A Commentary on Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

here has been much international controversy over groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS. These groups and similar ones try to justify and motivate their persecution of Christians in Iraq and elsewhere.

Canon Andrew White, Vicar of the Anglican Church in Baghdad, experienced the horror firsthand when Islamic State descended upon on the Christian town of Qaraqosh.

“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” said White in an interview from Catholic News Service. “I baptized his child in my church in Baghdad. This little boy, they named him after me – he was called Andrew. This town of Qaraqosh is a Christian village so they knew everybody there was part of their target group.”

The brutality of Islamic State has become known worldwide, and chillingly, there seems to be no one capable of standing against them. Iraqi forces, unable to stop them, simply fled. Syrian forces fought them to an uneasy draw, and America’s feckless Commander in Chief, Barack Obama, (who seemingly holds his most important title as something merely ceremonial) has shown he has no stomach for such a fight. This sadly means that thousands and perhaps more will lose their lives.

Born out of the fires of the sectarian conflicts of Iraq and Syria, and far from the peaceful faith practiced by the vast majority of Muslims all over the world, the Islamic State is a distilled, concentrated form of hate and rage-filled fanaticism. This same hate is opposed to the West and seeks to reshape the region into the Caliphate, an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader known as a caliph, i.e. the “successor” to the prophet Muhammad. The banner of the Caliphate, if raised successfully, would be one under which all neighboring nations and peoples would fall, either by conversion or force.

Many of these fighters come from the same groups that formed “the resistance” in the conflicts in Libya and Syria, which in the eye of former Ambassador Ryan Crocker have come to present a threat more dangerous than previously understood.

“This is about America’s national security,” said Crocker to The New York Times, who was ambassador to Iraq under George W. Bush and to Afghanistan under Obama. “We don’t understand real evil, organized evil, very well. This is evil incarnate. People like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the Islamic State leader) have been in a fight for a decade. They are messianic in their vision, and they are not going to stop.”

Shortly after ISIS’ rise to power in the region, Christians were warned to either leave the Iraqi city of Mosul and other areas under Islamic State control, pay the jizyah tax to Islamic State leaders or face a sentence of death. Those are the stark choices faced by Christian families in the region: One can flee, convert, pay a fine or be put to death. There will be no tolerant coexistence with ISIS. And in spite of the fact that Christians, Muslims and Jews have lived peacefully together in this region of the world for centuries, the brand of Islam that dominates them has become so extreme that it has come to represent an existential threat to the Christians and Jews.

The undeniable, inescapable fact is this: when Islamic State hangs Christian or other religious

minorities’ men, rapes women and beheads children by the hundreds, they claim to do so in the name of their faith. Islamic State has warned Christians, repeatedly and possibly for the last time, that “there is nothing to give them but the sword.” All across Northern Iraq, Christians and other religious minorities are huddled in refugee camps, trapped in the desert, or trapped in their homes, awaiting death. This is no mere localized conflict, but instead represents the larger, cultural conflict of resurgent, fanatical, militant Islamism, intent on regional and then global domination, a conflict that targets peace-loving members of the Islamic faith as well.

Sadly, it seems that the dire warnings of Ryan Crocker, Ambassador John Bolton, Vice President Cheney and Senator Ted Cruz, among numerous others, have fallen upon willfully deaf ears at the White House out of obtuseness, ignorance or a perverse blending of the two. America’s inept, incoherent, and incompetent foreign policy has contributed to the failures to address the growing crisis that is leaving scores of victims under the black flag of fanaticism.