Category Archives: Issues

Little sympathy in Istanbul for Kurds amid ISIS aggression

France 24 reports: On the streets of Istanbul Saturday, there was little sympathy for the few pro-Kurd protesters who turned out to demonstrate against Ankara’s reluctance to help the besieged Kurdish-Syrian city of Kobane.

In downtown Istanbul, the bars are full and the shopping district is teeming with young people. Meanwhile in front of the imposing gates of the Galatassaray High School, a riot-control tank engine idles noisily, surrounded by riot police carrying sticks and shields.

Every night for the last five days, scores of pro-Kurd demonstrators have answered the call of the Popular Democratic Party (HDP), the main (legally-recognised) Kurdish party, to demand greater support for the Syrian town of Kobane, whose Kurdish population is under siege by fighters belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group.

Looking on, 32-year-old Can is not impressed. “It’s absurd that they are protesting here,” he tells FRANCE 24. “What happens in the east should stay in the east.”

In other words: what happens to the Kurds – the ethnic group that dominates the east of the country – should stay with the Kurds. [Continue reading…]

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Kurd vs. Kurd: internal clashes continue in Turkey

Metin Turcan writes: In Turkey, people primarily remember two organizations when recalling southeastern Turkey in the 1990s, when state authority had been badly eroded: the leftist and staunchly secular Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the militant, Sunni Islamist Kurdish Hezbollah. Their bloody clashes left behind some 500 unsolved murders, many of them executions.

The scenes from recent violent street clashes in many parts of Turkey protesting the Islamic State (IS) siege of Kobani, across the border in Syria, and Turkey’s inaction toward it make one wonder whether PKK-Kurdish Hezbollah fighting might be on the verge of escalating. Armed violence between the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the PKK’s armed youth wing, and Huda-Par, successor to Kurdish Hezbollah, have already resulted in fatalities that might bode ill for the Kurdish political movement. Huda-Par had been trying to become a political actor, steering clear of armed violence.

A call bound to escalate tensions between Huda-Par and the PKK appeared Oct. 7 through a Twitter account said to be belong to the YDG-H. It read, “To the attention of all our security units in Kurdistan and Turkey. Arm yourselves. Hezbollah-contra-Huda-Par members are to be executed wherever they are seen.” After the tweet, YDG-H members began attacking Huda-Par religious centers, associations and party premises in Diyarbakir, Batman, Bitlis and Siirt, where they are known to be strong. Huda-Par responded with arms, and the clashes intensified. [Continue reading…]

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Violent protests put Turkey’s Hizbullah, PKK in spotlight

Hurriyet Daily News reports: The Oct. 7 protests that led to the deaths of at least 21 people throughout Turkey have put the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkey’s Hizbullah, whose members are mostly Kurdish Islamists, back in the spotlight.

Hizbullah and its affiliate, the Free Cause Party (Hüda Par), engaged in several clashes with the PKK during the Oct. 7 protests across Turkey against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The bloodiest clash between the two sides of the night caused the death of at least 10 people in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır.

The YDG-H, the youth branch of the PKK, claimed responsibility for the attack against Hüda Par’s provincial branch in Diyarbakır. Hüda Par Deputy Chair Bahattin Temel said Oct. 8 that four of their members were killed in the attack.

Mehmet Hüseyin Yılmaz, another Hüda Par deputy chair, pointed the finger at both the Turkish government and the PKK via Twitter on Oct. 8. “We are under attack in every place in Kurdistan. The PKK and the HDP are conducting a political genocide against Islamic structures. The security forces of the state, which didn’t stop the attacks yesterday, are today raiding our party and Islamic NGOs,” Yılmaz said.

While pro-PKK social media accounts have been calling for “the immediate execution of Hüda Par members,” Hizbullah supporters were equally defiant on Oct. 8. A Twitter account associated with the Hüda Par’s Batman provincial headquarters shared the photo of an alleged PKK supporter’s corpse. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian Authority forces take control of Gaza crossings as donors pledge millions for reconstruction

Ma’an reports: The Palestinian Authority is set to assume responsibility for the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings in Gaza on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa said.

Mustafa, who is also head of a reconstruction committee for Gaza, told Ma’an Friday that the PA will take charge of building materials entering Gaza and the movement of Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank.

Representatives in the health, agriculture, housing and civil affairs ministries will be in charge of monitoring materials for their respective sector.

The Associated Press reports: Qatar pledged $1 billion Sunday toward the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip after this year’s devastating Israel-Hamas war, once again using its vast wealth to reinforce its role as a regional player as Gulf Arab rival the United Arab Emirates promised $200 million.

