In an explosive TV interview aired last week, Iraq’s Grand Mufti Rafi Al-Rifa’i, the highest Sunni authority in the country, accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iraqi government, and Iraqi Shiite militias of mass genocidal killings and rape of Sunni men and women from Iraqi towns and villages “liberated” from ISIS (Islamic State).
Mufti Al-Rifa’i posed the unanswerable question, “Why should we fight ISIS? So the Iranian IRGC can take over? The same Iranian IRGC that is running operations in Iraq?”
Mufti Al-Rifa’i is the religious leader of roughly eight million Sunni Muslims who live in the western parts of Iraq. Overall, about 22 million Sunni Muslims live in eastern Syria and Western Iraq. They are the current target of ISIS – and also, it turns out, of the Iranian IRGC.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is the key Iranian governmental army. Unlike the regular Iranian Army or “artesh,” which is tasked with the military duties of defending Iran's borders and maintaining internal order – according to the Iranian constitution, the Iran Revolutionary Guard or “pasdaran” is empowered to carry out special forces, military intelligence, and overseas military/intelligence operations.
The IRGC is officially recognized as a direct component of the Iranian military under Article 150 of the Iranian Constitution. Therefore, its actions and possible war-crimes are the direct actions and direct responsibility of the Iranian government itself.
In a tragic retelling, the Sunni Mufti Al-Rifa’i described that when the Iraqi Sunni town Jurf al-Sakhar was “liberated,” the men are immediately separated from the women and children after which “nobody knows what happened to the men,” intimating that they were immediately mass-murdered.
To top things off, the women and children were not allowed to return to their homes and left “without a roof over their heads.” He added, “Orchards were bulldozed, and houses and (Sunni) mosques were burned down.” Ominously, the cleric added that “This has happened in each and every (Sunni) city” that has been “liberated” by the Iraqi government.
He bitterly related that the Iraqi government renamed the Sunni city of Jurf al-Sakhar “Jurf Al-Nasr” (“Nasr” means “victory”) after retaking it, but from his description, the battle was more like a Shi’ite genocidal massacre of Sunni civilian men, women, and children.
Al-Rifa’i went to the heart of the matter – the American policy of targeting only the Sunni ISIS – when he asked: “Am I supposed to fight against ISIS, so (Shi’ite) militias can come in an rape our (Sunni) women?”
The Mufti stated: “If the Iraqi government wants all Iraqis to stand as one, they must act justly. Whoever talks about the slaughter by ISIS should also talk about the slaughtering (of Sunnis) by the (Shi’ite) militias. Islam is a compassionate religion. We are not stupid enough to start an internal (Sunni) fight only so that the (Shi’ite) militias come and slaughter us.”
The mufti's testimony shows that in trying to put down the terrorism of ISIS, the Obama policy of attacking only Sunni terrorists is allowing Iranian terrorists to commit genocide against the Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria.