Here’s the least surprising news of the day, from CNN:
ISIS is targeting civilians attempting to leave the militant-held city of Falluja, as Iraqi forces and militia attempt to wrest back control of the city, a European non-profit operating in Iraq says.
As many as 50,000 residents remain trapped in the center of Falluja as Iraqi security forces close in, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) told CNN Monday. Many of those who try to escape the clutches of ISIS are being targeted and shot by militants, it said.
And:
One man CNN spoke to said ISIS fighters came to his home and told him he needed to go to the center of Falluja to serve as a human shield for the terror group.
“It was an order,” Taleb Farhan, a resident of Karma on the outskirts of Falluja, said. “If you refused they’d shoot you on the spot.”
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which jihadist military strategy depends on the use of the human shield to compel American, western, and Israeli military restraint. Yes, they can try to conceal themselves in the countryside, but it is much easier for them to infiltrate the civilian population, operate out of homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools, and then wave the bloody shirt whenever civilians die. They hide in plain sight.
This strategy is pure evil, and ISIS’s only tactical mistake is so brazenly showing its hand. More sophisticated jihadists, like the monsters of Hamas, have at least cultivated sympathetic media enough to get them to turn a blind eye to obvious jihadist war crimes.
American and Israeli forces should follow the law of war, of course, but that law puts the onus on both parties to an armed conflict to protect civilians, and (absent compelling evidence of intentional killings) when human shields die in the course of combat, the moral and legal blame lies with the party using the shields, not the party seeking to avoid civilian casualties. So if you see news in Fallujah of civilian deaths from an American air strike, remember that the truly guilty party is the ISIS jihadist hiding in the home, not the American pilot doing his duty.