Aron Lund writes at length on each of these developments:
10. The Death of Zahran Alloush.
9. The Failure of the Southern Storm Offensive.
8. Operation Decisive Quagmire.
7. Europe’s Syria Fatigue vs. Assad’s Viability
6. The Vienna Meeting, the ISSG, and Geneva III.
5. The Donald.
4. The Iran Deal.
3. The Continuing Structural Decay of the Syrian Government.
2. The American-Kurdish Alliance.
1. The Russian Intervention. [Continue reading…]
Metin Gurcan writes: Clashes between the Turkish government and Kurdish forces continue unabated in southeastern towns mostly inhabited by Kurds. But now the Kurds appear to be taking the battle to Istanbul and other western Turkey cities.
Despite increasing social and economic costs, the parties show no signs of cooling down. Ankara says it will continue to combat terrorism no matter the cost, and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) issues stern warnings that the clashes could escalate and spread.
The latest such threat came from Cemil Bayik, co-chair of the Union of Kurdish Communities’ (KCK) executive council. KCK is a unit of the PKK. Bayik bluntly said, “We are heading to the establishment of a revolutionary resistance front with the participation of organizations that will come from inside and outside of Turkey.” [Continue reading…]
Business Insider reports: A Kurdish militia with ties to an organization waging an insurgency in Turkey’s southeast region violated Turkey’s “red line” in Syria over the weekend by crossing the Euphrates River during an anti-ISIS operation.
The operation to take back Tishrin Dam from ISIS was staged by the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG — the military arm of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
It served as a huge blow to ISIS, which had relied on the dam to move weapons and fighters between its de-facto capital of Raqqa in Syria and the cities of Manbij and Jarablous it controls in the northern countryside of Aleppo Province.
But ISIS was not the only loser. The operation was also a major affront to Turkey, which declared the Euphrates a “red line” for Kurdish territorial expansion over the summer. Indeed, Turkey struck the YPG twice in October after it defied Ankara’s warning not to cross the river. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports: Turkey’s stepped-up military campaign to crush Kurdish insurgents has reduced some urban neighborhoods in the southeast of the country to battle zones, raising fears the conflict could escalate and spread elsewhere in the country unless peace talks resume.
Since the government last week declared what it called a “decisive” campaign to end five months of limited violence between Kurds and government security forces, young Kurdish militants in the cities of Diyarbakir, Cizre, Silopi and Nusaybin have been targeted by Turkish tanks, helicopters, artillery and snipers, according to local residents and news reports from the region.
Militants in the mainly Kurdish cities have erected barricades to seal off neighborhoods they’ve declared outside the authority of the Turkish state, and are using AK-47s, rocket launchers and homemade bombs to defend the enclaves, these residents say.
Turkish officials said Wednesday that about 170 Kurdish militants and at least 11 members of Turkey’s security services have been killed since the government’s announcement last week.
The rising death toll has raised concerns among human-rights groups, the U.S. and the European Union that the fighting could expand beyond southeastern Turkey and become more indiscriminate if both sides fail to heed appeals by Washington and Brussels to stop fighting and return to negotiations. [Continue reading…]
NOW reports: A group of tribes in Syria’s Raqqa province have warned the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) against entering areas it controls, in the latest sign of simmering tensions between ethnic Arabs and Kurds in the province where ISIS maintains its de-facto capital.
“No one from the YPG may enter the Arab areas where are our fighters are present,” the Collective of Raqqa Tribes said in a statement issued Tuesday.
The group further called on the Kurdish militia to “hand over” the flashpoint Tal Abyad, a strategic Raqqa border area populated by ethnic Arabs and Turkmen that the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has joined to its Democratic Self-Rule Administration. [Continue reading…]
Kyle Orton writes: it is now of primary importance that the British Government and the U.S.-led anti-Isis coalition as a whole make Assad’s ouster a central feature of their stated political objectives. The defeat of Isis requires the enlistment of Sunni Arab forces, and that can only happen if they are confident that Isis will not be replaced by radical sectarian forces of the Assad regime or Iran, which is in control of the Assad regime and which has deployed tens of thousands of Shi’a jihadists into Syria.
