Tikrit (Iraq): Ever since Daesh or ISIS came to limelight few years ago, Sunni Muslims all over the world in one voice denounced the terrorist group saying it has nothing to do with Islam and Muslims, in fact it has been deliberately formed to create negative image of Muslims world over and wipe out Sunni Muslims from Iraq.
The claim is getting credence as war against Daesh or ISIS enters final stage. The massacre of Sunni Muslims which took place in other parts of the world in the past and which is underway in Syria is being repeated on a larger scale in Mosul, Raqqa and other Iraqi areas and territories overrun by ISIS or Daesh.
"The vast majority of the 4.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced from their homes by the Islamic State's war are Sunnis. And as the offensives get underway to capture Mosul, Iraq's biggest Sunni city, and Raqqa, the group's self-proclaimed capital in Syria, more Sunni towns and villages are being demolished, and more Sunni livelihoods are being destroyed", Washington Post said in a report Sunday.
"ISIS was a tsunami that swept away the Sunnis," said Sheikh Ghazi Mohammed Hamoud, a Sunni tribal leader in the northwestern Iraqi town of Rabia, which was briefly overrun by the Islamic State in 2014 and is now under Kurdish control.
"We lost everything. Our homes, our businesses, our lives", he added,
Across the border in Syria, where the war against the Islamic State is entangled with the complicated conflict between rebels and the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Sunnis are also bearing the brunt of the violence and dislocation. Sunni towns and neighborhoods are being leveled by Syrian and Russian airstrikes, Washington Post said.
"The effort to crush the mostly Sunni rebellion relies heavily on Shiite fighters from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq. Sunnis comprise the vast majority of the 5 million refugees scattered around the region and in Europe, according to the United Nations and the governments of the countries that are hosting them", America's leading newspaper reported.
"The dangers are clear, analysts and Iraqis say. Sunnis are at risk of becoming a dispossessed and resentful underclass in lands they once ruled, creating fertile conditions for a repeat of the cycle of marginalization and radicalization that gave rise to the Islamic State in the first place", the newspaper said.
"A journey through many of the towns and villages in Iraq that have been liberated from Islamic State control, most of them well over a year ago, reveals the enormous scale of the challenge. From the Syrian border in the west to the Iranian border in the east, there are wrecked villages, half-empty towns and people whose lives have been torn apart, perhaps irrevocably", it said.
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