Category Archives: War Commentary

Yazidi Child Soldiers

take revenge on ISIS:

Their support of youth participation in the YBŞ—especially for women and girls—is made all the more striking by the fact Yazidis in rural Sinjar are often part of traditional patriarchal families. So-called honor killings of Yazidi women believed to have shamed their families have even survived into the present. A gruesome video that drew headlines and condemnation in 2007 showed a 17-year-old Yazidi girl named Dua Khalil Aswad being stoned to death by her own people on suspicion she converted to Islam to elope with a Muslim.

But the PKK/YPG model preaches equality of the sexes, something gaining ground among the Yazidis rescued by the militias.

Vian, the teenage PKK commander and drill instructor, claims for her part that the threat to ISIS fighters they’ll be killed by women gives coed units a psychological edge. “We have heard ISIS is afraid of fighting women,” she says. “We think ISIS is saying ‘if not for women, we’d control all the world.’”

“They don’t want to be killed by us,” she adds smugly.

It’s appalling that they have to rely on groups like the PKK for help.

The 70th Hiroshima Anniversary

Thank God for the atomic bomb.”

It’s always tempting to second-guess things like this, but it was the best decision that could have been made at the time with the information available at the time. Hundreds of thousands of troops were expecting to have to fight (and die) to take the home islands as hard as they just had for Okinawa. And countless Chinese were still being tortured and murdered.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Roger Kimball:

The idea that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — and, since the Japanese failed to surrender, of Nagasaki on August 9 — was a ‘war crime’ has slowly acquired currency not only among the anti-American intelligentsia but also among other sentimentalists of limited worldly experience.

Yes. And years ago, Bill Whittle took on the ignorant and not-to-be lamented Jon Stewart on the subject.