Limiting Iran’s power more broadly in Syria is crucial to defeating Isis. Iran and Isis are symbiotic, feeding off one-another by committing atrocities against the other’s political constituency against which they can claim to be the only protectors. The appearance of the coalition siding with Assad/Iran by only bombing Sunni radicals, while doing nothing as Iran moves tens of thousands of European- and U.S.-designated Shi’ite terrorists into Syria, is deeply damaging, helping Isis to present itself as the guardian of the Sunnis.
Sunni Arab forces are needed to defeat Isis because it is in Sunni Arab areas that Isis has its caliphate. Much propaganda has been spread by Assad, Iran, and Russia that there are no moderate Syrian rebels left, but this is simply untrue. The entire rebellion is at war with Isis and there are about 75,000 moderate rebels whom the coalition could work with, plus a further 25,000 not-so-moderate rebels who are also fighting Isis. (Al-Qaeda and pro-al-Qaeda forces amount to 15,000 at the most.) While the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program failed, as it was bound to do since it was only directed against Isis, and gets a lot of media attention, this ignores the more than 40,000 moderate rebels who have been vetted by the CIA and supplied with lethal weaponry, virtually none of which has gone astray. If the moderate rebels forces had something to fight for — namely the promise of self-rule, protected from Isis and Iran — and were given the appropriate resources they could be mobilized to defeat these two Western enemies. The Sunni Arab tribes also remain astonishingly unengaged, though when the West defeated Isis’s predecessor in Iraq it was exactly by aligning with these tribes to help them provide local security.
Finally, it is necessary not to over-rely on Kurdish forces. The Kurds have proven very adept at protecting Kurdish-majority zones from Isis, but many commentators have extended this fact to declare that the Kurds are our only reliable ally in Syria. Leaving aside the political authoritarianism and ethnic engineering of the PYD, the party in control of the Syrian Kurdish armed units, the PYD has been able to clear Isis from less than one province in a year with the backing of Coalition airstrikes. In early 2014, the rebellion, without any air support, expelled Isis from positions in seven provinces, two of which Isis remains wholly absent from and two of which Isis is still largely absent from. Organically rooted, local forces are needed to sustainably hold territory from which Isis is removed. If Kurds stayed in occupation of Arab territory it would produce a backlash similar to Iran’s militias that would redound to Isis’s benefit, as Sunni Arabs fear sectarian domination more than Isis. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday he believes that if an agreement can be reached to ease President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from power, a coalition of Americans, Russians and Syrian forces could wipe out the Islamic State “in a matter of literally months.”
Mr. Kerry’s comments, in a speech to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday morning, were the first in which he publicly offered an estimate of how quickly a well-organized effort might be able to defeat the radical Sunni group. He also said that “without the ability to find some ground forces that are prepared to take on Daesh,” using an Arabic acronym for the group, “this will not be won completely from the air, and we know that.” But he was not specific about where those ground troops would come from. His aides later said they would have to be indigenous. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: Drawing on thousands of combatants from Syria’s mix of religious and ethnic groups, a U.S.-backed alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces has emerged as the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State group.
But the dominant role of Kurdish fighters in the alliance is a concern for majority Sunni Arab factions and their regional backers, raising questions about the group’s future role in a broader political context in Syria.
In its founding statement, the Syrian Democratic Forces said its aim beyond destroying IS was to build a democratic, pluralistic Syria “where all Syrian citizens of all sects enjoy freedom, justice and dignity.”
“Officially they represent a whole range of ethnicities and ostensibly the vision could be deemed moderate, but the coalition can only gain limited traction, as the YPG is justifiably perceived as the dominant actor to which the allied rebel groups in particular are junior partners,” said Aymen Tamimi, an expert on rebel and Islamic extremist groups and a fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank.
One of the alliance’s biggest challenges is reclaiming mostly Arab areas with a fighting force whose most effective combatants are Kurds.
“They added Arab groups to the alliance to dilute the Kurdish element, but everyone knows it’s the Wihdat,” said Abu Khaled, a rebel fighter loosely affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, using the Arabic abbreviation for the YPG.
