RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES

This is not a used car parking lot, but the road out of Mosul, Iraq.  People are running for their lives as the UN says 500,000 have fled the fighting there.  Many left with only the clothes on their backs and need food and water and medical care.

Although the President has said alQaeda was "on the run", a terrorist branch of alQaeda called ISIS (Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) is running the fight and beheading its way to Baghdad.

According to the Washington Post, ISIS is gobbling up the resistance, and they just became richer than a small country.  How?  As 1,300 ISIS forces took Mosul, they helped themselves to $425 million from the central bank of Mosul (500 billion Iraqi dinars).  Then they also scraped together a large quantity of gold bullion and dollars from other banks.

Know what else was in Mosul?  Out at the airport, ISIS helped themselves to a fleet of Blackhawk helicopters that we gave to the Iraqis.  And Humvees.  All are part of the $15 billion we've spent on training, weapons, and equipment for the Iraqis...which now will prove helpful to the terrorists.

Now we hear that Iranian forces are coming in to throw in with Iraqi forces against ISIS.  THERE'S a boiling caldron.  Iran's President Rouhani called the ISIS fighters "barbaric".  Is that the "pot" and the "kettle"?

Don't forget to factor in the autonomous Kurdish government (from the north of Iraq) who are trying to figure out how they can survive these bullies.  The Kurdish "Peshmerga" troops have a more valiant battle record than do the Iraqi forces, who tend to retreat.

No one wants American boots, but a few drone strikes could make a HUGE difference to the poor beleaguered Iraqi army.  And what is our President doing/saying?  Not one to act definitively, he says he is "not ruling anything out".

But here is ISIS acting definitively.  Whatever this poor man did, it displeased their worldview.

We can pray for all the refugees, including our Christian brothers and sisters who are fleeing.  As a dentist trying to get his family out of Mosul said:  "We are just waiting to die."

And the worse part?  This nightmare in Iraq can repeat in Afghanistan soon.