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In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen broke into the houses of two Shabak families, killing a boy and his parents in one and a mother and daughter in the other, according to police. A bomb exploded near the house of another Shabak family, wounding six family members.
The Shabaks are a small ethno-religious minority, numbering around 60 to 70 thousand people. Their language - Shabaki - is closer to Kurdish and Farsi than Arabic. Their religion is syncretic; it borrows elements from Shia Islam and merges them with older traditions, including their own non-Islamic religious texts.
Like the Yazidis (another nearby Iraqi religious minority), they have been viciously persecuted and ethnically-cleansed from whole areas of Iraq since the invasion in 2003.
This has been the fate of Iraq's Christians, Mandeans, Ahmadis, Zoroastrians, Yarsanis, etc. as well as Iraqi Sunnis or Shiites living in "the wrong" areas.
A common defense of the Iraq War is that since Saddam massacred people and engaged in ethnic cleansing, it was right to remove him.
Well, if the goal was to stop ethnic cleaning in Iraq... it failed. Badly. To this very day.
It was such a great move to invest a trillion dollars into nation building in Iraq. Too bad Bush can't run for a 3rd term, because if he did, we could do the same in Iran. Oh, wait, Romney is promising that anyway. Never mind.
Hi I'm the US and I expected something good to come out of invading another country.
Nothing good can come out of invading a sovereign country.
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