Our Non-Ally in Ankara

Was it only a week ago that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel listed a "core coalition" of 10 countries willing to join the U.S. effort to destroy the Islamic State? Since then Britain has categorically ruled out military strikes in Syria, while Germany has ruled out any use of force. Now Turkey is bugging out.

The Turkish abdication goes a step further than the Brits or Germans. Not only will Ankara take no military action, it will also forbid the U.S. from using the U.S. air base in Incirlik—located fewer than 100 miles from the Syrian border—to conduct air strikes against the terrorists. That will complicate the Pentagon's logistical and reconnaissance challenges, especially for a campaign that's supposed to take years.

Confronting the Yazidi Genocide

Aren Torikian

 

Thousands of people leaving their ancestral homeland. Women and children being kidnapped, raped, and sold as slaves. Men slaughtered by the dozens.

While this sounds like something from the Armenian Genocide, it is going on in the world as I write. In Northern Iraq, where the Babylonians and Assyrians once ruled vast empires, the Islamic State (IS) has been waging a genocidal war against the defenseless Yazidi people.

The IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham/the Levant), is a descendant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group the U.S. Army fought against for almost a decade. Taking advantage of the Syrian Civil War, the IS swept through Syria in 2013, capturing towns from Kurds, Syrian government forces, and other rebels. The IS continued to grow this year, and expanded operations into Iraq. Coupled with an Iraqi Army retreat, the IS’s advance led to gains just outside of Baghdad, hundreds of miles from where it started its rampage. After capturing Mosul in the north, Iraq’s second largest city, the IS started to consolidate its gains. Ethnic Yazidis, fleeing from almost certain death, collected on Mount Sinjar, and were soon surrounded by IS forces. Facing starvation, heat stroke in the 100-degree Iraqi sun, and massacres, the Yazidis became a sort of call to action.