By Theodore Shoebat
The Iranian (and Iranian backed) militias that America has been working with to fight ISIS are now persecuting Christians. This is the never ending cycle of deception and destruction that the US has been doing for decades. They deceive the people by saying that they must take down Saddam to end his tyranny against the Shiites; Saddam is toppled, and the Shiite Iran became the malevolent figure. And then ISIS came into the equation (with American military equipment and weapons of course), and all of the politicians scrambled to show themselves strong against this new enemy. Now, to counteract this chaos caused by US intervention in Iraq, the Americans are now working with Shiite Iranian backed militias, who are now persecuting Christians, which is the very crime of ISIS for which the Western world was demanding military strikes in Iraq. I did a whole video on this:
In regards to the Christian persecution, Lisa Daftari of Foreign Desk, wrote:
According to leaders, the seizures have been carried out in the upscale regions of Baghdad, where militia men have forced entry into homes and businesses with falsified documents… Iraq’s Christians are considered to be one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, with their villages concentrated in Baghdad, Basra, Erbil and Kirkuk. The Assyrians had made the towns and regions around the Nineveh Plains in the north home, until IS forced them out.
Last year, in June of 2015, a detailed report was written on how the Americans are working with Shiite Iranian backed militias, even militias who have killed American soldiers in the past:
The U.S. military and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are getting closer and closer in Iraq, even sharing a base, while Iran uses those militias to expand its influence in Iraq and fight alongside the Bashar al-Assad regime in neighboring Syria.
Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military base in Anbar, the same Iraqi base where President Obama is sending an additional 450 U.S. military personnel to help train the local forces fighting against the Islamic State. Some of the Iran-backed Shiite militias at the base have killed American soldiers in the past.
Some inside the Obama administration fear that sharing the base puts U.S. soldiers at risk. The U.S. intelligence community has reported back to Washington that representatives of some of the more extreme militias have been spying on U.S. operations at Taqqadum, one senior administration official told us. That could be calamitous if the fragile relationship between the U.S. military and the Shiite militias comes apart and Iran-backed forces decide to again target U.S. troops.
American critics of this growing cooperation between the U.S. military and the Iranian-backed militias call it a betrayal of the U.S. personnel who fought against the militias during the 10-year U.S. occupation of Iraq.
“It’s an insult to the families of the American soldiers that were wounded and killed in battles in which the Shia militias were the enemy,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain told us. “Now, providing arms to them and supporting them, it’s very hard for those families to understand.”
The U.S. is not directly training Shiite units of what are known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, which include tens of thousands of Iraqis who have volunteered to fight against the Islamic State as well as thousands of hardened militants who ultimately answer to militia leaders loyal to Tehran. But the U.S. is flying close air support missions for those forces.
The U.S. gives weapons directly only to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Security Forces, but the lines between them and the militias are blurry. U.S. weapons often fall into the hands of militias like Iraqi Hezbollah. Sometimes the military cooperation is even more explicit. Commanders of some of the hard-line militias sit in on U.S. military briefings on operations that were meant for the government-controlled Iraqi Security Forces, a senior administration official said.
This collaboration with terrorist groups that have killed Americans was seen as unavoidable as the U.S. marshaled Iraqis against the Islamic State, but could prove counterproductive to U.S. interests in the long term, this official said.
The militias comprise largely Shiite volunteers and are headed by the leader of the Iraqi Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. He was sanctioned in 2009 by the Treasury Department for destabilizing Iraq. Al-Muhandis is a close associate of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian Quds Force commander, who has snapped selfies with the militia leader at key battles.
Other militias that have participated in the fighting against the Islamic State include the League of the Righteous, which in 2007 carried out a brutal roadside execution of five U.S. soldiers near Karbala. The group to this day boasts of its killing of U.S. soldiers. In an interview in February, a spokesman for the militia defended the killings and said his militia had killed many more American soldiers.
Also, in March of 2015, I wrote a short article on the US assisting these very Iranian backed militias, and I stated that we should expect these very militias to persecute Christians in manners more brutal than ISIS. Here is the article:
When ISIS invaded much of Iraq and unleashed their reign of terror over Christians, Shiites and Yazidis, the western world was terrified at such violence. Beheadings, crucifixions, horrific immolations, all of this scared and disturbed.
