest, where Israel has said it will prevent Damascus from deploying forces.

The IDF is now on the Syrian side both of Mt. Hermon, and the Golan Heights, and has no intention of leaving. The Syrians are not able to go to war against Israel, given that the IDF has destroyed a great amount of the weaponry that had been left behind by the Syrian army when it suddenly collapsed after the rebels, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took Damascus, and Assad decamped to Moscow.

The oil-rich northeast of the country also remains outside state control, held by a US-backed Kurdish-led group….

About 30% of Syria remains under Kurdish control. This is the part of Syria where the country’s oilfields are located. The Kurds are under military threat, not from the fellow Syrians in Damascus, but from the Turkish troops that have seized an enclave in the Kurdish-held territory and threaten to push the Kurds further south. Meanwhile, the American base is one source of security for the local Kurds, who collaborated with the Americans on wiping out ISIS in eastern Syria and remain solidly pro-American. The American military, in turn, knows it can count on the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG), to fight jihadists, not just ISIS as it has done in the past, but now including those now trying to consolidate their rule in Syria.

Iran, formerly Assad’s closest ally, said it “strongly opposes insecurity, violence, killing and harming innocent Syrians from every group and tribe.”…

Iran was always a strong supporter of the Assad regime, and of their fellow Shiites, the Alawites, and now the Iranians must watch in horror as their Alawite allies, including mostly their civilians, are under ferocious attack by the government’s Sunni, even jihadist, military.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Israel was Right to Be Aggressive in Syria

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Just a day after the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had seized Damascus, and Bashar Assad had fled to Moscow, Assad’s army crumbled into dust, with soldiers ripping off their uniforms so as to avoid being killed by vengeful, and now triumphant, rebels. Those soldiers left largely unattended huge quantities of weaponry. The IDF seized the occasion to improve its defensive posture against Syria. There was a brief window of just a few days, between the fall of Assad and the regime in Damascus stabilizing and taking control of those abandoned weapons, during which the IDF did two things. First, it moved Israeli soldiers into Syria, where they established two new military outposts, one on the Syrian side of Mt. Hermon, and one extending further into Syria from the pre-existing buffer zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan. Now the IDF controls the commanding heights that extend into Syria; the Israelis have a clear unimpeded view of Damascus — now literally in their sights — far below.

The second undertaking, which began just as soon as Assad had left for Russia, was the IDF’s systematic destruction of the Syrian army’s weaponry. The Israelis knew exactly where the weapons were located; they had long been preparing for a possible war against Assad, and had their target bank ready.

The IDF announced on December 10 that its air force and navy had conducted over 480 strikes in Syria in the span of 48 hours, 350 of which targeted airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, missiles, drones, fighter jets, tanks, and weapon production sites, destroying between 70% and 80% of Syria’s strategic weapons. It also sank Syria’s navy. And there was nothing that Ahmed al-Sharaa and the men of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham could do about it. Now Israel has not only made itself much safer, having removed Syria as a viable military threat to the Jewish state, but also has “demilitarized” the Jihadists in Damascus.

We have just seen that after al-Sharaa’s repeated promise that Syria’s minorities had nothing to worry about, decently, the jihadist “security services” — as they call themselves — entered Latakia to capture or kill Alawite members of Assad’s army. They were apparently ambushed by Alawite veterans of Assad’s army, and suffered a loss of 125 men. At that point, they decided to take revenge on the civilian population, killing more than 1,000 Alawite civilians — some reports claim up to 4,000 civilians have now been killed, and they also have been killing Christians — mostly Greek Orthodox but including some Melkites — because, of course, that’s what jihadists like to do. More than a thousand civilians, possibly as many as 4,000 according to some Alawite sources, have been killed in the space of two days. That’s a lot, but imagine what the jihadists could have done if they still possessed all the weapons that Israel destroyed, and had been able to use them not only in campaigns against the three million Alawites in Latakia and Tartous, but also against the four million Kurds, the 600,000 Druze, and also to crush other Sunni groups that have been disabused of their initial hopes for a “moderate” HTS, now that its jihadist ideology has been revealed. All of those threatened minorities in Syria owe the IDF a debt of gratitude, as the unintended beneficiaries of its successful campaign to destroy the weaponry left behind by Assad’s army.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Iraq on Brink of Disintegration: ISIS Blitzkrieg threatens Baghdad – Kurds Seize Kirkuk

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The ISIS Jihad  blitzkrieg seized the oil-rich Northern Iraqi City of Mosul Wednesday, while the Iraqi Army fled. This leaving  nearly half a million civilians, Assyrian Christians among them,  to flee to rural areas of the province of Biblical Nineveh. ISIS is the Salafist –Jihadist Al Qaeda terrorist army, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham,the Levant.

