More Ethnic Cleansing
Update: Local officials in Nineveh province now put the death toll at 500. There are only an estimated 100,000 Yazidi in Iraq.
Juan Cole notes that the series of car bombs that killed 200 in northern Iraq was a continuation of the attempts to eliminate minority populations. This time the Yazidi, a Kurdish religious sect, were the targets. In July it was Shi’ia Turkmen.
The Sunni Arabs want to force all other groups out of the area. The “noise” about al Qaeda in Iraq is is the official military agitprop. This is more probably part of the civil war than of the resistance to occupation. This would have happened with or without the US presence or foreign fighters.
2 comments
of course the sunnis want everybody else out of there, they were the ones in power under saddam hussein [as much as anybody can be said to have power when a despot rules their country].
i hate that we precipitated this war, and that people, ours and theirs, are dying horribly, but it was probably going to happen when saddam hussein died [or became incapacitated]. neither of his psychopathic sons was leadership material, and had they both outlived him, they likely would have plunged the country into a brutal civil war.
oh, wait…
i can be counted on, almost always, to root for the underdog, but i’m having a hard time working up any sympathy for the yazidi.
That incident is part of the reason they were attacked so brutally, and this isn’t the first reaction by the Sunnis. The worst of it is that “honor killing” is an Arab tribal tradition, as are most of the restrictions on women, not Islamic. It is foreign to the traditions of Central Asians, like the Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tadzhik, etc. It has been imported with the Wahhabi movement from Saudi Arabia and the Taliban version of the Deoband school from India.