A clutch of Yazidi-Americans closely tied to the minority group under siege in northern Iraq say they are wary of the Obama administration and its European allies’ embrace of a poorly defined effort to arm Kurdish fighters in the Sinjar Mountains.
In interviews Wednesday with The Washington Times, the Yazidis expressed deep appreciation for President Obama authorizing U.S. military force to stop their brethren from being slaughtered by al Qaeda-inspired extremists with the Islamic State, but they warned that relying too heavily on Kurdish militias to do the fighting on the ground after American bombs have been dropped may worsen the situation for religious minorities — and make the overall security situation even more volatile in the region.
“The only way we can truly protect the Yazidis, as well as the minority Christians in northern Iraq, is for U.S. and United Nations forces to be on the ground,” said Mirza Ismail, who heads the Yazidi Human Rights Organization International, a loosely knit network of Yazidi groups in the U.S., Canada and Iraq.
“This is a genocide,” said Mr. Ismail, who added that Washington appears blind to the reality that the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) is exploiting the crisis involving Yazidi and Christian populations in order to manipulate Western powers into providing heavy weaponry to Kurdish militia groups known as the peshmerga.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/13/us-yazidis-wary-of-arming-kurdish-fighters-in-nort/#ixzz3AMi8TIQ0
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