Former Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane told Fox News Tuesday night that the terrorist group ISIS is “the most significant threat to the Middle East that I have ever observed.”
“On the same weekend, they launched a new offensive in Iraq, collapsed a Peshmerga, a much-acclaimed military force that’s part of Kurdistan. Also they took two oil fields, and now threatens the Mosul Dam. They did this on one weekend in two different countries simultaneously. Anybody looking at that knows that this is an organization of consequence, and it must be dealt with,” General Keane said.
The Fox News military analyst provided several solutions to dealing with the Islamic army.
“The way you deal with them is you kill them, and that is the only way that they understand, is force. You have to apply force to deal with it,” Keane told Fox News host Shannon Bream.
He continued: “We need a strategy to deal with it. We have none, and the fact is, the strategy should not just be the killing aspect of it.”
The Army general believes the finances of the terrorist group should be targeted.
“We know what banks they’re using. We actually know the names of their seven portfolio managers. We should target the barks and target the managers. We should separate the groups that are supporting them politically,” said Keane.
The Obama administration knows that “militarily, there’s obviously much that we can do, and we’re sitting on our hands,” says the general.
“If we maintained a residual force, we could have buttressed the Iraqi military. We could have restrained Maliki and we could have made it possible for these people [terrorists] to not come back after we spent all of the blood and treasure pushing them out of Iraq,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told Fox News Channel on Tuesday.
Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf has been sounding the alarm about the attacks on Christians in Iraq. He recently told WMAL Radio in DC that Christians are “worse than persecuted, it is now officially genocide.”
“We are ready to see the end of Christianity in the Middle East,” the Virginia congressman told WMAL. “Keep in mind, more biblical activity took place in Iraq than anywhere other than Israel. Abraham was born there. Ezekiel and Daniel are buried there. Esther was in Iraq. And they just destroyed Jonah’s tomb. Christianity as we now know it is being ended in Iraq. And this administration says nothing.”
Tens of thousands of Iraq’s Yazidi minority in Kurdistan have fled their homes as the militants have been executing those who refuse to convert to Islam or kidnapping women for marriage.
Nahren Anweya with the Assyrian Church of the East recently told Sean Hannity on Fox that her family there is “so afraid.”
“Families have been slaughtered. A lot of Christian families — they can’t even have a funeral. They’re dismembered, their bodies. It’s terrible,” said Anweya.