REPORT: Iraqis in Lebanon protest against insurgency back home

Men and children chanted slogans for Iraq and waved Iraqi flags as well as banners inscribed with sentences like “We are all with you, Iraq” and “We die so that Iraq may live.”

“This is a gathering of the Iraqi community in Beirut as a supporting message to the political operation in Iraq and the Iraqi army, and it is a message to all the politicians in Iraq that the division of Iraq and supporting the terrorist groups is a red line. This is why it is a message from the Iraqi community that we are with the unity of Iraq,” said Iraqi journalist Abbass Al-Mousawi.

Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group have routed Baghdad's army and seized the north of the country in the past week, threatening to dismember Iraq and unleash all-out sectarian warfare with no regard for national borders.

“We are protesting against the terrorism happening in Iraq, that countries are practicing against this united people that have been living together for the past thousands years,” declared Salah Al-Sayyadi, an Iraqi living in Lebanon.

The division is becoming greater as severe fighting takes place, people are killed, and Sunni families flee to the east whilst Shi'ite families escape to the west of the country.

ISIL said it executed 1,700 soldiers out of 2,500 it had captured in Tikrit. Although those numbers appeared exaggerated, the total could still be in the hundreds.

“We came from all the areas in Lebanon, from the North, the South, and Beirut to support the armed forces and stand by its side against this Takfiri Wahabi attack supported by a Zionist American Masonic global planner to destroy and divide Iraq,” added another Iraqi Mohammed Al-Shamari.

ISIL seeks a caliphate ruled on medieval Sunni Muslim precepts in Iraq and Syria, fighting against both Iraq's Maliki and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, another ally of Iran. It considers Shi'ites heretics as deserving of death and has boasted of massacring hundreds of Iraqi troops who surrendered to it last week.

Its uprising has been joined by tribal groups and figures from Saddam's era who believe Maliki is hostile to Sunnis.


REUTERS


For more details, watch Foutoun Raad's full report in the video above