{"id":24097,"date":"2014-08-16T18:38:25","date_gmt":"2014-08-17T02:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=24097"},"modified":"2014-08-16T18:38:25","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T02:38:25","slug":"yazidis-many-attacks-carried-out-by-neighbors-not-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/16\/yazidis-many-attacks-carried-out-by-neighbors-not-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Yazidis: Many Attacks Carried Out by Neighbors, Not ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhat lost in the first-hand account of last week&#8217;s helicopter crash by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/08\/17\/world\/middleeast\/iraq-alissa-j-rubin-a-times-correspondent-recounts-fatal-helicopter-crash-in-kurdistan.html?_r=0\">NY Times reporter Alissa Rubin<\/a>, who was injured in the incident, was a potentially important revelation about the attacks on the Iraqi Yazidi minority. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The pilot really made a big impression. You know, the Yazidis feel so betrayed by the Arab neighbors they had lived among for so many years; they all turned on the Yazidis when ISIS came. Many of the atrocities were carried out not by the militants but by their own neighbors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The focus in the story is on the pilot, himself a Sunni Arab from the region, trying to save his neighbor Yazidis even as others had turned on them. That&#8217;s important, without a doubt, but ignores the more important point, that ISIS didn&#8217;t actually carry out many of the attacks on the Yazidis.<\/p>\n<p>So to sum up, President Obama started a war to save 40,000 trapped Yazidis from ISIS, and there weren&#8217;t 40,000 of them, and they weren&#8217;t trapped, and now it turns out ISIS also wasn&#8217;t nearly so involved as previously indicated. America was lied into the first Iraq War in 2003 on some mightly flimsy pretexts, but it seems the administration didn&#8217;t learn any of the lessons, even bad lessons like keeping your lies less transparent, and the whole pretext collapsed in just over a week. The war, however, will go on much, much longer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhat lost in the first-hand account of last week&#8217;s helicopter crash by NY Times reporter Alissa Rubin, who was injured in the incident, was a potentially important revelation about the attacks on the Iraqi Yazidi minority. The pilot really made a big impression. You know, the Yazidis feel so betrayed by the Arab neighbors they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-24097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24098,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24097\/revisions\/24098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24097"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=24097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}