ISIS has looted nearly a half billion in cash and tons of gold bullion making the terrorist army perhaps the largest well funded Al Qaeda affiliate.  Add to that the significant oil fields and Iraq’s largest refinery in Mosul, the ISIS literally may have the fuel to follow through with their threat to attack Baghdad. Mosul  was festooned with the decapitated heads of  Iraqi policemen. This despite Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki putting on a brave face calling upon his parliament to declare a state of national emergency. Now he has to rely on the loyalty of the US trained Iraqi army and militia from his Shia base to defend the capital.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish Regional Government  (KRG) in Irbil dispatched its peshmerga forces to take over what they couldn’t do by plebiscite, the oil rich city of Kirkuk.  A Kirkuk that the Kurds consider as “their equivalent of Jerusalem”.  Now, as one report cited, just a mound of dirt separates Kurdish peshmerga from ISIS jihadi.

At risk is the future of this artificial country created by the British from the Mesopotamian Mandate of the League of Nations following WWI.   Ironically the US surge strategy of General Petreaus nearly a decade ago used nation building and bribery to defeat the al Qaeda forces in the Anbar provinces and Mosul.  Given current developments the  refusal of the Al Maliki government to negotiate a status of forces agreement with may have contributed to this looming debacle.  That choice was up to Maliki.  Because of these missteps we have looming a possible  Sunni Caliphate stretching across neighboring Syria deep into Iraq.  Today the picture gets even murkier as Iran announced dispatch of battalions of its  Quds Force to bolster the defense of Nouri al-Maliki’s beleaguered capitol.  This episode may rival the legendary history of the  sweep of the first Grand Jihad over 14 centuries ago. The Washington Post in a report today on these rapidly deteriorating developments in Iraq quoted President Obama saying:

“I don’t rule out anything, because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria,” Obama told reporters after a White House meeting with visiting Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

“I think it’s fair to say that . . . there will be some short-term, immediate things that need to be done militarily, and our national security team is looking at all the options,” he said. “But this should be also a wake-up call for the Iraqi government” about the need for political accommodation between the country’s Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni minority, he added.

ISIS loots Mosul Central bank

The International Business Times (IBT)  wrote of how much booty the ISIS secured in the capture of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul Seized: Jihadis Loot $429m from City’s Central Bank to Make Isis World’s Richest Terror Force. The IBT reported:

Nineveh governor Atheel al-Nujaifi confirmed Kurdish television reports that Isis militants had stolen millions from numerous banks across Mosul. A large quantity of gold bullion is also believed to have been stolen.

Following the siege of the country’s second city, the bounty collected by the group has left it richer than al-Qaeda itself and as wealthy as small nations such as Tonga, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Falkland Islands.

The financial assets that ISIS  now possesses are likely to worsen the Iraqi government’s struggle to defeat the insurgency, which is aimed at creating an Islamic state across the Syrian-Iraqi border.

[…]

They also seized considerable amounts of US-supplied military hardware. Photos have already emerged of Isis parading captured Humvees in neighboring Syria where they are also waging war against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

What  is really worrisome is that the vast treasury that ISIS has seized that will enable them to  pay on average $600 a month to attract  thousands of  foreign jihadis, especially those in the West.

Just yesterday, ISIS forward elements seized Tikrit the ancestral home town of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, putting it less than 95 miles from Baghdad. ISIS has also surrounded the city of Samarra less than 70 miles from the nation’s capital.

http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/11/kirkuk754.jpg

Kurdish peshmerga troops in Kirkuk. Source: ekurd.net.

Kurdish Peshmerga Seize Kirkuk

The autonomous KRG Peshmerga forces went into action today seizing a virtually defenseless Kirkuk. The KRG had been thwarted by the Al Maliki government from conducting a plebiscite to take back this resource rich original part of the Kurdish homeland.    The Guardian’s report conveys the sense of how rapidly Iraqi forces had abandoned the defenseless city,  Kurdish Peshmerga seize a chaotic victory in Kirkuk:

Capturing the city and its huge oil reserves, just outside the area controlled by the KRG, is a huge achievement. Yet victory looks far from glorious or orderly.

[…]

On Thursday Kurdish officials said they had stepped in to protect the city after government troops fled before advancing rebels from the Sunni jihadi group Isis.

Locals alleged that weaponry inside the K1 base had been seized by Kurdish Peshmerga forces belonging to both the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the two main political forces in the KRG. But in the confusion of Iraq’s deepening crisis it is hard to be quite certain.

[…]

“There are no security concerns at this moment and the situation is calm in the city,” said Dler Samad, the Kirkuk governor’s press officer. The governor, Dr Najmadin Karim, had visited Peshmerga forces near Hawija, just 3km away from ISIS units. But a minister responsible for regional security forces survived a bomb blast as he drove into Kirkuk.

Chaldean Archbishop Emil Shimoun Nona of Mosul, Iraq. Sourcs CNS Church in Need Service.

