Facing The Enemy

"We expect the river itself to be the biggest mass grave. And we expect that in every city of our area that is liberated we will find a mass grave full of those who opposed Islamic State."
"We're still digging but we don't know how many graves there are  yet. We're expecting big numbers."
Amin, spokesman, Iraqi Human Rights Ministry

A Shiite militiaman kisses the grave at the site believed to be a mass grave where Islamic State militants killed hundreds of Iraqi soldiers when they overran Camp Speicher military base last June, in Tikrit, Iraq, 80 miles north of Baghdad, Friday, April 3, 2015. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Up to that point authorities had discovered the presence of eleven mass graves, each of which represented the burying place of dozens of bodies, the graves located in the complex of palaces in Tikrit along the Tigris River north of Baghdad that were the home base of its former tyrant, Saddam Hussein. So far only 57 bodies were identified, the slow process of matching remains to a DNA database of the 1,686 cadets registered missing from Camp Speicher is ongoing.

Officials at the air force academy located at Camp Speicher had  ordered 1,700 cadets to leave last June when ISIS had overtaken Tikrit, and return to their homes. The cadets all left as ordered, unarmed. On their way they were captured by Islamic State fighters. Had they remained at Camp Speicher they would have been safe, since the camp itself never came into the possession of the Islamist fanatics, although Tikrit did.

At the time, ISIS had proudly posted videos online showing groups of hundreds of the cadets as they were being executed. Boasts that all 1,700 had been slaughtered went viral. The search for additional mass graves is ongoing, since the eleven now discovered will not account for the total numbers that were slaughtered by Islamic State. Understandable, since many of the young men had been thrown into the Tigris River.

Some of those cadavers washed up in Samarra, the nearest dam downstream from Tikrit. Islamic State began broadcasting on their al-Bayan radio station, a fluent English-speaker hosting, to give details of the recent attacks it had launched in Iraq, Syria and Libya, according to the SITE Intelligence Group monitoring militant websites.

Opponents of ISIS don't speak with a universal voice, some exploiting their own regional, ethnic and religious perspectives. While Islamic State is unified in its hatred and violence against all those who spurn their movement toward a universal caliphate, it ill behooves those whom it targets not to make a common stand against the brutal juggernaut claiming to represent the true Islamic tradition of conquest in pursuit of installing a universal surrender to Islam.

In northern Iraq there are complaints from the Yazidi, horribly persecuted by Islamic State, finding haven in Kurdistan, that their top military leader, Haider Qasim Sheshu had been arrested. He had adamantly refused to submit to the authority of the Kurdish peshmerga forces, refusing to disband his fighters on Sinjar to join with peshmerga fighters.

"The peshmerga want to exploit our case and take supplies from the international community that are intended for us. They are threatening us not to say anything and either just shut up or leave Sinjar", complained Ibrahim Hodeida, a Yazidi spokesman, who has evidently never heard of the dictum, divided we fall.