Soren appears to believe that the Assad regime and the YPG are actually Islamic fronts, G.  Not sure why, except to him, anything and everything smacks of Islamophobia, except of course his Homophobia, racism and Xenophobia.  Quite a lot of phobias you've got there, Soren!  Are you aiming for the record book?   

There are no shias and sunnis fighting side by side.

Soren wrote on Sep 5^th, 2015 at 8:11pm:


Yes I did.

If secularists in the ME are specifically fighting against islamisation - that makes Islam front and centre of the conflict - are you following yet?

This was originally about you mocking me for claiming that the 'kuffar, non-kuffar' dynamic was central to this conflict. In terms of the battle both the Syrian regime and the YPG are fighting against the Islamists - this is exactly what this is about.

Please spend some time to reflect on this exceedingly simple point before you go shooting your mouth off again with nonsense.

well no schit sherlock 

HE WAS one of Islamic State’s top commanders who captured women in terrifying conditions and forced them to have sex with his depraved fighters.

But it seems one of his captives has exacted their bloody revenge.

It has emerged the senior commander, known only by his nom de guerre Abu Anas, was murdered on Saturday by an unidentified Iraqi woman he kept as a sex slave.
   
Kurdistan Democratic Party spokesman Saeed Mamouzini told Iraqi television network al-Sumaria that the woman shot Anas dead in Iraq’s Tal Roman district, three months after she had been forced to sex slavery. He said the woman was married off to several of Anas’s fighters as a sick “gift”.

It comes as more details emerge of IS’s use of rape as a weapon of power and cruelty against its captives.

It is not known what happened to the woman, who is believed to be a member of the Yazidi-Kurdish minority.

The Yazidis are a religious minority in Syria and Iraq that is targeted by IS. A total of 5270 Yazidis were abducted by IS last year, and more than 3000 are still in their grip, according to figures within the community.

‘WE ASK YOU TO RAPE’

News of the commander’s death comes as Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie said IS dictated mass rape as official policy, the kind of which was “beyond what we have seen before”.

Jolie, a United Nations special envoy, was giving evidence at a Lords committee hearing on sexual violence in conflict zones.

“It’s not sexual, it is a violent, brutal terrorising weapon,” she told the committee.

“The most aggressive terrorist group in the world today knows what we know, knows that it is a very effective weapon and they are using it as a centre point of their terror and their way of destroying communities and families, and attacking and dehumanising.”

She said IS explicitly told its fighters: “We ask you to rape.”

“They are saying, ‘You should do this, this is the way to build a society’,” Jolie said.

The star, who has campaigned for a decade against the use of rape in war, recalled meeting girls as young as seven who had been brutally raped in war zones.

“I remember distinctly meeting this little girl who was very young, perhaps seven or eight, and she was rocking back and forward staring at the wall and tears streaming down her face because she had been brutally raped multiple times,” Jolie said.

“You couldn’t talk to her, you could touch her. I felt absolutely helpless and didn’t know what to do for her.

“More recently, I met a 13-year-old girl in Iraq who had been kept in a room with many other girls. They were taken out in twos, brought to this very dirty room with this dirty couch and raped repeatedly.

“They told me what was even worse than this physical violence was they had to stand in rooms and watch their friends be sold.

“To hear men arguing over what they were worth. Were they worth $40, $50? What was the price, their value? And how humiliating that was.”

Jolie appeared at the committee at the UK House of Parliament alongside former Foreign Secretary William Hague, with whom she co-founded Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, which campaigns for the victims of rape in war zones.

She praised British government for taking a lead on the issue but urged for a “very strong response” to IS in Iraq and Syria.

ISLAMIC STATE’S SEX HANDBOOK

This week Human Rights Watch (HWR) executive director Kenneth Roth revealed that IS has circulated a chilling “pamphlet” that outlines rules about having sex with enslaved women who are not Muslim, including girls and young women from the Yazidi community.

The pamphlet, which is available on Twitter, has been translated and republished on the HRW website.

Set out in a question-and-answer format,

the document uses passages from the Koran to justify rape, and recommends that if the female captive is a virgin, her master “can have intercourse with her immediately after taking possession of her”.

“However,” the pamphlet continues, “if she isn’t, her uterus must be purified (first).”

Roth said that by treating captured non-Muslim women as subject to the sexual whims of those who control them, “ISIS disregards nearly universal injunctions against slavery and rape”.

Previous reports by HRW have outlined the horrifying system of organised rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage inflicted on Yazidi girls and women held captive by IS.

Earlier this year HRW interviewed 20 girls and young women who escaped from IS and suffered “unimaginable trauma” from their ordeals.

RAHAL Dergham understands the Syrian refugee crisis better than just about anyone else in Australia.

