Grappling With ISIS

"We need to make sure that we alleviate humanitarian suffering. Secondly, I believe we need to make sure that (ISIL) is not in a position to overrun the Kurds or to take a stronger hold on Iraq."
Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans

It's been estimated that around 1,700 Islamists have left Europe, mostly from France, Germany and Britain to join the fighting in Iraq, recruited for the sheer joy of experiencing that adrenalin rush of accomplishment that comes with beheading another human, crucifying apostates, slaughtering men, women and children in a mass paroxysm of religious patriotism.

If such atrocities are undertaken for the sake of upholding the sanctity and honour of a dearly held religion, they cannot be wrong.

Because of the impending threat, the European Union recognizes with the eventual return of such conscripts to jihadist extremism, it has decided it is incumbent upon it too to arrange for direct arms deliveries to the Kurdish fighters in conflict with the Sunni evangelists, offering Iraqi Christians and Yazidi the opportunity to save their lives by converting to Islamism under the kindly governance of the Islamic State.

European pledges to fly tonnes of aid to northern Iraq over the coming days have burst forth out of a communal concern for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing the unstoppable incursion of the Islamists, sweeping away all resistance to their onslaught of territory and their fearsome advance, leaving behind a wake of innumerable corpses.

Their own radical Muslims who have left the confines of Europe for the more bracing latitudes of Syria/Iraq present a conundrum to Europe; what will happen on their return?

There has been a telling incident that occurred in May at the slaughter of four people at Brussels' Jewish Museum with the return of a radical French Islamist from Syria. Canada too has its concerns with the report of Calgarian Farah Mohamed Shirdon, now dead after threatening via videos that after the Middle East, Europe and North America are next in line for surrender to Islamist rule.

Frame grab from an ISIS video, of Calgarian, Farah Mohamed Shirdon, who was fighting overseas with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS video frame grab/Calgary Sun/QMI Agency

In an earlier interview with an investigative journalist on line, Shirdon responded to the information that his former schoolmates expressed surprise that the quiet young man they were familiar with was now fighting with a terrorist group with the statement: "Why are they astonished? There are hundreds of Canadians here." Well, now there's one less; the voluble young man who was pleased to burn his Canadian passport on video is no longer in the land of the living but in Paradise.

According to Jeffrey Anderson, an analyst with Georgetown University, Europe's decision to send arms to the Kurds represents an address to an immediate crisis: "In a defensible way, which is relying overwhelmingly on sympathetic local forces. You're strengthening the centrifugal forces within the country. You're making it more likely that what you're emerging with is not a unified Iraq. That's the price you have to pay for solving this crisis."

Smoke rises near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul after a U.S. airstrike near the Mosul dam on Sunday, August 17. The dam is a strategic target as its failure could result in flooding all the way to Baghdad. ISIS, known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public beheadings and other acts of terror, has taken over large swaths of northern and western Iraq as it seeks to create an Islamic caliphate that stretches from Syria to Iraq.

France's pledge to ship weapons to the Kurds, and Britain's delivery of ammunition and military supplies from eastern European nations will be welcomed by the Peshmerga whose own arms are inferior to those that the Islamic State looted from the arms depots courteously left for them by the fleeing Iraqi militias who decided to leave Mosul in the hands of the ISIS fanatics to minister to the majority Sunni Iraqis living there.

Germany, the Netherlands and other European nations are considering requests to send arms to the Kurds with the assurance that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will finally step down from his untenable position of holding on for another term despite Haider al-Abadi's appointment to succeed him as Iraqi prime minister. Now, whether a Shiite leader is capable of extending equality to Sunnis and Kurdish Iraqis will be put to the test.

Trucks carrying Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters head to the Mosul dam on the Tigris River on August 17.