Inside the battle for Tikrit

The New York Times, hand-wringing liberals that they are, report that Iraqi forces that took back the Iraqi city Tikrit from ISIS the other day aren’t acting as civilized as they like;

There were no Islamic State prisoners taken at all in the recent fight, said Mr. Khadimy, the senior Badr official. “To be honest, everywhere we captured them we killed them because they were the enemy,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing how that sounded, he explained that any ISIS fighters who were about to be captured were assumed to be suicide bombers, so they were killed as a precaution.

A battalion commander of the popular mobilization forces who was involved in the fight here for the past several months said that this week his men had captured three Afghan men, an Afghan woman and an Algerian man, all Islamic State fighters, in the battle for the palaces. “After we were done with them, we killed them,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified admitting to a war crime.

Yeah, well, maybe they should have taken prisoners whose treatment would have been scrutinized by the media instead. Reuters reports similar barbaric behavior;

Near the charred, bullet-scarred government headquarters, two federal policemen flanked a suspected Islamic State fighter. Urged on by a furious mob, the two officers took out knives and repeatedly stabbed the man in the neck and slit his throat. The killing was witnessed by two Reuters correspondents.

The incident is now under investigation, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan told Reuters.

AFP reports that Amnesty International is sticking their big, fat noses where they don’t belong;

“We are very concerned by reports of widespread human rights abuses committed in the course of the military operation in the area around Tikrit,” the rights watchdog’s Donatella Rovera told AFP.

Yeah, well, that’s the nature of warfare in that particular region. If ISIS is going to be defeated they have to feel defeated. I’m not saying that I don’t find it repulsive that humans mistreat each other in that part of the world, I do. That’s also the reason that I oppose the introduction of US forces in that region, too. US troops won’t be able to defeat ISIS because they won’t be able to fight the gruesome war that needs to be waged against ISIS. Precisely because of the New York Times, Reuters and Amnesty International.

Like I’ve said before, the Iraqis and the Iranians have to make war more painful than not fighting in order to beat ISIS. American forces would be hamstrung by a restrictive set of Rules of Engagement, the Iraqis and Iranians don’t have that problem.

At least, the Iraqis are not murdering folks who aren’t trying to kill them first, you know, like the Islamic extremist al-Shabab terrorists in Kenya when they murdered 148 Christian students on Thursday. I’m sure Amnesty international won’t be sending people to investigate that REAL atrocity.

The gunmen singled out Christians at the university, killing them on the spot. But Muslims also were among the dead, as were women, even though the attackers had said at one point that they, too, would be spared.

The masked attackers — strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s — battled troops and police before the violence ended after about 13 hours.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the NYT link.

Category: Terror War