The Caliphate is now spreading to the Mediterranean
Il Giornale, August 8, 2014
It is time we start to realize that the whole Middle East is an all-out battlefield, where the Caliphate fights strenuously, kills, wins, and is expanding; where the civilians do not exist as other than victims and pawns; where the Islamist fanaticism is smearing itself with mass executions, deaths, severed heads, crucifixions; it dresses in black and grows a beard, celebrates its martyrs and shows off Kalashnikovs and missiles, ignoring the compassion we have achieved so hardly over the centuries, and raising a wall between Muslims on one side and Jews and Christians on the other. In the last twenty-four hours in Iraq, near the city of Qaraqosh, in the North, the Worldwide Caliphate forced about one hundred thousand Christians to flee; those desperate people are fleeing for their life, walking with no shoes and thinking about crucifixions and tortures. It is ironic that they are seeking sanctuary with the Kurds, who just lost control of one thousand kilometers of border.
It is an old Christian area that could not believe it would have found itself with the forehead on the ground, facing the three Islamic impositions: convert, pay the dhimmi taxes and penalties, or die. In the last five days, in Mosul, they seized the country’s major hydroelectric dam. The Kurds had warned that they would not be able to hold the border by themselves without receiving reinforcements. Of course, they received none. At least forty thousand of their civilians had to flee on Mount Sinjar. Also their shrines are being destroyed. Al Maliki’s government is not even accepting the UN offer of aid packages to be dropped by planes. The United States, as we all know, is sitting on Obama’s golden abstention. No solidarity, no serious attention are being given today to those who are trying to oppose the advance of the Islamic State. From Iraq to Syria and Lebanon, all the way to the Mediterranean, Sunni extremists are spreading, whether they are Al Qaeda, Jabat Al Nusra, ISIS or Hamas.
Only yesterday night, a Red Cross convoy entered the town of Arsal in Lebanon, where a war of conquest is being fought by jihadists. The army itself is fighting them, while, since August 2, terrorists from Jabat Al Nusra and ISIS are concentrating their attack on the surroundings of the Qalamoun mountains, because is there that one hundred fifty thousand Syrian refugees are gathered, acting as an excellent human shield stronghold. Among Lebanese troops there are twenty people missing in action, fifteen dead, and more than ninety injured. In Syria, even if Assad, as Hezbollah in Lebanon, is not less hideous than his enemies, Jabat Al Nusra's terrorists assaulted the last garrison of the army in Raqqa, killing dozens of soldiers and civilians. Furthermore, around forty people have been killed in a suicide attack. In Libya, Benghazi has been declared an “Islamic emirate” by Ansar Al Sharia.
The Islamic State finds grist for its mill only when confronting Egypt in Sinai, and when Hamas has to engage Israel: before Israel, Egypt destroyed the galleries going from Gaza to its territory, confronted its own Muslim Brotherhood, killing Shadi Al Manijeh, head of Ansar Bait Al Maqdis, an organization linked to the Islamic State. Israel fought with determination and, if Hamas will not renew the truce today, it will keep doing so with expenditure of forces and lives, but knowing that Hamas is part of a lethal and larger plan.