Fundamentalists slaughter security forces
KIRKUK, IRAQ — Sunni ultra-fundamentalists boasted Sunday that they had murdered 1,700 Iraqi security forces this weekend in Tikrit, only 80 kilometres down the road from this oil-rich ethnically diverse city of Kurds, Turkmen and Sunni, Shiite and Christian Arabs.
There were conflicting opinions about the veracity of dozens of photographs of mostly young men apparently being summarily executed by gunmen from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
The ghastly photos that have been posted online have revolted Kurds, who mostly live in their own autonomous region in the northeast of the country, and hardened their resolve to hold on to Kirkuk, which their Peshmerga forces took control of last Wednesday before the extremists could seize the city when it was abandoned by panicked Iraqi troops.
“It’s really serious,” said Ala Talabani, who is a Kurdish representative from Kirkuk in the Iraqi parliament. “We have to consider this unlike any other issue in Iraq.
“There were always terrorist attacks here and there since the collapse of the regime in 2003. But this is different. It is really threatening all the Iraqi communities, the political process, the democratic process and what we have achieved so far in creating government and democratic elections. It is threatening all Iraqi people,” he said.
“The filthy Shiite bastards are killed in the hundreds” was among the captions that have appeared online with photos of the massacre, according to a translation by the New York Times.
The black-clad insurgents had been fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s army until last week when they swarmed over the unguarded Iraqi border, quickly capturing Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, after the Iraqi army refused to fight. Soon after that the insurgents had an equally easy time taking control of Tikrit. They are now gathering between Tikrit and Baghdad, preparing for an assault on the Iraqi capital, where Shiite militias have been recruiting thousands of new members and quickly arming them.
Just a few hours earlier, Talabani described an atmosphere of chaos and fear in Baghdad as the capital’s seven million Sunni and Shiite residents wondered whether a bloody sectarian war was about to engulf them.
Along their rapid journey south toward Baghdad the insurgents are known to have captured several thousand Iraqi soldiers in and near Tikrit, which lies halfway between Kirkuk and Baghdad. Those soldiers who had papers identifying them as Sunnis were released unharmed, according to reports in the Iraqi media, while those who were Shiites were detained.
ISIL’s goal is to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, that would follow such an extreme form of Shariah law that the group has been denounced by al-Qaida.
“We believe in God now in a real Islamic way, not like them,” said Aso Mamand, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk, by far the most powerful political party in the city, which has a Kurdish majority. “They are Islamic extremists, so wherever they are, they will hurt that area.
“What they are planning to do is turn back Iraq to a very distant past, to go to the time of the caliphate. They are very bad. They are rejected by everyone,” said Mamand.
If the images put on social media on Sunday by ISIL were an accurate depiction of what happened near Saddam Hussein’s former palace by the Tigris River, it would be a slaughter of extraordinary proportions even for this deeply troubled part of the world. In circulating the photos the intent of the ISIL insurgents was clearly to terrify Iraq’s Shiite majority into believing that a genocidal reign of terror had begun against them.
I know the spot where some of the bodies from this weekend’s purported mass murder were apparently brought after the victims were shot in an open field. I slept on the ground outside the palace alongside U.S. Marines after they captured Saddam Hussein’s hometown in what was the last battle of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The massive stone mansion includes scores of chandeliers, fantastic hand-woven tapestries and toilets made entirely of gold. It was built into a steep bank leading down to a turn in the river where some of the bloodied corpses of those executed appeared to have been thrown.
Other videos that have appeared online in recent days purport to show ISIL insurgents decapitating Iraqi soldiers and police and committing other atrocities in Mosul.
Such displays filled Rizgar Haji Hama with disgust. The leader of Kurdish nongovernmental organizations in Kirkuk, which have been caring for some of the 800,000 refugees, said: “We do not differentiate between Sunnis and Shiites. Many of our people do not even know that there is a difference.”
Once mostly communists, the Kurds now “take the middle way,” Hama said. “It is the same with Islam. We do not believe in cutting off heads and hands.”