Dear UN: What Is Iraq Supposed To Do, Continue To Let Terrorists Ruin Their Country?

Far be it for me to ever defend the rulings of an alleged corrupt judicial system in Iraq, but the United Nations is wrong to condemn Iraq for killing 36 members of the Islamic terrorist group, ISIS, as Samuel Osborne of The Independent reports.

“…given the weakness of the Iraqi justice system,” the rushed decision poses, “greater injustice.”

Osborne writes that Iraq executed 36 members of ISIS by hanging for “capturing 1700 soldiers from the Speicher military base” and overtaking the “northern city of Tikrit in the summer” in 2014. Following the capture of the soldiers, ISIS posted a video forcing the soldiers to “lie face down by a shallow trench before they were shot dead.”

Iraq Executes Dozens for 2014 Massacre by ISIS https://t.co/bj6uYUdkNM

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 22, 2016

In 2015, the 36 members of ISIS believed to be involved with the execution in 2014 were captured after Iraqi forces regained control of Tikrit. (As mentioned: ISIS recorded the execution of killing the soldiers, so “believed involvement” is just semantics). That said, I understand the United Nations criticism of the Iraq justice system sentencing these men to death for their own inhumane crimes.

A 2013 report from the Human Rights Watch has condemned the Iraq leadership for using “draconian measures against opposition politicians, detainees, demonstrators, and journalists, effectively squeezing the space for independent civil society and political freedoms in Iraq.” Iraq is steep in political upheaval, corruption, which has resulted in thousands of civilians and police deaths.

Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, hasn’t shied from finger-wagging shame towards Iraq for their deplorable human rights violations behavior.

“As insurgent groups targeted innocent Iraqis in a multitude of coordinated attacks throughout the year, Iraq’s security forces targeted innocent civilians in mass campaigns of arbitrary arrests and abusive interrogations.”

“After decades of dictatorship, occupation, and terrorism, the Iraqi people today face a government that is slipping further into authoritarianism and doing little to make them safer.”

The HRW 2013 report, details Iraq tortured female detainees for “suspicion of terrorism,'” without impunity, but accepting a bribe assured the female prisoner’s freedom. Obviously, this practice is unethical and highly suspicious on the part of the authority who arrested these women. Who goes about freeing “suspected terrorists” for favors claimed? HRW also reports the Iraq police would arrests 12 and 13-year-old girls, too, without impunity — beating, torturing, and allegedly raping them.

None of Iraq’s offenses are immune to my ears. I find their human rights violations and corrupt system despicable, contemptible, repugnant, most of all, nefarious. Thus, it pains me to defend their right to decimate and execute ISIS, in light of their lack of due process and other proclivities. What isn’t lacking, however, is those 36 ISIS members recording the execution of the soldiers they captured in Tikrit in 2014.

What also isn’t lacking from the record book is ISIS’s beheading people (without due process) of any perceived enemy. Let’s also not remiss, ISIS’s other means of chaos: Suicide bombings, stoning, rapes, and mass shootings. NBC News reports since January 2016, ISIS killed 18,000 people in Iraq. Where was the due process for those Iraqi lives?

Intensive review of Clinton State Dept record presents broader picture of missteps that left Iraq vulnerable to ISIS https://t.co/0LPJsiZvOb

— ProPublica (@propublica) August 21, 2016

Let’s also not dismiss Boko Haram allegiance to ISIS, which ISIS humbly accepted. You remember Boko Haram, right? He kidnapped 600 girls, raping and forcing many into the sex trade industry — girls as young as 12. Boko Haram also participates in suicide bombings and mass shootings of innocent civilians.

We known ISIS’s psychotic intent, to force Sharia law on the masses — not with asking and fair elections — but with force.

So, spare me the “peace not war,” bullcrap that Iraq lacks due process. Iraq defended itself against terrorism and sought justice for the dead soldiers. Yes, there’s a lot of hypocrisy in this case because war is dirty, war is revengeful – but until the Middle East decides to all drop their weapons and seek peace and democracy, life will continue to be complicated and chaotic there.

On war, Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News wrote that occasionally one is “forced to renounce his faith in God and admit charlatan.” G.K. Chesterton, on the subject of military fighting, wrote, ” The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Every man has the right to defend his country, including vengefully, sometimes.

It’s easy for groups like the United Nations and Human Rights Watch to criticize — but unlike the Iraqi’s — these activists groups don’t live with the daily destruction of violence at the hands of terrorists.

[Photo by John Moore/Getty Images]