As anti-government protests known as the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East in early 2011, observers felt they were witnessing spontaneous, grassroots calls for freedom against decades of tyranny and dictatorship. While the demands of the protestors were largely sincere, the protests that erupted in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and crucially, Syria, were nevertheless the product of an unconventional warfare campaign organized by the Barack Obama administration, including the National Security Council (NSC), State Department, CIA, and allied intelligence agencies. Rooted in Obama’s...

On 14 August 2007, four massive truck bombs tore through the small Yezidi towns of Tel Ezer and Siba Sheikh Khidr in Sinjar, a remote district in northwest Iraq. The explosions killed over 800 members of the persecuted religious minority, marking it one of the deadliest terror attacks in history. Rashid, a survivor of the attack in Tel Ezer, tells The Cradle that on the day of the bombing, his father sent his older brother to the market in the center of town to buy some things for the family.  “When the bomb exploded in the market, I was in the garden of my home. Even though the bomb blast...

Members of the Yezidi religious minority who fled ISIS and other Turkish-backed extremist groups in Syria are now seeking to flee Israel’s relentless bombing campaign in Lebanon. “They bombed just next to our house. Just five meters from our building. I can’t handle another second here,” said Um Farhad, a Yezidi women living with her husband and two sons in a village near Baalbek in the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon. “By God, I don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do. If we die here or if we don’t die, only God can help us,” she told the Libertarian Institute by phone. The city of...