The good news is that there is a new 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza. But newspapers have carried pictures of the seven-year-old Australian son of a jihadist fighter in Syria brandishing the severed head of a victim. This follows an interview in the Weekend Australian on Saturday where retired general, Professor Peter Leahy, former head of the Army, was quoted as saying that “Australia is in the early stages of a war (against radical Islam) that will last for the rest of the century.”

Over the weekend the United States and Britain carried out bombings of ISIS artillery positions in Iraq in an attempt to remove the threat to Christians and Yasidis who have fled to the mountains to escape genocide. Food and water have also been dropped to prevent them starving. That, of course, is the easy part. The core issue remains how to get them off the mountain and rehabilitated somewhere safe, which does not mean going home. This will require a major military operation, which, on past form, would be undertaken only the United States and its allies. Even that is doubtful. President Barack Obama has said this mission will not be short.

Another problem is the lack of support from Sunni US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who appear fearful of confronting ISIS.

And then there is the rising concern of another major new war in the Middle East. It is perhaps worth quoting the first paragraph of an analysis by the distinguished Middle East author and correspondent Robert Fisk, who wrote in The Independent:

“In the Middle East, the first shots of every war define the narrative we all dutifully follow. So too, this greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis in Iraq. Christians fleeing for their lives? Save them. Yazidis starving on the mountain tops? Give them food. Islamists advancing on Irbil? Bomb them. Bomb their convoys and “artillery” and their fighters, and bomb them again and again until…”

The rest of Fisk’s article is the calibration of a journalist who has seen it all before, and is worth reading, even if it provides no cause for optimism, confirms Obama’s cryptic statement that “this will take time” and tends to provide ample evidence for the remarks by General Leahy.

Colin Chapman is president of AIIA NSW and a regular commentator on geopolitics for CNBC Asia.