Will some “moderate” Muslim spokesman in the West kindly explain how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misapplying Islam in this case? After all, this treatment of non-Muslims is prescribed in the Qur’an. So how can they object? Yet they constantly insist that what the Islamic State is doing has nothing to do with Islam. Will someone explain this conundrum? Why, of course they won’t.
“Thousands of Iraq’s Yazidi minority killed as Islamic militants expand territory,” FoxNews.com, August 4, 2014:
Thousands of people from Iraq’s minority Yazidi community have been killed while others have fled their homes following the takeover of two northern towns by Sunni militants, a spokesman for the community says.
As Kurdish fighters are struggling to hold back the onslaught of the Islamic State militants, some 40,000 Yazidis fled the northern towns of Sinjar and Zumar, Jawhar Ali Begg told The Associated Press.
The militant group gave the Yazidis, who follow an ancient Iranian religion, an ultimatum: convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death, Begg added. The Islamic State is trying to expand the territory of their self-styled caliphate.
This ultimatum did not, of course, originate with the Islamic State. It is in the Qur’an: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).
“Thousands of Yazidi people have been killed,” he said.
Iraq is facing its worst crisis since the civil war in 2006, when the Islamic State group, an Al Qaeda breakaway faction with a strong presence in Syria, captured large swaths of land in the country’s west and north in a lightning offensive earlier this year.
The United Nations said last month that more than 500,000 people have been displaced by the violence since June, bringing the total this year to 1.4 million, including more than 230,000 Syrian refugees. The group drove ethnic and religious minorities out of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and attacked mosques and shrines, claiming they contradicted strict Islamic teachings.
Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga, have been battling with the militants for control of several towns stretching between the province of Nineveh and the Kurdish Iraqi province of Dahuk. At least 25 Kurdish fighters were killed in clashes with the militants on Sunday, and another 120 were wounded, according to Muhssin Mohamed, a Dahuk-based doctor.
A statement Monday by the Islamic State said it had captured dozens of Kurdish prisoners during the clashes and seized “large number” of weapons.
The authenticity of the statement could not be verified, but it was posted on a website used by the group.
On Sunday, there were conflicting reports over whether or not the militants captured the Mosul Dam.
Capture of the dam could give the Islamic State the ability to flood major cities in Iraq or withhold water from regions, according to Reuters….