Shiites burn 6 Sunnis alive while Iraqi police and military watch

Associated Press report -- BAGHDAD, Iraq - Militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by...

The report described the attack as a revenge killing for the slaughter of 215 people in the Sadr City slum on Thursday by Sunni-Arab insurgents using bombs and mortars.

In the action today, members of the Mahdi Army militia also burned four mosques and several homes, using rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and automatic rifles while the Shiite-dominated police and Iraqi military stood idly by, according to residents and police reports.

So the burning has begun already, another harbinger of the calamitous burning of the cities at the punishment of "the arrogant one" Jeremiah prophesied -- "I am against you, O arrogant one... For your day has come, the time when I shall punish you. And the arrogant one will stumble and fall with no one to raise him up; and I shall set fire to his cities, and it will devour all his environs [suburbs]" (Jer. 50:31-32).

And at that time, "her high gates [city centers] will be set on fire; so the peoples [of the coalition] will (have) toil(ed) for nothing; and the nations become exhausted for [because of the] fire" (Jer. 51:58).

That is why they will say, "We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; forsake her and let us each go to his own country. For her judgment has reached to heaven and towers up to the very skies" (Jer. 51:9).

And when they leave, Jeremiah decrees from the LORD, "I am going to arouse and bring up against Babylon a horde of great nations from the land of the north, and they will draw up their battle lines against her; from there she will be taken captive... and Chaldea will become plunder..." (Jer. 50:9-10).

Jeremiah identifies this horde of great nations from the north: "The LORD has aroused the spirit of the kings of the Medes, because his purpose is against Babylon to destroy it... Consecrate (these) nations against her, the kings of the Medes, their governors and all their prefects, and every land of their dominion..." (Jer. 51:11, 28).

But it is not enough that Babylon is defeated and plundered at the hands of the Medes; she will also suffer this calamity: "The sea has come up over Babylon; she has been engulfed with its tumultuous waves" (Jer. 51:42).

And after the flood, "her cities have become an object of horror, a parched land and a desert, a land in which no man lives..." because "I shall dry up her sea and make her fountain dry" (Jer. 51:43, 36).

And because of the fire, defeat, flood and drought, "Babylon will become a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and hissing, without inhabitants" (Jer. 51:37).

"Thou, O LORD, hast promised concerning this place to cut it off, so that there will be nothing dwelling in it... but it will be a perpetual desolation."