Fear and Loathing of Qaraqosh

Anyone who dares to doubt the benefits of the military operation of the Western coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria immediately hears the answer: “How else can you stop these madmen?”

But, firstly, these "madmen" - Islamist militants and their leaders, who announced the creation of a new "great caliphate" - did not appear overnight. They first found themselves in Iraq in 2003 when the US invaded and have never left since. They "absented" only once, in 2012, to join the jihad in neighboring Syria. Jihadist militias, sympathetic to al-Qaeda from the very beginning, are an explosive mixture of Iraqi paramilitaries abandoned by the Americans, disenfranchised Sunnis who consider themselves pariahs under the new Shiite government in Baghdad, and marginal renegades rushing from battle to battle, rushing into battle with the "infidels" anywhere. The novelty of the moment is only that now recruited recruits from the West have jumped into this boiling cauldron and become cannon fodder.

After the Americans left Iraq, a deceptive silence reigned there for some time. Meanwhile, the systematic squeezing out of the Christian population continued in the country, which ultimately resulted in its exodus - as a result of the offensive of IS units, the cities of Mosul and Karakosh alone were forced to leave more than 180 thousand Christians.

The unshakable silence of the Christians of the West, whether from ignorance of what was happening, or from indifference, stunned, disappointed, and deeply troubled the Christians of the East. The West, in fact, began to act only when the Islamists began to systematically destroy another religious minority - the Yezidi Kurds, whom Sunni Muslims see as "Satanists."

In early 2014, IS madmen retook Fallujah and swept across the Anbar region bordering Syria. But even then the world paid attention to them only for a moment, frozen in horror.

Why did President Obama decide on a military operation against ISIS?

The reason was by no means only that America, as Obama said, could not leave to the mercy of fate the American advisers and instructors who remained in the IS offensive zone. (By the way, for me personally, it remains unclear why the life of an American is worth more than the life of an Iraqi, Afghan or Syrian.) America took decisive action primarily because it heard a signal for help from its most reliable and predictable ally in the region - the authorities autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. How many times over the past ten years have I heard from the Kurds complaints about the lack of real participation in their fate on the part of the Euro-Atlantic community. But not everything is simple here either.

During the first military victories of the Islamic State in the spring and summer of this year, units of the elite Kurdish Peshmerga militia, consisting mainly of Sunni Muslims, occupied the strategically important city of Kirkuk, in fact, the oil capital of Iraq. But the battle for Kirkuk was strange: the jihadists actually allowed the Peshmerga to take the city without a fight. This suggests an unspoken agreement between the Kurds and the IS: the former take control of Kirkuk, their longed-for and unattainable goal since 2003 (the Americans did not allow the Kurds to do this while they were in Iraq), and the latter are given the opportunity to reign supreme over vast territories Northern Iraq, where two large communities of Iraqi Christians still lived. And only the despair and indignation of the inhabitants of Christian Karakosh, who recently staged a protest march, finally forced the West to pay attention to their situation. Isn't it too late?

Within the next few months, it is quite likely that Iraq will disintegrate as a single and integral state. IS fighters do not need modern weapons or well-functioning infrastructure to maintain their positions. Firstly, all the military equipment abandoned by the defeated Iraqi army ended up in their hands. Secondly, at least half a billion dollars seized in the banks of Mosul became their prey. Thirdly, they sow fear and obedience throughout the country with the help of a knife and a video camera, spreading through Youtube scenes of the execution of Western hostages, reprisals against "infidels" and objections. And the fear sown cannot be overcome with the help of bombardments alone.