Obama Cancels Rescue Mission Of Iraqi Christians And Yazidis Trapped On Mountain

Is Obama the weakest president in U.S. history?

The Iraqi Yazidis are not Christians per se, but they are one of Iraq’s oldest religions. Mixed in with the Yazidi refugees are plenty of Iraqi Christians who have been forced to flee by ISIS. If you were president, wouldn’t you order a dramatic rescue mission to show the world how much America values life and freedom? If you were a Christian president, and there were only 100 Christians trapped in there, why wouldn’t you try to save them?

WASHINGTON — The United States military has concluded that there are too few Yazidi refugees still trapped in the mountains of northern Iraq to warrant mounting a potentially risky rescue, the Pentagon said late Wednesday.

Military advisers who earlier in the day visited the Sinjar mountains, where as many as 30,000 people were thought to still be trapped, said that they found “far fewer” Yazidis than expected and that those who were there were in better condition than anticipated. Food and water dropped in recent days have reached those who remain, the Pentagon statement said.

The Pentagon said the visit proved that the actions the United States had taken in recent days had succeeded in preventing the Islamic State from capturing and executing the Yazidis, members of a religious sect that Sunni extremists view as heretics. It said the assessment team encountered no hostile forces during its visit and “did not engage in combat operations.”

Brett McGurk, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, said the assessment team had spent 24 hours in the mountains. He declared via Twitter that the U.S. actions had “broken the siege,” a sentiment repeated by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: “President said we’re going to break the siege of this mountain, and we broke that siege.”

But in declaring success, the Pentagon did not offer any figure for the number of Yazidis who had died in the mountains or say what had become of Islamic State forces that had controlled all the approaches to the area and still occupy the cities of Sinjar and Zummar nearby, where they reportedly have carried out executions of Yazidi men, forced marriages of Yazidi women and kidnapping of children. The United Nations has reported that tens of thousands of refugees have flooded other cities in the region.

“The team has assessed that there far fewer Yazidis on Mount Sinjar than previously feared, in part because of the success of the humanitarian air drops, airstrikes on ISIL targets, the efforts of the peshmerga and the ability of thousands of Yazidis to evacuate from the mountain each night over the last several days,” the statement said. “The Yazidis who remain are in better condition than previously believed and continue to have access to the food and water we have dropped.”

The statement concluded, “Based on this assessment, the inter-agency has determined that an evacuation mission is far less likely.”

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