IB Times – by Athena YenkoSpeaking from the United Arab Emirates, Defence Head Air Chief Marshall Mark Binskin said that footage showing how Australian forces are pounding the ISIS in Iraq are to be withheld from the public. He emphasised that what is happening in Iraq “is not a video game.” Just as how Australia kept videos of the 2003 mission in Iraq, the same goes for the current mission. While there had been calls for some people to release the footage, he believes otherwise.
“I don’t want to get into glorifying what’s happening out there. This isn’t a video game. This is the real world. That camera film shows people dying and I don’t think we should glorify that,” Binskin said.
Binskin, however, gave assurance that the Australian airstrikes had been crippling the terrorist group. He said that the mission had slowed the group’s further advance and made it vulnerable. The group could no longer show itself in the battlefield.
Commander of Australia’s Air Task Group in the Middle east, Air Commodore Steve Roberton, that aircraft cameras had captured the bombing conducted by four RAAF Super Hornets on October 8. From the footage it can be seen that the Super Hornets on patrol had deployed two GBU-12 laser-guided bombs against a target that the Defence termed as an ISIS “facility.” He said that images include those captured by the Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared or ATFLIR that employs both day and night cameras.
Meanwhile, on the ground, escapees from the ISIS said that the group’s barbarism is extremely repugnant and far from what outsiders could picture in their heads. Corpses scattered across the streets are headless; some with gouged eyes. Members of the ISIS are beheading people right in the presence of children, their families and loved ones. Kurdish escapees who were able to reached the safer region of Suruc, across the border of Turkey, spoke of things that went beyond the meaning of horrifying.
“I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off. Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out – I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all,” Amin Jafar told the Daily Mail.
Ahmed Bakki feared for his cousin who refused to escape with the family. He said that when they called his cousin, a member of the ISIS answered it, saying that the ISIS already got his head. He said that an English teacher tried to negotiate with the terrorists but to no avail. The teacher was tied to one of the terrorists’ car and was dragged away. There were words that the teacher was later beheaded, Bakki said.
Bakki also said that his neighbor was beheaded for merely “delivering vegetables to the kaffir.” He said that most of the ISIS members he encountered were speaking with an accent close to that of the Europeans. “They are Chechen, they are English, they are from all over Europe. We know because we can hear their accents,’ Bakki said.
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