The Islamic State group once drew recruits from near and far with promises of paradise but now bodies of jihadists lie in mass graves or at the mercy of wild dogs as its “caliphate” collapses.
Flies buzz around human remains poking through the dusty earth in the Iraqi town of Dhuluiyah, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of Baghdad, at a hastily-dug pit containing the bodies of dozens of IS fighters killed in 2015.
“They should have ended up in the stomachs of stray dogs,” local police officer Mohammed al-Juburi told AFP.
“We buried them here not out of love but because we wanted to avoid diseases.”
At one stage, IS ruthlessly wielded power over a vast swathe of territory straddling Iraq and Syria, but a military onslaught on multiple fronts has seen its fiefdom shrink to a last few pockets.
Since the launch in 2014 of air strikes in Iraq and Syria against the group, a US-led coalition says around 80,000 jihadists have been killed.
The overall number of dead is higher if you include those targeted by Russian and Syrian strikes.
Buried with bulldozers
In agricultural Dhuluiyah on the banks of the Tigris river, residents faced a common dilemma over what to do with the corpses of IS fighters after local Sunni militiamen beat back the jihadists in fierce clashes.
“We could have thrown them into the water, but we love the river too much to pollute it,” said the local policeman, who lost his own brother in the violence.
“The people here as well as their animals drink from the Tigris.”
Local finally decided to dig a mass grave for the fighters — but they said they refused to honor them with Islamic rites.
Back about 3 years ago I wrote this essay:
|Back then I said “who the hell know what Obama will do, but now we have Trump, and we know what he will do, “Bomb the Hell out of them”.
These two pictures invoked outcry from every Progressive and Liberal leaning mind in America and were used as propaganda to kill American’s support for the Vietnam War.
Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnamese chief of the national police, fires his pistol into the head of suspected Viet Cong official Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street early in the Tet Offensive, February 1, 1968. Photographer Eddie Adams reported that after the shooting, Loan approached him and said, “They killed many of my people, and yours too,” then walked away. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams) 1969 Pulitzer Prize winner for Spot News Photography.
Bang, followed by soldiers of the South Vietnamese army’s 25th Division, June 8, 1972. A South Vietnamese plane seeking Viet Cong hiding places accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on civilians and government troops instead. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc (center) had ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing. The other children (from left) are her brothers Phan Thanh Tam, who lost an eye, and Phan Thanh Phouc, and her cousins Ho Van Bon and Ho Thi Ting.
No comments:
Post a Comment