When groups like ISIS move into your neighborhood, the effects can last long after they leave in the form of the reprisal attack, the gift that keeps on giving:
Members of the Yazidi community, one of the Iraqi minorities hardest hit by jihadist atrocities, killed 21 Sunni Arab villagers in a January revenge attack, Amnesty International said today.
The London-based watchdog investigated attacks carried out on January 25 by a Yazidi militia in Jiri and Sibaya, two Sunni Arab villages in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq.
“Virtually not a single house was spared. Half of those killed were elderly or disabled men and women and children,” Amnesty said in a report.
It said another 40 were abducted, 17 of whom are still missing.
There’s no excuse for seeking “retribution” from people who didn’t do anything to you in the first place, and the Yazidis don’t exactly have a blemish-free history when it comes to employing unjust violence. But it seems likely that this massacre wouldn’t have happened if ISIS had not brutalized the Yazidis in Sinjar last year, and any further escalation from here will thus also have roots in what happened in Sinjar. There’s every reason to expect the same sorts of attacks to happen in other parts of Iraq down the road, and certainly in Syria where the Alawite/Druze/Christian/Sunni mix raises similar risks of inter-communal violence. So ISIS is going to stick around, in one form or another, for a long time to come.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 