The pledges followed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry earlier announcing immediate American assistance of $212 million, though Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said Gaza needs $4 billion to rebuild.

Human Rights Watch says: Donor countries at the October 12, 2014 conference on assistance to Palestine should press Israel to lift sweeping, unjustified restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said today. The United Nations Security Council should reinforce previous resolutions ignored by Israel calling for the removal of unjustified restrictions.

Blanket Israeli restrictions unconnected or disproportionate to security considerations unnecessarily harm people’s access to food, water, education, and other fundamental rights in Gaza. Israel’s unwillingness to lift such restrictions will seriously hinder a sustainable recovery after a seven-year blockade and the July-August fighting that damaged much of Gaza, Human Rights Watch said.

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Kurdish woman commander Nalin Afrin, unlike Obama and Erdogan, is committed to expelling ISIS from Kobane

Correction: @Mwforhr points out that the photograph below was taken by Matt Cetti-Roberts and appeared in his article at Medium, “On the Lonely Iraq-Syria Border, Snipers Battle for a Strategic Road” about YPG fighters in Rabia. So, the woman shown is not Nalin Afrin.

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13,000 terrified Kurds trapped between ISIS and Turkish border receive little aid

The Telegraph reports: They are the forgotten people of the war for Kobane.

As the battle for control of the strategically vital border town creeps closer to a bloody denouement, between 10,000 and 13,000 terrified refugees cower on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey – trapped in a dangerous no-man’s-land between the murderous violence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [Isil] and official Turkish suspicion towards Kurds.

Many sleep inside family cars parked next to the chicken wire border fence. Some have brought livestock with them in the hope that they can soon return to the farmlands they hastily vacated, an increasingly forlorn aspiration.

Now many have started to suffer grievously in their state of limbo after Turkey finally sealed the border to stop the flood of refugees.

Up to 50 may have died in recent days, from various causes, including starvation and stepping on landmines, say Syrian Kurdish groups.

Some – including Kurdish fighters brought to the border from Kobane – are said to have bled to death from minor wounds after being denied access into Turkey.

The thousands of refugees stuck at three separate border points appear in less obvious danger from Isil atrocities than the 700 civilians still stuck inside Kobane itself, according to United Nations estimates.

Yet it is the former who have become the latest trigger for Kurdish anger over Turkey’s stance in the war between Isil jihadists and the Kurdish militias fighting to save Kobane.

While the stranded border refugees have run short of water and food, Turkish security forces have intervened aggressively to stop aid groups and relatives approaching the fence to render assistance. [Continue reading…]

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From Syria to Gaza: The search for a better life

Linah Alsaafin reports: Mohammad Farid Yousef’s family has been detained at Cairo airport for almost a month. They left the Gaza strip in the aftermath of Israel’s recent 51-day invasion this past summer, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians and injured 11,000 more, creating widespread destruction.

Since the uprising in Syria began in March 2011, an estimated 191,000 people have been killed, including over 2,000 Palestinian refugees. Three million have been displaced, with refugee camps sprouting in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. A further 6.5 million are internally displaced, meaning that half of the Syrian population in total have fled their homes.

Prior to the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohammad Al-Morsi, Syrians and Palestinian Syrians could obtain a visa from the airport in Egypt, which encouraged a number to set up life there, until Syria was safe enough to go back to. Yet the 30 June military coup, the rising xenophobia and hateful media incitement endangered the lives of Syrians and Palestinians living there, forcing many of them to flee elsewhere.

Mohammad and his family fled the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. They arrived in Gaza through the Rafah border crossing in April of the same year after a brief stop in Egypt, deciding that they could at the very least lead a dignified life in the coastal enclave.

“We had nowhere to go,” Mohammad, 29, told the Middle East Monitor. “I came to Egypt during Morsi’s reign with relative ease, but the negative attitude of the Egyptian people towards us and their exploitation made my family rethink our options. We found we had nowhere to go except Gaza, especially since travelling by boats from Egypt to seek asylum in Europe had not started then. It began in May, a month after we had already left to Gaza.”

The Palestinian refugee population in Syria had numbered around 600,000. Now, almost half have escaped the fighting in search of security and stability, but face heavy restrictions by various Arab governments, such as Lebanon, which has announced it will not grant entry to Palestinian Syrians. [Continue reading…]

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Kobane leader: ‘If we dont get help now, Kobane is indeed under threat of falling to ISIS’

Jenan Moussa, who reports for Arabic Al Aan TV and is arguably the best-informed journalist covering the ISIS assault on Kobane, has for the last week been speaking every day to Anwar Muslim, head of the Kobane canton in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), who remains in the city. She says that his tone is down today and he says “we’ll fight till death.”

