Should the U.S. Arm Assyrians to Fight Isis?

An Assyrian volunteer stands guard over the Christian city of Al Qosh, Iraq. Photograph by Jeff Gardner, founder and lead photographer at the Picture Christians Project. I was in Iraq a few weeks ago doing humanitarian media work. That translates into me traveling to the nasty places in the world, gathering information and image that organizations use to mobilize their supporters. Starting in Erbil, I worked my way West to Dohuk, North to the Turkish border, and South, right up to the lines with the Islamic State (IS) just above Mosul, listening, observing and photographing as much as I could. The situation there is as bad as you've heard and worse. IS has made tens of thousands of people homeless, robbed them, looted their cities, sexually-enslaved their women and brutally murdered unknown numbers of innocents. I spent almost ten days gathering stories and images of those who were lucky enough to escape IS's handiwork. Iraq is now thoroughly infected with IS and the disease is spreading. This is due largely because the United States, under its current leadership, deliberately refused to finish what we had started there. Instead of capitalizing on US progress in the region, the Obama administration (and most of its political party) politicized the matter and pulled the rug out from under a decade of gains in Iraq. Evil is what evil does, and whether it's the petty-crook in your town or the terrorist half-a-world away, they both constantly look to exploit gaps in power: a chance to rob, rape and murder. It is really just that simple. IS is also growing in Iraq because the Obama administration has a difficult time calling, or maybe even seeing, certain ideologies as a source of evil. Why? Because liberalism lacks belief in absolute good and bad, and thus has a hard time seeing evil even when it goes about lopping off heads and running sex-slave markets. When someone lacks strong convictions they often assume that others do too, and they miss that some, like IS, are absolutely certain in their belief in murder and mayhem. Negotiating their way through life without a moral compass, many liberals miss that there are those, like IS, who navigate by the knife, not seeking True North, but blood. The cure to the IS disease is first to call evil for what it is, and in doing so, recognize its origins. As this concerns IS in Iraq the source of this evil is political Islam. Am I saying that all Muslims are evil, or even violent? No, I am not. But political Islam, which is an authoritarian and theocratic belief system, is the soil in which IS grows. The one is the fruit of the other. Secondly, the US must mobilize and train all those willing to fight IS. The policy of equipping and training IS' enemies is good, but it is misguided when it comes to groups like the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Over the past two years the FSA has had its clock cleaned by IS, and is, by most accounts, infiltrated by terrorists, including IS and the Al Nusra Front. A better application of this policy would be to equip and train those in Iraq who have the most skin in the game - the Assyrians. The Assyrians are the original Iraqis, are nearly 100% Christian (thus impossible for Muslims, like IS, to infiltrate) and are the natural foes of Muslim terrorists. And yes, they have a score to settle with IS. In place after place that I traveled, I heard the same story: Assyrians were disarmed by the Kurdish Peshmerga and told to stay in their cities and villages, assured that all would be well. However, when IS flooded into Northern Iraq in June, the Peshmerga retreated Westward as fast as the Iraqi army did, leaving hundreds of thousands of Assyrians to fend for themselves. The suffering that the Assyrians endured at the hands of IS has been immense. In Dohuk, at the headquarters of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, the political party that represents Assyrians in the Iraqi federal parliament, I have seen lists of young men who have signed up to fight IS. There are even groups in the US, like the American Mesopotamian Organization, who are working to arm and train Assyrian fighters. If US officials do not want to get caught leading from behind again, they should call these groups together and take the measure of the Assyrians' readiness to fight. There is an energy in the young Assyrian men that I spoke with in Iraq, born in part from the boredom that comes with having nothing to do in an Internally Displaced Persons camp (IDP), but also from the humiliation of being driven into the desert by IS thugs. In short, it was clear to me that the Assyrians want to fight, but only lack equipment and training - both of which the US should supply. Which brings me back to where I started. IS is a disease, one that has vowed to spread itself and visit terror on all of us. It is in Iraq's and our best interest to equip the Assyrians to deal with IS now, and over there, before we are forced to deal with IS later, and over here.

Jeff Gardner is founder and lead photographer at the Picture Christians Project. You can see his work at picturechristians.org.