“Their (YPG) record is not clean, and that is the biggest problem facing this alliance,” he said from Turkey, where he goes back and forth to Syria.
His comments reflected the wide distrust the YPG faces among mainstream rebels in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Aron Lund writes: The self-proclaimed Islamic State is under pressure in Syria today. In the Aleppo area, its defenses have been pierced by a Syrian government offensive backed by the Russian Air Force. Although most of the Russian airstrikes have hit other Sunni rebel groups (regardless of what the pro-Kremlin propaganda claims), some attacks target the Islamic State as well. In the deserts east of Homs, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed government is trying to reverse recent losses to the jihadi group. Should his army manage to recapture Palmyra, which was lost in May, it would be a severe blow to the Islamic State.
But until now, the most significant recent victories against the Islamic State have taken place further east and have come at the hands of an American-backed, Kurdish-majority alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
Created as recently as October, the SDF is a political umbrella designed to provide legal and political cover for American military support to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as PKK. A Kurdish leftist group locked in battle with the Turkish government, it was designated a “ foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. government in 1997 and graduated to become a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization in 2001, largely due to Turkish pressure.
The PKK, operating in Syria through a front group known as the People’s Defense Units, or YPG (with an all-female version called the YPJ), has emerged as the country’s most potent anti-jihadi force. Having crushed the Islamic State in Kobane in February, Tal Abyad in June, Hasakah City in July, and now in al-Houl on the Iraqi border, the Kurds and their local allies are gearing up for further offensives on jihadi strongholds near Raqqa and south of Hasakah. The White House desperately wants to support them, seeing few other ways to pressure the Islamic State in Syria.
So, in order to avoid any legal or political blowback, U.S. officials now insist that they are not at all working with the-organization-that-must-not-be-named, but rather with the SDF, where the YPG is only one member among many. And the United States has avoided adding the YPG to any blacklists, even though any American official could (but won’t) tell you that it’s a PKK front. [Continue reading…]
Al Jazeera reports: A prominent lawyer and human rights defender, who faced a criminal charge for speaking in defense of Kurdish rebels, was killed Saturday in an attack in southeast Turkey in which a police officer also died, officials said.
Tahir Elci was shot while he and other lawyers were making a press statement. Two policemen and a journalist were also injured.
It wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the attack, and there were conflicting reports about what led to it. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: As Syria unravelled, Turkey doubled down on its commitment to a range of militant groups, while at the same time appearing to recognise that the jihadis who had passed through their territory were hardly a benign threat. The change in the dialogue with western officials was marked: security officials no longer insisted on the extremists being called “those who abuse religion”. Labelling them “terrorists” in official correspondence was no longer the problem it had been.
Despite that, links to some aspects of Isis continued to develop. Turkish businessmen struck lucrative deals with Isis oil smugglers, adding at least $10m (£6.6m) per week to the terror group’s coffers, and replacing the Syrian regime as its main client. Over the past two years several senior Isis members have told the Guardian that Turkey preferred to stay out of their way and rarely tackled them directly.
Concerns continued to grow in intelligence circles that the links eclipsed the mantra that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” and could no longer be explained away as an alliance of convenience. Those fears grew in May this year after a US special forces raid in eastern Syria, which killed the Isis official responsible for the oil trade, Abu Sayyaf.
A trawl through Sayyaf’s compound uncovered hard drives that detailed connections between senior Isis figures and some Turkish officials. Missives were sent to Washington and London warning that the discovery had “urgent policy implications”.
Shortly after that, Turkey opened a new front against the Kurdish separatist group, the PKK, with which it had fought an internecine war for close to 40 years. In doing so, it allowed the US to begin using its Incirlik air base for operations against Isis, pledging that it too would join the fray. Ever since, Turkey’s jets have aimed their missiles almost exclusively at PKK targets inside its borders and in Syria, where the YPG, a military ally of the PKK, has been the only effective fighting force against Isis – while acting under the cover of US fighter jets.