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Air Force pilots lack ISIS targets to bomb because the U.S. refuses to use actionable intelligence

The Daily Beast reports: Within the U.S. Air Force, there’s mounting frustration that the air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is moving far more slowly than expected. Instead of the fast-moving operation with hundreds of sorties flown in a single day — the kind favored by many in the air service — American warplanes are hitting small numbers of targets after a painstaking and cumbersome process.

The single biggest problem, current and former Air Force officers say, is the so-called “kill-chain” of properly identifying and making sure the right target is being attacked. At the moment, that process is very complicated and painfully slow.

“The kill-chain is very convoluted,” one combat-experienced Air Force A-10 Warthog pilot told The Daily Beast. “Nobody really has the control in the tactical environment.”

A major reason why: the lack of U.S. ground forces to direct American air power against ISIS positions. Air power, when it is applied in an area where the enemy is blended in with the civilian population, works best when there are troops on the ground are able to call in strikes. From the sky, it can be hard to tell friend from foe. And by themselves, the GPS coordinates used to guide bombs aren’t nearly precise enough; landscape and weather can throw the coordinates off by as much as 500 feet. The planes need additional information from the guys on the ground. The only other option is to use laser-guided bombs, but even then the target has to be correctly indentified before hand.

But putting the specialized troops the Pentagon calls “Joint Terminal Air Controllers” or JTACs into combat comes with a cost. “The problem with putting JTACs on the ground is that once you get American boots on the ground, and one of those guys gets captured and beheaded on national TV or media,” the A-10 pilot said.

The Pentagon has compensated for this, in part, by easing back in Syria on the restrictive rules used minimizing civilian casualties like it is in Afghanistan. But in many other aspects, current and former Air Force personnel say, U.S. Central Command is fighting the war against ISIS in largely the same way it operates against the Taliban in Afghanistan. “The strategic problem posed by [ISIS] is different than that in Afghanistan,” one former senior Air Force official said. “So the similarity of the minimal application of airpower, along with excessive micromanagement by the CENTCOM bureaucracy is a symptom of not recognizing that this is a different strategic problem.”

After all, ISIS isn’t simply a collection of terrorists. The group holds territory, and manages an inventory of heavy military and civilian equipment. There’s a reason they call themselves the Islamic State. So instead of worrying about individual air strikes, this former official said, the CENTCOM needs to run a wider more free-ranging air war where more targets are hit much more quickly. “Very few in the military today have experience in planning and executing a comprehensive air campaign—their experience is only in the control of individual strikes against individual targets,” the official added. “There needs to be constant 24/7 overwatch, and immediate attack of any [ISIS] artillery, people, vehicles, or facilities that they are occupying.”

But that is a view shared mainly by those within the Air Force — which has, for decades, argued that it has the ability to win wars though strategic bombing.

Even in the case of the campaign against ISIS, there are many officers from the Army, Navy and even the Air Force who told The Daily Beast that they agree with the restraint shown by CENTCOM leadership — noting it is pointless to bomb the wrong target and antagonize the local population.

Further, the challenge for CENTCOM is further compounded by the lack of workable intelligence in Syria.

This claim about a “lack of workable intelligence” is bullshit — as a BBC News report made clear yesterday:

Asya Abdullah, a co-leader of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) representing Syrian Kurds, told the BBC that they were ready to work with US-led coalition forces.

“We have provided coalition forces with the coordinates of IS targets on the ground and are willing to continue providing any help they will request,” she said.

Kurdish commanders on the ground say that some of the latest air strikes have been more effective than previously and that this has helped their fighters to push back IS on several fronts.

A senior female Kurdish commander on Kobane’s defence council, Meysa Abdo, told the BBC: “If the coalition is serious about degrading IS, then Kobane is where they should target IS because they have an effective partner on the ground which has successfully fought back against IS alone.”

CENTCOM might plead that it cannot reliably select targets without Joint Terminal Air Controllers on the ground, but these specialized troops don’t have supernatural powers. The vetted intelligence they provide must depend more than anything else on what they are being told by locals who themselves know much more about the terrain and their adversaries than any American could, having only just arrived on the scene.

The problem is not a lack of military intelligence, but a lack of ordinary intelligence — the kind that would liberate itself from a bureaucratic straightjacket and say, “To hell with senseless directives from Washington about who we can and cannot talk to.”