When the Sydney Catholic priest arrived from Syria almost eight years ago, he says he left a country that was “moving forward”. In his home town of Hama, the young clergyman freely held masses, his family worked happily and worshipped freely, and the children went to school for a decent and compulsory education.

Now, he says, it’s a completely different place. Every time he speaks to his family or friends who are still there or have recently fled, or even when he checks up on how the conflict is progressing online, there are some terrifying reminders of how bad it’s become.

This is what Syrian asylum seekers are faced with... police fired at least 20 tear gas grenades into the crowd of Syrians and protesters.

“He was a peaceful man, a kind man,” Father Dergham says of his close friend and former colleague Father Francois Murad.

“They taped it when they decapitated him and posted the video on YouTube. We saw it even before the media started talking about it. Now whenever you search Syrian crisis or anything about Christian persecution, you will see him.”

The 33-year-old has seen, heard of, and counselled his friends over more atrocities than any man his age should have encountered.

There’s the time a teenager from his town was tortured and murdered trying to visit his family at Christmas.

“One of the last ones we lost was a young man, he was about 18,” he says.

“He was not even armed. He had run away from the compulsory army service and was working in Lebanon but he was smuggled back to the country to be with his family on Christmas Day.

“At the checkpoint they, ISIS, found him and took him from the car. They took him out and they beat him and he was killed. His family didn’t get to see him for Christmas Day but they did see him again.”

When the parents of that young man saw him again, Father Dergham explains, his body had been delivered to them in a plastic bag, chopped into pieces.

“We’ve received many of our people in parts,” he says.

Like the time a taxi driver the young priest used to work with was returned to his family.

“He disappeared and they found his taxi on the side of the street and we never heard of him for three months,” he says.

“He was rich so they asked his family for a lot of money to have him returned. The family paid but still he was killed. He was returned though, in a plastic bag. They received his decapitated body. He had been tortured.”

He describes bodies found in shallow graves cut up into pieces and piled on top of each other. Men held captive working as slaves and being fed only a piece of cheese or a chunk of bread each day, and women sold as sex slaves.

Father Dergham described more atrocities than can be listed here, and many too distressing to publish. But he says people need to know about the reality of what is going on in Syria to understand that the people there just need leave.

“The situation in Syria is now nearly unbearable and that’s why people are leaving,” he says.

“They are leaving in masses and probably no one will stay, even in the safe areas because they will no longer be safe. Anyone, any Christian who is still there lives in constant fear and they are right to be in fear.”

Since the civil war and the infiltration of ISIS, Father Dergham says everyone he knows who was happy in Syria has left or is trying to since their cities have been taken over.

They make up some of the 4.1 million Syrians fleeing their homeland after more than four years of civil war, making it the worst refugee crisis the world has seen since the genocide of Rwanda.


Their desperation and the reality of their journey has been revealed today in the faces of children in Hungary, sprayed with tear gas as they try to cross the border into Hungary.

On Monday, 10,000 migrants crossed the Hungary Serbia border. Their treatment by protesters and police have angered human rights groups, but also serve to show the reality of Syrians’ struggles.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott last week began discussions about resettling 12,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria and Iraq.

When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took the top job earlier this week, he praised Mr Abbott for his generosity towards Syrian refugees, but he’ll now likely be under pressure to take more.

The US is looking to resettle at least 10,000 refugees Syrian refugees — a marked increase to the 1800 it has taken in since the conflict erupted.

European countries have been praised for their willingness to accept asylum seekers, with Germany saying it is prepared to take up to 800,000 asylum seekers entering its country this year.

AN Iraqi man with links to Islamic terrorist groups has been shot dead by police in Berlin after he stabbed an officer in the neck area with a knife on Thursday morning.


Police responded to reports of the man — now identified as 41-year-old Rafik Mohamad Yousef — threatening passers-by with a knife in the West Berlin district of Spandau at about 10am.
Yousef reportedly stabbed a 44-year-old female police officer in the neck with a nine-centimetre blade as she approached him.


An officer then opened fire on Yousef, killing him but also accidentally hitting the female police officer in the kidney with one stray bullet.

Despite attempts by emergency workers to revive him, Yousef died in an ambulance shortly after being shot.

Berlin chief prosecutor Dirk Feuerberg said it was too early to speculate about a “terrorist motive” and Yousef’s apartment was being searched, German news agency DPA reported.

At a press conference, Feuerberg said the injured female police officer is now in a stable condition in the intensive care unit after undergoing emergency surgery.

“We wish strength and full recovery,” Police posted to Twitter.

Prior to the attack, Yousef removed an electronic tag that he had been ordered to wear when he was released on bail. Yousef had been convicted and given a prison sentence for planning an attack against former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi in 2004.

He was a member of Ansar al-Islam, a radical Islamic group with links to al-Qaeda, made up predominately by Iraqi Kurds. The group has a history of conflict with Islamic State.