American Ignorance Risks Fueling Deadly Middle East Sectarianism

The violent sectarian era that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and peaked with the rise of the Islamic State more than a decade ago may feel distant in Washington, but in the Middle East the wounds remain fresh. Just this past spring, Iraqi forensic teams uncovered the remains of more than 30 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Iraqi security personnel, and Yazidi women and children in an Islamic State mass grave near Mosul. A week earlier, across the Syrian border in eastern Deir Ezzor, another mass grave was uncovered, one of at least 18 such sites documented in Syria this year….