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FSA fighting alongside Kobane Kurds

Michael Weiss reports: The following is an interview NOW conducted with Abu Saif, the field commander of Raqqa’s Revolutionaries Brigades, which is now stationed in Kobane, fighting alongside the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militias of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of Syrian Kurdistan. Although not much-discussed in the international press coverage of Kobane, the FSA’s participation in this anti-ISIS campaign illuminates just how isolated indigenous Syrian forces are in combating a transnational terrorist army.

(Note: ISIS is referred to throughout this interview by its widely used epithet, Daesh.)

NOW: In the past, the FSA has fought the YPG, often alongside Daesh. Is this cooperation with the Kurds just a tactical maneuver, or can you envision a long-term strategic partnership?

Abu Saif: Initially, we started out actually fighting against the YPG or the PYD, and then when Daesh moved on Raqqa, we stopped fighting against the YPG and shifted into fighting Daesh. Then Daesh pushed us out of Raqqa and we had to withdraw from the city and into the northern suburbs of Raqqa, which are close to Kobane. There was a sort of cease-fire or truce between the FSA and the YPG. Ahrar al-Sham played a role in that cease-fire. And so we were on board with the cease-fire. It was for six months. We reached out to the Kurds and we became friends. Then we withdrew even further into Kobane itself. The YPG were fighting Daesh, so we were forced into an alliance with the YPG. We had nowhere else to go. Daesh were surrounding us on all sides, except of course behind us was the YPG. As the Arabic proverb goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

NOW: Can you see the YPG joining the FSA, as both Turkey and the United States seem to want?

Abu Saif: I don’t think the PYD will give up its identity and bundle itself into the FSA. However, in Kobane, our brigade received an offer from the Kurds to have the PYD to join with them and fight under the FSA banner. This might make it more amenable for the Turks to come to Kobane’s rescue. This is still in the negotiations phase, no final decisions have been made.

NOW: You’re in Kobane now. Can you describe conditions in the city? What part is invaded by Daesh, what part is being held by the YPG/FSA?

Abu Saif: The situation right now is quite miserable. Unfortunately, we had to withdraw at least half of our men. In fact, the situation was quite bad even months ago when we were still fighting Daesh in the suburbs of Rae. No one gave us anti-tank weapons. We had RPGs, but Daesh relied on heavily armored vehicles, after the capture of Mosul.

When Daesh pushed against Kobane, the situation became even worse. We asked for assistance, but no one gave us anything. There were no anti-tank weapons. When Daesh breached the defenses and made their way into the city, the fighting became street-to-street. We decided we had to withdraw at least half of our forces to save their lives. [Continue reading…]

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If Obama is serious about democracy he should be doing more to help Kobane

David Romano writes: Writing in the Guardian this week, columnist David Graeber compares the plight of Syria’s Kurds and the besieged town of Kobane to the Spanish Civil War: “Amid the Syrian war zone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the ground by ISIS. That the wider world is unaware is a scandal.”

Just as Spanish revolutionaries empowered women and fielded female combatants, so too do the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Syrian Kurds. The lightly armed YPG partisans now fight house to house against much more heavily armed fascists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). They fight to protect their land and an attempt at local democratic governance – an attempt that provided refuge to and empowered not just Kurds, but Turkmen, Christians, Arabs and others. The main political party directing the YPG forces in Syrian Kurdistan is the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Like the Spanish and many other revolutionaries, the PYD are of course not angels, and they stand accused of shutting out rival Kurdish parties promoted by Turkey, the United States and the Iraqi Kurds. They have strong organic links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Nonetheless, the Syrian Kurds have not attacked anyone but the Islamists trying to take over their lands. They have not even asked for a Kurdish state or secession from Syria. Rather, they proclaimed local self-government in the three cantons of Kobane, Cizre and Afrin. The three cantons emerged as tolerant, somewhat democratic islands amidst the grim maelstrom that is the Syrian civil war. By the PYD’s own rules, all the administrations must have male and female leaders and include all the ethnic and religious groups of the area within their decision making structures.

