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Friday, October 17, 2014

Don't Give Up Your Guns

I saw the following in an article at Der Spiegel recounting the experiences of a Yazidi woman who escaped from her ISIS captors. Relating about the attack on the woman's village, the article mentions:
Islamic State fighters came to Nadia's town several times, always at intervals of one or two days. They were at pains to demonstrate their military strength, roaring into town and announcing that they were the new lords of the land. The men wore mirrored sunglasses, kept their faces masked with black scarves, and carried pistols and daggers in their belts, recalls Nadia. At first, they led the townspeople to believe that they were safe, as long as they handed over their weapons, mostly old hunting rifles and kitchen knives. They told the men of Kocho that disarmament was the price to pay they had to pay to avoid being killed by Islamic State fighters. 
After the weapons were collected and piled up on the back of a pickup truck, the jihadists herded the residents into the school. They separated the men from the women and took away the men in small groups. The women heard shots all afternoon and were paralyzed with fear, says Nadia. Then the older women were separated from the younger ones. At the last moment, her mother slipped a gold ring from her finger and gave it to Nadia: "In case you need it," she whispered. This is Nadia's last memory of her mother.
You may remember a similar incident in my analysis of the Haun's Mill Massacre. There, officers of the Missouri state militia ordered the Mormon settlers to give up their weapons, which they did, fearing that refusal would lead to repercussions. It did no good. Missouri forces attacked the Haun's Mill settlement only a few days later killing 17 men and boys.

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