Senior Turkish officials have openly stated that the Kurds – the main US ally in Syria – pose more of a threat than Isis to Turkey’s national interests. Yet, through it all, Turkey, a Nato member, continues to be regarded as an ally by Europe. The US and Britain have become far less enamoured, but are unwilling to do much about it. [Continue reading…]
Wes Enzinna visited Rojava in northern Syria, to teach a crash course in journalism: ‘‘I’m an atheist,’’ said Ramah, an 18-year-old student with a neatly trimmed goatee. A crowd of students had circled around, curious about who I was, what music I liked, how I had ended up here. None of them had ever heard of Bob Dylan or Edward Snowden or Brooklyn, where I lived. They asked if Obama really was a Muslim. They asked if everyone in America was an atheist, like Ramah. I told them there were many Christians, Muslims and Jews, though I said I didn’t believe in God.
‘‘Were you afraid when you discovered that God didn’t exist?’’ Ramah asked, imploring me with earnest, walnut-brown eyes.
‘‘Why would I be afraid?’’ I said.
‘‘In a world where there’s no God,’’ he said, ‘‘how do you deal with the constant fear of dying?’’
The next morning, I met with a student named Sami Saeed Mirza. I had barely slept, kept up by the intermittent swoosh of fighter jets and a series of loud thuds, whether distant bombs or the innocuous din of street life, I couldn’t tell. At one point, I went onto the rooftop and looked out at the horizon, a squiggly line of undulating sand spotted with a few stone huts. It was beautiful, in its way, a whole world painted with a single brush stroke of brown. Somewhere out there was the front line.
Mirza, 29, had sad, drowsy eyes and wore thick spectacles perched low on his nose. He hadn’t noticed the commotion. ‘‘I’m used to the sound,’’ he said. Unlike other students at the academy, Mirza grew up outside Syria in a small village in western Iraq. He is not a Muslim or an atheist but a Yazidi, part of an ethnic and religious minority that practices a modern form of Zoroastrianism. He hadn’t heard of Abdullah Ocalan until recently. In August 2014, ISIS extremists attacked his village, near the city of Sinjar, and butchered as many as 5,000 of his neighbors. While Mirza and his family were trapped on a mountain for four days, waiting to die, a battalion of women — Y.P.J. soldiers — fought through the ISIS lines and created a path for them to escape. Mirza, severely dehydrated and on the verge of collapse, fled.
‘‘The battle made me think of women differently,’’ he told me. ‘‘Women fighters — they saved us. My society, Yazidi society, is more, let’s say, traditional. I’d never thought of women as leaders, as heroes, before.’’
Mirza heard about the academy at a refugee camp, and here his education in feminism had continued. He and his fellow students studied a text that Ocalan wrote on gender equality called ‘‘Liberating Life.’’ In it, Ocalan argues that problems of bad governance, corruption and weak democratic institutions in Middle Eastern societies can’t be solved without achieving full equality for women. He once told P.K.K. militants in Turkey, ‘‘You don’t need to be [men] now. You need to think like a woman, for men only fight for power. But women love nature, trees, the mountains. … That is how you can become a true patriot.’’
‘‘I’ve learned the truth,’’ Mirza said. ‘‘The leader has shown us the correct interpretation of society.’’ Rojava’s Constitution — its ‘‘social contract’’ — was ratified on Jan. 9, 2014, and it enshrines gender equality and freedom of religion as inviolable rights for all residents. The Sinjar massacre gave Rojavan authorities an opportunity to show that they were deadly serious about protecting these rights. Still, I wondered if the rescue of Yazidis like Mirza wasn’t also strategic, a way to enlist the minority group in the defense of Rojava.
‘‘Why do you think the Y.P.G. and Y.P.J. saved you?’’ I asked.
‘‘Maybe I know, maybe I don’t,’’ he said. ‘‘But they are the only ones who came to help us. America didn’t come. The pesh merga’’ — Iraqi Kurdistan’s military — ‘‘didn’t come.’’ Now he wanted to devote his life to the teachings of Ocalan. ‘‘I was nothing before coming to the academy,’’ he said. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports: After U.S.-backed Kurdish forces drove Islamic State militants from the Iraqi city of Sinjar this month, some of the fighters involved began looting houses of Sunni Arabs suspected of ties to the extremist group.