Yet since they established their autonomous cantons in 2012, the United States, Europe and even most independent “progressives” of the world seem to have studiously ignored the Syrian Kurds. [Continue reading…]

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Four things the Left should learn from Kobane

Kerem Nisancioglu writes: The Kurdish town of Kobanê has recently become the centre of a geopolitical conflagration that may well change the course of Middle Eastern politics. After months of silence over the threat faced by Kurds from ISIS, the world is now finally watching, even if the ‘international community’ remains conspicuously quiet. However, many Western responses, be it from scholars, journos or activists, have somewhat predictably retracted into recycled critiques of US and UK imperialism, often at the expense of missing what is truly exceptional and noteworthy in recent developments. So, in the style of contemporary leftist listicles, here are four things we can and should learn from events in and around Kobanê.

1. It’s Time to Question the West’s Fixation on ISIS

If Barack Obama, David Cameron and Recep Tayyip Erdogan are to be believed, the ‘savagery’ of ‘fundamentalism’ is the primary focus of NATO involvement in Syria. Notably, many left critics have reproduced this very same fixation on ISIS when discussing Western interests. However, for an almighty imperialist organisation supposedly hell bent on stopping ‘Islamic extremism’, NATO have been curiously ineffective. In fact, the US has been indirectly responsible for arming ISIS and altogether incompetent and/or reluctant in arming the decidedly secular Kurdish resistance. US and UK air strikes have been fleeting, and at best symbolic, making little impact on the advance of ISIS. Moreover, Turkey has repeatedly turned a blind eye to ISIS’s use of its territories and borders for training activities and supply lines, respectively. More recently, as Kobanê teetered on the edge of conquest, Turkey insisted any military assistance was dependent on the Kurdish PYD abandoning self-determination and self-governing cantons, and agreeing to Turkish buffer zone in Kurdish controlled areas in Northern Syria (which amounts to little more than a colonial land grab). Now, considering the US and UK were keen to intervene long before ISIS was seen as a threat, and considering Turkey long-standing hostility to the PKK/PYD, we should be more demanding of any analysis of intervention that begins and ends with ISIS. In short, it is becoming increasingly clear that ISIS is little more than a pretext for NATO to pursue other geopolitical aims – namely removing Assad and destroying Kurdish autonomy.

2. Be Wary of Liberal Internationalism

Many anti-intervention critiques have argued that non-military options remain available through diplomatic channels and pressure on regional players such as Iran, the Gulf States and even Russia. This is to misread the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Firstly, the US does not control every allied state with complete impunity. Despite historical relations of dependency, despite metaphors of ‘puppets’, most Gulf States are remarkably powerful actors in their own right, with interests and activities that are beyond US control. Any suggestion to ask the Saudis to end financial support is likely to be as effective as asking ISIS to calm down a bit. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian refugees to be given identity cards and work permits in Turkey

Today’s Zaman reports: The government is preparing to issue identity cards and work permits to Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war ravaging their country and sought shelter in Turkey, Minister of Employment and Social Security Faruk Çelik announced on Wednesday.

Speaking at a meeting, attended by several government ministers, to announce the new Medium-term Economic Plan (OVP), Çelik stated that Syrian refugees will be given identity cards “defining their status,” and they will also be granted work permits, prompting discussions as to whether the refugees will have equal rights with Turkish citizens.

Though the minister did not give further details of the government-initiated plan for the refugees, whose numbers are estimated to be already approaching 2 million, lawyer Eda Bekçi, head of the Association for Solidarity with Refugees (Mülteci-Der), told Today’s Zaman that the government should conduct research to track and monitor the refugees as well as easing any difficulties they have faced in society since arriving in Turkey.

In April 2014, the government adopted a new law on foreigners and international protection in Parliament, which was approved by then-President Abdullah Gül. According to the law, foreigners and those who have international protection cannot be sent back to places where they could be subject to torture, inhumane treatment or humiliating punishment or where they will be threatened because of their race, religion or membership of a certain group. [Continue reading…]

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Anger grows as Turkey prevents Kurds from aiding militias in Kobane

The Guardian reports: In the past two years, [Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan has attracted much international condemnation for his increasingly erratic and personalised authoritarianism. The exception has been the seeming promise of sealing a historic peace pact with the PKK and its jailed leader, Abdullah Öcalan. That prospect now appears to hinge on Kobani and on how Erdoğan chooses to react.

“It is wrong to say that the peace process is over,” said Vahap Coskun, an assistant professor at Dicle University, in Diyarbakir. “But one must understand that it is now at its most vulnerable, the most endangered it has ever been.”

Others are less lenient. The PKK harshly criticised Ankara’s stance on the Isis siege last month and warned that the government had violated the terms of an 18-month mutually observed ceasefire. The PKK’s statement said that because of the Justice and Development party’s “war against [Kurdish] people,” the PKK leadership would “step up its struggle in every area and by all possible means”.

