In Iraq, Obama made the decision to back Iran's Shiite terrorist militias to fight ISIS. The locals on the ground though don't seem too enthusiastic about the deal.
Once IS was driven off, though, the mission of the Hashd militias wasn't even close to being completed. As is so often the case in Iraq, the next horrific story lies in wait behind the first. Because as it turned out, the Kurds were not the militias' primary target. Rather, as Mayor Abdul laconically puts it: "Actually, the Shiite militias wanted to get revenge on the Sunnis, but there aren't enough Sunnis left for them to kill. That's why they turned their attention to us."...
But those who were targeted here were not the IS sympathizers, rather it was those Sunnis who fled from the Islamist terrorists. At the end of April, the remaining 300 Sunni families left their previously mixed quarters in the Turkmen part of the city for the safety of the Kurdish sector. Only with the help of the city's Committee for the Monitoring of the Status of Expellees, which is run by the Kurds, were we able to convince a victim of repeated displacement to speak with us. "I was an official at the oil refinery in the city of Baiji," he says. "When Daesh" -- the Arabic acronym for IS -- "took over the refinery and then my home village not far from Tuz, I didn't know where to go. So we moved into the city, thinking it would be peaceful here."
Before long, though, death threat notices began turning up at night and then a bomb exploded in front of their house. He insisted on leaving the mixed neighborhood, the man continues, but his brother's family remained. One day in December, the brother's two sons both disappeared within hours of each other. One of them was kidnapped across from his school at midday and the other was taken in the afternoon, picked up by men driving slowly through the streets in a white pick-up. After two days, the father received a call from the telephone of one of his sons, with the caller saying that, if an $80,000 ransom was paid, the two boys would be freed within half an hour.
Over the course of several further calls, the ransom was negotiated down to $60,000 and the family sold what they could and borrowed and begged for the rest. They placed a bag holding the money not far from the local headquarters of a Shiite militia and it was picked up. But the phone went silent. "We kept calling and calling. But ... nothing."
There is a list of Sunni men who have been similarly kidnapped in Tuz Khurmatu in the last year and a half with 156 names on it. But it only includes those whose families "are brave enough to follow up," says a resigned Ayoub Jumaa, head of the city's committee. "In total, we believe there have been almost 1,000 such cases in the surroundings." Now, says the uncle of the two kidnapped boys, nobody is paying the ransoms anymore. "Everyone knows: My son is dead whether I pay or not. Daesh or Hashd, what's the difference? The Kurds here at least allow us to live."
There isn't any difference. Both are Jihadist groups. The only difference is that one is Shiite and the other is Sunni. Obama's solution for Iraq once again solves nothing.