A week later in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, Kurdish fighters expelled about 60 Sunni Arab families who had remained in the ruins of one village, according to local officials and residents. They said it was one of more than 50 Arab villages razed or partially demolished by Kurds who recaptured them from Islamic State since July. The Kurds suspected some male relatives of the expelled families of fighting with the Sunni radicals of Islamic State.
Sunni Arab officials and residents in Iraq accuse Kurds of exploiting the war with Islamic State to grab land. In Syria as well, Sunni Arabs are either fleeing, being forced out or are blocked from returning to areas seized by Kurds or Iran-backed groups, according to residents and some of the Kurdish fighters themselves.
It is part of a broader shift in Iraq and Syria, where opponents of Islamic State such as Shiites and Kurds are claiming recaptured land and oil resources that have long been in dispute. These conquests are redrawing internal boundaries, displacing communities and deepening ethnic and sectarian tensions in the two increasingly fragmented countries. [Continue reading…]
Hassan Hassan writes: A senior commander of the Raqqa Revolutionaries’ Brigade, one of the SDF factions [in the newly-formed Syrian Democratic Forces], told the authors that uneven American support for the YPG enabled the Kurds to dictate terms to the rest of the factions. The main task of the new alliance “is to protect their areas only because the Kurds can’t cover all the region,” he said. “[The army] has only light weapons so it does not become too powerful.… The American support is what made [the Kurds] above the rest and impose their political goals.”
This reality was exemplified last month, when the Pentagon said that U.S. jets airdropped 50 tons of ammunition to Arab rebel forces in northern Raqqa. However, the Arab factions seemingly could not move the ammunition on their own, and it quickly ended up in Kurdish hands.
There are three reasons the subordinate role for Arab tribal fighters undercuts the alliance’s potential. First, the imbalance will undermine the military capabilities of the coalition to push against the Islamic State in Arab-dominated areas.
Second, the tribal fighters’ status as junior partners in the alliance will increasingly reduce their morale — as happened previously, when many U.S.-trained rebels abandoned the battlefield because they felt the program was aimless and disproportionally focused on counterterrorism. Tribal fighters say that U.S. support for the Kurds indicates it is less committed to tribes in the long term. They fear that nobody would come to their aid if the Islamic State returned to areas from which it had previously been expelled, as happened in Iraq over the years or in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor last year, when repeated appeals for help went unnoticed by the international community.
“Had it not been for the [international] coalition, ISIS would have reached Qamishli,” said a fighter from the Shammar tribe, which leads the Kurdish-Arab alliance’s al-Sanadid forces. “And the fact is that when ISIS wants, it could reach anywhere.”
Finally, there are widespread fears that as more areas are seized by the Kurdish-led alliance, incidents of ethnic cleansing will increase. Last month, Amnesty International released a report accusing the YPG of committing war crimes, including the forced displacement of Arab civilians and demolition of their houses. “Whenever the YPG enters an area, they displace its Arab residents,” the Shammari fighter said, referring to Arab towns in southern Hasakah. “Fifteen villages were leveled to the ground in Tal Hamees, Tel Brak, and Jazaa.” [Continue reading…]
Roger Cohen writes: “We don’t want Turkey to become Syria or Diyarbakir to become Aleppo.”
Those were the words of Tahir Elci, the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association when I spoke to him after the recent Turkish election here in this troubled city of strong Kurdish national sentiment. On the night of the vote tires smoldered and the tear-gas-heavy air stung. In the center of the old city, rubble and walls pockmarked with bullet holes attest to the violence as police confront restive Kurds.
