Recently Pope Francis declared that “the persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.” The slaughter of 200,000 Christians in the Darfur region of Sudan since 2011 may not have received the attention it deserved. But now the religious cleansing of Christians in Iraq resulting from Islamic jihadists’ conquest of lands Christians had called home since the first centuries A.D. cannot be ignored.
In a region where Christians and Muslims had previously lived in relative peace side by side for centuries, the last 10 years have witnessed some 1.1 million Christians being killed or driven from their homes. Since June of this year, the fall of northern Iraq to the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has created over half a million refugees—both Christian and non-Christian.
In their blitzkrieg across northern Iraq, ISIS has seized large caches of advanced weapons left by the U.S. to the Iraqi military. Tanks, armored vehicles, surface-to-air missile launchers, warehouses of machine guns and ammunition and even Blackhawk helicopters—captured in Smarra, Falluja, Mosul and Tikrit—are now in the hands of ISIS. Now the world’s most brutal terrorists have some of the most up-to-date military equipment available. In addition, ISIS has looted banks of some $500 million, seized five oilfields and Iraq’s largest electricity-generating dam—providing the means for self-funding the expansion of Islamic terrorist rule. Its assets generate $3 million in daily income and are valued at over $2 billion—unprecedented in the annals of terrorism.
While the Hamas-Israel war has dominated the news recently, ISIS terror against Iraqis—both Christian and non-Christian—this year has taken four times more innocent civilian lives than have been lost by the Palestinians in Gaza. ISIS has now launched incursions into Lebanon and the Kurdish region of Iraq. Baghdad and Jordan are the next likely targets.
Jordan is a key U.S. ally, sharing borders with Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. ISIS terrorists have called for the execution of Jordan’s U.S.-backed King Abdullah as an infidel and enemy of Islam.
Jordan’s precarious situation is further compromised by many young Jordanians who went to fight against Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria and are now returning more radicalized than before they left. In addition Jordan, a country with a population of only 6.5 million, is burdened with more than 600,000 registered Syrian refugees now living within its border.
ISIS has been using the conflict in Syria as a recruiting ground to enlarge its terrorist ranks, drawing on the 12,000 foreign fighters that have joined since the conflict started in 2011. The largest influx of foreign fighters have come from Arab states, and many have been so radicalized that they pose an internal terrorist threat—an ISIS fifth column—within the countries to which they return.
But there is a new and unprecedented threat with ISIS having recruited nearly 2000 fighters with Western passports. U.S. Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, has reported that among those, there are some 100 Americans, who could be trained in terrorism and attempt returning to the U.S. as subversive ISIS agents.
So what are reasonable options to undertake and to engage allies in the region to contain and defeat ISIS? For starters the U.S. should assist Turkey—a NATO ally that shares a border with Syria and Iraq. Turkey worries about Kurdish nationalism because of its own Kurdish minority and stands ready to help Iraqi Kurds keep their freedom and defeat ISIS. The U.S. can also promote dialogue, cooperation and planning between Arab allies which border Iraq—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, which collectively possess formidable air power, consisting of over 400 combat-ready F-15s, F-16s and F-18s.
There is no support nor is there need for U.S. military boots on the ground, but there is no substitute for American advisers, intelligence experts, drones and counterterrorism special forces who can locate, identify and help take out high value ISIS targets and leaders in Iraq and Syria. Airpower alone can’t win a war, but it can significantly diminish ISIS forces. When used in coordination with ground forces, the odds of success are exponentially increased.
The U.S. has had some 800 advisors, intelligence and special forces deployed in Iraq to lay the groundwork for operations against ISIS. The catalyst for commencing U.S. Air Force operations against ISIS finally came yesterday in what President Obama explained as the need to: 1) protect a humanitarian airlift to 40,000 of the Yazidi sect who fled to the safety of mile-high Mount Sinjar near Syria to avoid genocide at the hands of ISIS, and 2) protect American advisors and diplomats under ISIS siege in Irbil in Iraq’s Kurdish region.
The problem with President Obama’s authorization of limited and defensive use of air power against ISIS is not that it is too little too late. It is that it is not a strategy based on moral clarity about the imperative of civilization prevailing over barbarism. What’s needed now is not prolonged indecision and half measures, but a return to leading and encouraging allies to stand with us in winning hearts and minds about the value of life, which requires a strategy to defeat ISIS and terrorists wherever they are.
