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Why Are We At War With The Islamic State?

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Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia are among the ground troops on whom we rely in our war against the Islamic State. [Credit: Reuters]

Iraqi secu­ri­ty forces and Shi­ite mili­tia are among the ground troops on whom we rely in our war against the Islam­ic State. Their bru­tal­i­ty rivals that of IS. [Cred­it: Reuters]

[The sol­diers] dragged res­i­dents up to age 70 from their homes, beat­ing and curs­ing them with sec­tar­i­an slurs, Abu Omar [one of the sur­vivors] told Reuters by phone.  He said the fight­ers took the men’s mobiles and ID cards, then bound their hands, tying Abu Omar to his 12-year-old men­tal­ly ill son with rope. They did the same with his two old­er sons and three brothers.

The men were led a few hun­dred yards to a field where Abu Omar said more than a hun­dred oth­ers had been gath­ered.  For about two hours, they were forced to kneel and stare at the ground as the fight­ers select­ed their tar­gets and led them to a spot behind a mud wall.

“They took them behind the wall. Less than a minute, then a gun­shot,” said Abu Omar. “All we could hear was the gun­shots. We could­n’t see.”

This atroc­i­ty, which claimed the lives of 72 unarmed peo­ple in a vil­lage in Iraq’s Diyala Province, was not car­ried out by the Islam­ic State (IS). It was per­pe­trat­ed by our allies in the war against IS — Iraqi secu­ri­ty forces and Shi­ite mili­tia. Con­tin­ue read­ing →