Elci was detained last month for a day and a half after saying in a television interview that the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., was not a “terrorist organization” but “an armed political organization which has large local support.” An indictment has been brought against him that seeks a prison sentence of more than seven years. The P.K.K. is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
“For a few words about the P.K.K., in which I said some of its operations were terrorist but it was not itself a terrorist organization, there is a lynching campaign against me,” Elci told me. “Yet there is no strategy among the Turkish security forces against the Islamic State, no real mobilization. If ISIS were treated like the P.K.K., it would be very different.” [Continue reading…]
Kadri Gursel writes: The 49.4% of the vote the Justice and Development Party (AKP) got in the Nov. 1 elections beat all forecasts, astonishing not only Turkey and the world but the party’s own quarters as well. How the AKP was able to boost its vote by a fifth in only five months after losing its parliamentary majority with 40.8% in June is now an imperative question.
With an outcome of such an extraordinary nature, the AKP — a party supposed to have fatigued and lost some appeal after 13 years in power — must have resolved some major problem in Turkey in five months’ time or convinced part of the electorate that only the AKP could resolve that problem.
And what is this problem? For an accurate diagnosis, one needs to compare the two different Turkeys that existed ahead of the June 7 and Nov. 1 elections. There was only one new problem that emerged after June 7: the resumption of bloody clashes with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and suicide bombings blamed on the Islamic State (IS). [Continue reading…]
Roger Cohen writes: Above a restaurant specializing in sheep’s head soup, with steaming tureens of broth in the window, two young Syrian journalists took up residence in this ancient town in southeastern Turkey. They had fled Raqqa, the stronghold in Syria of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and devoted their time to denouncing the crimes of the barbarous jihadi group. Today, their second-floor apartment is a crime scene, with a red police seal on the door.
On Oct. 30, the Islamic State beheaded Ibrahim Abdel Qader, age 22, and slit the throat of 20-year-old Fares Hammadi. They later posted a video of their handiwork, saying enemies “will never be safe from the blade of the Islamic State.” The killers have not been found; a new unease inhabits this bustling town about 30 miles from the Syrian border. “It was shocking to have a first beheading in Turkey,” Omer Yilmaz, the owner of the restaurant, told me. “We are used to bullets, but that, no. To slaughter a human like an animal is unthinkable.”
The unthinkable is becoming conceivable in a combustible Turkey. Syrian violence has seeped over the border. The Islamic State is now entangled in the age-old conflict of Turks and Kurds. During several days near the Syrian border, often in areas with Kurdish majorities, I found simmering anger among Kurds and predictions of worsening bloodshed. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Kurdish militants ended a month-old ceasefire in Turkey on Thursday, a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “liquidate” them, dashing hopes of any let-up in violence in the wake of a national election.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group said the ruling AK Party, which won back its parliamentary majority in Sunday’s election, was on a war footing.
“The unilateral halt to hostilities has come to an end with the AKP’s war policy and the latest attacks,” it said in a statement carried by the Firat news agency, which is close to the militant group. [Continue reading…]
McClatchy reports: The newest U.S.-backed offensive against the Islamic State in northern Syria suffered a devastating setback when the extremist group detonated an explosive-laden vehicle near a Kurdish-led column of armored vehicles, an Arab militia commander said Monday.
The Islamic State said the suicide bomber, with five tons of explosives, attacked a convoy of 70 vehicles Sunday, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, killed dozens of Arabs and members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
Such vehicles are a favorite tactic of the Islamic State in northeastern Syria, according to another commander in the region, Abu Issa, of the Liwa Thurwar Al-Raqqa, or Raqqa Revolutionaries. He said between mid-July and mid-October, the Islamic State had sent 45 such vehicle bombs against his force, which is based north of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-styled capital. Among those killed were five of the 20 men who had been trained by the U.S. in the use of TOW anti-tank missiles.
“They empty out a 10-ton armored personnel carrier. They remove the seats and everything. There’s one driver, and he comes really fast,” Abu Issa told McClatchy in an interview last month. He said a TOW missile can stop the vehicle, but he said the U.S. had not supplied his forces with those missiles.
Abu Issa’s is not the only group hoping for U.S. arms in order to take on the Islamic State. Even the Sanadid militia, which took part in the fighting near al Hawl, has yet to receive U.S. ammunition, Bandar told McClatchy on Monday.
“We got nothing yet from the Americans,” he said. [Continue reading…]