ISIS continues to take advantage of its momentum in northern Iraq today, advancing keeper into Kurdish-held territory and seizing several new cities along the Kurdish frontier.
Among the most important cities to fall was Bakhdida (also known as Qaraqosh), a city in the Nineveh Province and the largest city of Iraqi Christians remaining.
Bakhdida normally only has around 50,000 residents, but was also housing a number of Iraqi Christian refugees from in and around Mosul since the ISIS takeover of that city in June.
Nearby villages, also mostly Christian, were overrun as well, and another influx of refugees is coming out of ISIS-held territory and into neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan.
Note: Some of the reports this article is based on came out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Though traditionally reliable sources of information, Kurdistan is openly lobbying for US military involvement at this point, and therefore efforts to “manage” information coming out of the region cannot be ruled out.
Anyone worried about the dire fate of Christians at the hands of merciless fiends in the Mid East can find a lot of them needing help in occupied Palestine.
This may be off topic but I'm curious. With all the reporting that has been done on ISIS/ISIL over the past 6 (?) months, very little has been reported about the leadership corp of ISIS. There was a little reporting done awhile ago, perhaps naming one guy the reporter(s) claimed was the leader of ISIS but nothing since.
It used to be de rigueur to identify the leader(s) and their toadies so the media could put an evil face on them – you know, make it personal. But with ISIS, nothing. Why is there nothing on these guys? Do they even exist?
One would think that with all the non-ISIS Arabs that are supposedly running scared that the vaunted CIA couldn't recruit a willing Shia spy or 2 or 3 to infiltrate the leadership corp and identify the leadership group and pinpoint where they are or are going to be and then execute a little "Shock and Awe" on them. At the least it would slow them down – may be even stop them long enough for the Iranians and Maliki to find their asses with both hands.