Political expert Hassan Hanizadeh has, in an interview with the Mizan News Agency, weighed in on the US air and ground attacks on the Sayyid al-Shuhada Brigades of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) in the town of Sinjar in Iraq’s Nineveh Province.
“The Americans had already announced that the PMU’s getting close to the Iraq-Syria border was their red line, and we saw that, under this very pretext, the US targeted PMU forces in Sinjar near the common border between Iraq and Syria,” he said.
Hanizadeh said attacks on civilian areas in Syria and the recent US attack on PMU troops in Sinjar are among the illegal activities by Washington in Syria and Iraq.
“The US insisted that the PMU must be dissolved after the liberation of Mosul. However, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced that the PMU will not be dissolved under any circumstances,” said the expert.
“In order to protect the ISIS in Tal Afar, the Americans did not allow PMU troops to reach the Syria-Iraq border and chase Takfiri terrorists,” he said.
He underlined that the US has, time and again, committed such crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but shirk responsibility for their crimes by simply saying “it was a mistake!”
After the true extent and harrowing dimensions of the crimes were unmasked, mostly by the locals who had fled unscathed, local officials as well as users of social networks in Afghanistan blamed Ashraf Ghani for the human disaster. They accused him of remaining tight-lipped and dragging his feet on the gross genocide of Shiites in Mirza Olang.
“Although Ashraf Ghani has highlighted the necessity of taking revenge for those killed in Mirza Olang, he did not introduce ISIS and Taliban terrorists as the key perpetrators of the crime, so that the Taliban’s track record would not be stained by this ignominious event, and the trend of Ashraf Ghani’s so-called ethnic peace with them wouldn’t be harmed. Killings and crimes by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists in different parts of Afghanistan are nothing new. It’s been decades that Afghan people have been victimized by terrorism on a daily basis. What makes the tragedy more painful and further reveals the innocence of the victims is that local officials had, time and again, warned about the possibility of such a human disaster, and called for the deployment of more troops to counter the attack by the Taliban and ISIS.
Central Gov’t Refuses to Dispatch Troops to Mirza Olang
Governor of Sar-e Pol province Mohammad Zaher Vahdat and Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Afghanistan Mohammad Mohaqiq are two government officials who, as they say, contacted Afghan security chiefs several times after terrorists began attacking Mirza Olang and called for action to save people.
However, it seems those who Zaher Vahdat was addressing are not afraid of being put on the list of accomplices to crimes once again. The reason is that during the several days when Zaher Vahdat was repeatedly making calls for helping the residents of Mirza Olang, no troops were dispatched to the area. Moreover, no human rights institution and international organization mentioned the human disaster, especially at a time when we are surrounded by social media networks and information is disseminated in the twinkling of an eye. The killing of Shiites in Afghanistan unmasked another reality, too, the reality that all terrorist groups are the same because they all have a brutal nature, and all of them promote the policies of hostile governments in the region. Even if they ostensibly turn the gun at each other, they are united against the oppressed.
Local authorities and elders, who had abandoned hope of receiving assistance from the central government, finally managed to secure the release of 250 of the hostages after holding talks with ISIS and Taliban elements. According to local media, the central government was supposed to dispatch troops to Mirza Olang and begin purging it from terrorists on Wednesday, exactly four days after the humanitarian disaster was committed.