Now Iranian Shiite militias are invading Iraq and explosively vanquishing ISIS and retaking the lands that they conquered. But, before we begin to praise these Shiites as heroes, let us remind ourselves that the rebels in revolutionary France were far more brutal than the monarchy everybody wanted to topple. ISIS is brutal — yes — but the Iranians will be far more worse. And Obama is backing them up.
General Petraeus, who was fired by the Obama Administration, has already given this warning, that the Iranians are a greater threat than ISIS:
We need to recognize that the #1 long term threat to Iraq’s equilibrium — and the broader regional balance — is not the Islamic State, which I think is on the path to being defeated in Iraq and pushed out of its Iraqi sanctuary… The most significant long term threat is that posed by the Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
…If Daesh is driven from Iraq and the consequence is that Iranian-backed militias emerge as the most powerful force in the country — eclipsing the Iraqi Security Forces, much as Hezbollah does in Lebanon — that would be a very harmful outcome for Iraqi stability and sovereignty, not to mention our own national interests in the region
There are already horror stories coming out. When Iranian militias liberated one village from the clutches of ISIS, a local teacher named Saleem Mohammed al-Obaidi approached them to give his thanks. But, he was startled by a malicious threat from the Iranians. They told him:
You are an old man, it is better for you and your wife to leave. If you stay here, we will kill you
Both Obaidi and his wife soon abandoned their home and left the village, not in fear of ISIS, but in fear of the people they once praised for defeating ISIS.
A teenage boy named Atheer left his home to go buy a loaf of bread, but he never returned. His boy ended being found in a local morgue. As his family was burying him, they found an envelope with a bullet and a message in it. Mohammed Sameh, the murdered teen’s brother, recalled what he found in the letter:
While we were busy burying him, someone dropped an envelope containing a bullet and a message. The message said that we have only 24 hours to leave our house, and if we did not do so, more of our family will die…We waited until the morning, then we left.
Here is a video of Shiites beating a man to death:
There are literally thousands of Shiite militants overrunning Iraq, and according to Hamed al-Mutlaq, they are too powerful for the US-backed Iraqi government to control. Al-Mutlaq continued on to say:
They have committed crimes like killing, stealing, displacing people from their homes… Meanwhile, the government has not been able to have any sort of pressure on the militias, to stop them from committing more crimes. …I don’t think the government is satisfied with them, or supports them, but they have grown stronger over time, they have followers, money and are empowered and supported by third parties
After US-air strikes drove ISIS out of certain areas, Shiite militias entered these very liberated regions and unleashed a wave of horrors, bulldozing and burning thousands of homes. In the area around Amerli 3,800 buildings in 30 towns and villages were destroyed by the Shiite militias.
Al-Mutlaq went on to say that these Shiite militias are being backed by Obama:
When I look at [President Barack] Obama’s reaction to the behavior of these militias, I feel he supports them or is satisfied with them… The U.S. promised that it would stand with Iraqis but it did not.
The Obama Administration, while not aiding the Shiite incursions, have characterized the violence of the Iranian militias as “a positive development.”
One human rights activist Joe Stork, spoke of the severity of the Shiite militias as such:
Iraq clearly faces serious threats in its conflict with ISIS, but the abuses committed by forces fighting ISIS are so rampant and egregious that they are threatening Iraq long term…Iraqis are caught between the horrors ISIS commits and abusive behavior by militias, and ordinary Iraqis are paying the price
Abu Ahmed al-Jubooy, a local taxi driver, had to flee his farm in the village of Jurf Al-Sakhar on account of the Shiite militias. He said:
No one can stop them from doing whatever they want to do. They can overthrow the government if it tries to judge them for crimes they committed and will commit… There were Iraqi army forces, federal police, and local police as well, but they controlled nothing at all there, the Shiite militias are controlling everything.
Expect the Shiite Muslims to begin slaughtering the Christian population in Iraq, with more brutality and viciousness than ISIS.