The ISIS threat to Christians in Nineveh

We have written extensively of the flight of the beleaguered  Assyrian Christians. A report by Nina Shea in the National Review On-line depicted the crisis that this ancient Christian community faces  in the midst of  the ISIS jihadist onslaught, The Cleansing of Iraq’s Christians Is Entering Its End Game.  Shea wrote:

Mosul’s panic-stricken Christians, along with many others, are now fleeing en masse to the rural Nineveh Plain, according to the Vatican publication Fides. The border crossings into Kurdistan, too, are jammed with the cars of the estimated 150,000 desperate escapees.

[…]

Since 2003, Iraq’s Christian community has suffered intense religious persecution on top of the effects of the conflict and, as a result, it has shrunk by well over 50 percent. Mosul, the site of ancient Nineveh of the Assyrians, who converted to Christianity in the first century, has become the home of many Christians who remained. Considered by Christians the place of last resort inside Iraq, Mosul and the surrounding Nineveh Plain has been home to many Christian refugees driven out of Baghdad and Basra.

ISIS on the march

Sources: The Institute for the Study of War, The Long War Journal. The Washington Post. Published on June 11, 2014, 9:37 p.m. For a larger view click on the map.

Who do you pin the blame on?

Earlier we  noted the failure of the Maliki government to conclude a status of forces agreement when the remaining US forces left three years ago. This was just as the civil war in Syria arose in bloody earnest that spawned ISIS’ terrorist Jihad in the region.  The Wall Street Journal cited Sen. McCain and  House Speaker John Boehner laying blame on Obama, while the Chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Service Committees, Republican Rep. Buck McKeon and  Democrat Sen.Carl Levin held differing views:

Several top Republican congressional leaders Thursday blamed President Obama for what they called policy failures leading to the collapse of Iraqi armed forces and the fall of major Iraqi cities to the control of Islamist militants.

[…]

“Now they’ve taken control of Mosul, they’re 100 miles from Baghdad. And what’s the president doing? Taking a nap,” Mr. Boehner said.

Mr. McCain said the administration’s decision to leave in 2011 was politically motivated.

“The trouble is, as the events of this week show, what the Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to stand on its own,” he said. “What we built is now coming apart.”

He said the U.S. must “take immediate action” to head off the militants’ advance, and reconsider the decision by Mr. Obama to wind down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in 2016.

[…]

Rep. Buck McKeon (R., Calif.), who heads the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters that he opposed airstrikes and any additional involvement by the U.S. in a crisis that has seen Sunni militants and Kurdish military units make incursions around the country. Iraq’s government had a chance to sign a status-of-forces agreement with the U.S. but didn’t, Mr. McKeon said.

“We lost a lot of blood, a lot of treasure there and gave them an opportunity and they wouldn’t sign the agreement,” Mr. McKeon said, adding that any assistance would add another strain to the military when officials are trying to slim down budgets. “They all take money, they all take resources, they all put people at risk.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the Senate armed services panel, blamed Iraq’s government for not doing enough to unify the country and stave off sectarian violence. He also questioned whether U.S. airstrikes would be effective given that Iraqi security forces, he said, have “melted away” in some places.

“While all options should be considered, the problem in Iraq hasn’t been so much a lack of direct U.S. military involvement, but a lack of reconciliation on the part of Iraqi leaders,” Mr. Levin said.

Fred Kaplan in Slate had views close to that of McKeon and Levin in an article, “If jihadists control Iraq, blame Nouri al-Maliki, not the United States”.  Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. After reviewing the success of General Petreaus’ surge in the western provinces and Mosul, Kaplan concludes about the current debacle:

Maliki has his own political problems. His party won a plurality of votes in the recent election, but not enough to declare victory…. The threat from ISIS—and it’s now a dire threat—might move some factions to strengthen the nation’s leader, or it might move more to abandon all confidence in Maliki and turn to someone else.

One hope for Iraq is that ISIS might have gone one rampage too far. While stomping through Mosul, some of their militiamen stormed the Turkish consulate and kidnapped Turkish diplomats. Under international law, that amounts to an attack on Turkey, and it’s unlikely that the Turks will simply shrug. Iran, which has emerged as Maliki’s main ally, has no interest in seeing Sunnis regain power in Baghdad. A strange alliance among all three may come to life to beat back this equally strange insurgency.

With news today that Iran is sending battalions of its elite Quds Force to fight in Iraq, Kaplan’s views appear like grasping a thin reed. Supplying more US military aid and perhaps air resources by the Obama Administration may not even put a dent into the ISIS Jihadist blitzkrieg poised to possibly conduct a siege on the capital.  Iraq is for all intents and purposes a failed state. The world and we in America will pay for its possible demise with a spike in both oil and gas prices. Time for us to bolster the independence of Kurdistan and let the Shia provinces become veritable client states of Iran, while a Jihadist  Sunni Emirate arises. Saudi Arabia will doubtless consider its options with  the failure of Iraq further endangering the Gulf region and its oil fields. Could a regional war of global proportions be in the offing?

Will the US Embassy in Baghdad be evacuating before being overwhelmed? Stay tuned for developments.

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Decapitated heads of policemen and soldiers line the streets of Mosul as ISIS imposes Sharia

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.