‘Their fight is our fight’: Kurds rush from across Turkey to defend Kobani

The Guardian reports: In the village of Yumurtalik, just over two miles west of the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish side of the border, picnic blankets dot a pistachio orchard; groups of men and women sit around eating and chatting. Some distribute flatbreads, olives and cheese, while others stand at the edge of a field, pointing at the barbed wire that separates the two countries.

“This border has no meaning for us,” says Rahman, 40. “We are all of the same blood. The pain in Kobani is our pain, and their fight is our fight.” Every now and then the thuds of missiles can be heard in the distance. The frontline between Islamic State (Isis) and the Syrian Kurdish People’s Defence Units (PYD) has steadily crept closer to Kobani over the past week.

“We have come here to protect Kobani and to watch over this border,” Nasrettin, 47, says. “We don’t trust Turkey to do this right. They would be happy if Isis wiped Kurdistan from the map.”

Like the majority of Kurds here he firmly believes that Ankara is actively supporting Isis with heavy weaponry, medical care and money – a charge that the Turkish government vehemently denies. Facebook pictures and YouTube videos that appear to back up their suspicions are eagerly shared among the picnickers, and continuous attacks by Turkish security forces on Kurdish activists gathering in border villages is proof enough for most that Turkey does not want the Kurds to prevail in Kobani. [Continue reading…]

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One thought on “‘Their fight is our fight’: Kurds rush from across Turkey to defend Kobani

  1. DE Teodoru

    Since the Vietnam War we have been at war with the “bad guys” without any regard as to whether the guys we were supporting were the good guys. In the end we realized that the greatest weakness of the guys we supported was that we created them and as a result their goal was to eat [at the trough] and run. As if it couldn’t get worse, after the Cold War we went, not after the bad guys, but after the good stuff (oil). In so doing we didn’t care whom we supported so long as it was someone too weak to challenge our appetite for their country’s black gold. Always, we cried out “democracy” and always the issue was: what do you mean by “democracy,” the regime you support in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan…..? No, Bush—like any other Republican, could not admit his coveting of Arab oil or Jewish votes, but instead tried to rape under the covering blanket of “democracy.” Alas, Obama was no better.

    Now our nation is pockmarked with oil wars veterans suffering the scars of over-solicitations made of them because they “volunteered.’ The way we filled our ranks proved no less unsavory than Britain’s or France’s impressments of their men into 17th and 18th Centuries colonial wars.

    Finally we reached the ultimate step of self-destruction. No longer a nation when the tide raises all boats, we became a nation where the kids of the guy next door are asked to go and protect the institutions of Wall Street’s global ventures. It’s as if with the death of Communism, capitalism has become exactly how Marx described it!

    The World Trade Center’s two gigantic buildings, though 50% occupied by federal and state agencies because the private sector couldn’t or would fill its rentable offices, were soon replaced by a single gigantic phallic monstrosity that once again had to be filled for the most part by the public sector because the private sector couldn’t or wouldn’t. And once again, we are at war with Jihadi gangs in a never ending war on terror, forgetting from where emanate their roots and who organized and finances them. Our President, like his predecessors has been duped into seeing the Middle East in a binary simplistic absurdity. We took Iraq from the Shia to give it to the Sunnis and now we fight the same Sunnis that in 2006 Saudi Arabia told us it would support. At the same time, we oppose Iran and all the Shia regimes it supports so that when the Saudis organized a war against the Assad regime ruling Syria, we assumed that he was the evil…..Now we secretly join Assad against Sunni ISIS on grounds that its terrorists will hit us next.

    Never does it occur to anyone to ask: when you lie with infested dogs aren’t you likely to get disease carrying fleas? $3 trillion and 4,000 dead Americans later we are back in Iraq to do what? Mission creep as ever before?On whose behalf? 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and ISIS is something Saudi Arabia told us in 2006 it would help create!

    The oil kingdoms are rich enough to play BOTH sides and they draw in the name of Allah on people who live only to die avenging those we killed in our last recent misadventures. Has Obama been rendered so myopic by the intelligence and military establishments that he cannot realize that he is fighting people who live only to DIE avenging the victims of our last illicit adventures? Poking a short stick (as the world is small indeed) at a hornets’ nest will only get us chassed by swarming hornets. For they know why we are there and, like alQaeda, they have turned our illicit avarice into an evil God Himself has sent them to destroy. The 21st Century is a time when our Crusaders face an enemy whom, in his own way, can get back here as fast, if not faster, than we can get there. Are we to utterly destroy the democracy that has made America an historic model to all mankind for the want of oil until they again knock down the phallic monstrosity that replaced the World Trade Center? We can’t afford to provide what we owe the veterans of our last “wars on terror.” Is Obama going to resort to conscription when he can no longer get high-tech volunteers to operate the sophisticate war machines he is paying the Military [techy]Industrial Complex to provide us with (made in China, of course). It’s as if America can’t stand the disappearance of a bipolar world it dominates, replaced by a multipolar world in which it can’t compete because the nations it pays to manufacture the gizmos we invent are manufactured by these same factories as cheaper knock-offs. We are so in dept that our dollars are owned by foreigners. So, is Obama planning on spending the next two years chasing down the psychopathic killers attracted to Jihad on money borrowed from China?

    And still, Obama defrauds the Ukraine Crisis in order to force Europe into polarizing back into out camp, debasing EU back into a NATO that we force to buy our war toys so they can fight in our crazy global campaign to Americanize the Middle East and militarize Europe so we can get Mideast oil cheap and sell Europe expensive arms while we get ourselves in hock to China.

    I voted for Obama, twice, and was ready to vote for Hilary….But, no more can I support those who would hold our heads to expose our nation’s jugular vein to the Wall Street vampires

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