A Shocking Silence on the Islamic State Sex Slavery
Trudy Rubin – The Philadelphia Inquiry
“… one of the sex slaves was a fresh-faced blond American, a 25-year-old aid worker who was captured in Syria in August 2013. Kayla Mueller was chained in a room and raped for months by the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, before being killed in February…
Marsha Mueller (L), is greeted by friends and family after a memorial honoring her daughter Kayla Mueller in Prescott, Arizona, February 18, 2015. (Reuters)
What astonishes me is the paucity of global outrage at the buying and selling of sex slaves — not to mention U.S. outrage at the enslavement of Mueller….
President Obama’s policies for fighting ISIS are so inept and contradictory they have helped the group’s so-called caliphate to sink ever-deeper territorial roots. The White House still doesn’t seem to recognize the long-term security threat the group poses to the U.S. homeland….
This will require (finally) a serious U.S. policy to help Iraqis and Syrians who want to roll back the jihadis. Washington must give all needed military support to Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish Kurds, who have fought most effectively against ISIS. It was the Kurds who pushed these fiends back from the Yazidi heartland, and any current U.S. effort to woo Turkey must not betray Kurdish fighters.
A far more controversial idea is reportedly being floated by General David Petraeus, the former CIA chief widely credited with turning around the Iraq war—for a time.
Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS
Shane Harris – The Daily Beast
The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.
Satellite images have confirmed the destruction of the Temple of Bel, which was one of the best preserved Roman-era sites in the Syrian city of Palmyra, a United Nations agency said. (Reuters)
Defeating ISIS
Max Boot – Council on Foreign Relations
If the president is serious about dealing with ISIS, he will need to increase America’s commitment in a measured way—to do more than what Washington is currently doing but substantially less than what it did in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade. And although President Obama will probably not need to send U.S. ground–combat forces to Iraq and Syria, he should not publicly rule out that option; taking the possibility of U.S. ground troops off the table reduces U.S. leverage and raises questions about its commitment….
Critics will call this strategy too costly, alleging that it will push the United States down a “slippery slope” into another ground war in the Middle East. This approach will undoubtedly incur greater financial cost (dispatching ten thousand troops for a year would cost $10 billion) and higher risk of casualties among U.S. forces. But the present minimalist strategy has scant chance of success, and it risks backfiring—ISIS’ prestige will be enhanced if it withstands half-hearted U.S. air strikes. Left unchecked, ISIS could expand into Lebanon, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.
The Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service forces participate in a training exercise as U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter observes at the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service Academy in Baghdad, Iraq, July 23, 2015. (Reuters)