Shaitat

May 22, 2015 at 1:42 pm | Posted in katarsis | Leave a comment
Tags: humanity, middle east, world

Do you know what Shaitat is? No, not Shaiton, but Shaitat. Al-Shaitat, to be more exact. It’s a tribe, or a Sunni paramilitary group, in Palmyra, Syria. If you’re on Twitter 24/7, chances are you know what Palmyra is, or why it is important, or why people are talking about it. Yes, Palmyra is home to one of the world’s greatest archeological sites; Daesh just captured the city and it wants to destroy the historic site just to piss people off.

But I do not intend to give you folks a lecture on ancient history.

Daesh has gone on a killing spree in Palmyra. Its main targets are the Shaitat members. They are Sunni Muslims, but Daesh, which claims to be the most Sunni organization, doesn’t care, so it killed them all. In one video, which I now regret to have seen, one Daesh commander from Russia executed a teen Shaitat member with an RPG. And, lo, this is not the first time Daesh singled out the Shaitats. Last year, it did the same thing and killed around 700 people. I love history. I even majored in history for my undergrad degree. I’ve visited most of the archeological sites in Java. But, at this moment, I could care less about ancient buildings. People are being hunted and slaughtered like rats. What an ugly, ugly world.

Oh, yeah, their ‘crime’ is rising up against Daesh.