“Does Ankara truly believe it can keep on negotiating with the PKK as if nothing has happened in Kobani?” Joost Lagendijk, a former Dutch MEP and expert on Turkey, said this week. “The pictures of the Turkish army as a spectator and bystander, doing nothing while Kurds are being killed in front of their eyes, has created a worldwide perception of Turkey as a cynical and calculating player.”

Demir Çelik, MP for the Kurdish People’s Democracy party (HDP) in Mus province, has accused the government of fraudulent double-dealing. “We have been very patient for a long time, but the government in Ankara did very little. They raised our hopes, but never fulfilled them.”

In Çelik’s home province on Tuesday evening, Hakan Buksur, 25, was reportedly shot by the police during anti-Isis protests. Kurdish protesters then torched several government buildings. Ankara imposed a curfew on Mus and five other cities, including Diyarbakir.

“This state of emergency will not produce a solution,” said Çelik. “It did not work in the past and it will not work now.”

The key request of the Kurdish fighters in Kobani is that arms, equipment, and PKK reinforcements be allowed across the Turkish border to help relieve the plight of the encircled town.

But the Kurdish fighters of the PYG are a satellite of the PKK and Erdoğan shows no inclination to arm guerrillas whom the Turks have been fighting for 30 years.

The outcome is a collapse in Kurds’ trust of Erdoğan and his ruling AK (the Justice and Development party), which has been mirrored in recent days in intra-Kurdish clashes recalling the dark times of the 1990s.

The violence in Diyarbakir was notable for the fighting between PKK loyalists and Islamist Kurds, with five of eight people killed being from the Free Cause party, or Hüda Par, according to local police.

Very conservative religiously, Hüda Par has emerged as a rival to the more secular PKK in the Kurdish south-east. The party originates in Hizbullah, a Sunni militant group from Turkey that has no connection to its namesake in Lebanon but shares that party’s sympathy for Iran.

Hizbullah gained notoriety in the 1990s when it was recruited by the Turkish “deep state” to murder and torture hundreds of PKK members and supporters in the region. For many, Hüda Par represents a Turkish government fifth column sowing intra-Kurdish conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey intervenes to prevent ‘national security’ threat from ‘provocative tweets’

Hurriyet Daily News: Twitter quickly withheld “provocative tweets against Turkey’s national security” during the recent violent protests, Transportation Minister Lütfi Elvan has announced.

“We faced tweets that threatened our national security, unfortunately provoking some of our citizens and even inviting others, like terrorist groups, to armed struggle. We did what was necessary and a considerable portion of those tweets were blocked by Twitter,” Doğan News Agency quoted Elvan as saying during a ceremony at Bahçeşehir University on Oct. 9.

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Kobane leader: ‘We stopped ISIS advance’

Stephanie Hegarty, BBC News: We’re standing on a hill in Mursitpinar, Turkey, overlooking Kobane. The east of the city is shrouded in smoke.

We’ve heard reports that IS are setting fire to buildings to create a screen from the aeroplanes we hear almost constantly overhead. Those planes continue to strike to the west of the city.

Towers of black smoke have been burning for the past few hours on the top of Mistanour hill, which is under IS control.

Our Kurdish sources inside Kobane tell us that the Syrian Kurdish YPG have advanced in the east and that a group of Free Syrian Army fighters moved behind IS lines causing heavy losses. But the big black IS flag still flies on a small hill and a building in the far east of Kobane.

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Official: Iraqi Kurdistan has sent weapons to Kobane defenders

Rudaw reports: The Kurdistan Region has sent weapons to the besieged Syrian Kurdish forces in Kobane, a top Kurdish official announced Wednesday.

In a late night interview with Rudaw TV Mala Bakhtiar, who is a leading figure in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said that both his party and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have shipped military equipment to the embattled Syrian Kurdish troops known as the People’s Protection Units or YPG in Kobane.

“Both we and the KDP have done everything in our power to arm the YPG forces. We even planned to deploy Peshmarga forces but couldn’t carry it out because we have to cross 70 to 80 kilometers of the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS) territory to reach Kobane, and at the moment it’s militarily impossible,” Bakhtiar said.

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Syrians fleeing Kobane detained by Turkey on suspicion of being militia

The Guardian reports: Syrians fleeing the city of Kobani have been detained at the Turkish border and held without charge on suspicion of being part of the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG), or People’s Protection Units, the main Syrian-Kurdish militia.

As the battle for Kobani between YPG fighters and Islamic State developed into street battles in the town, the Kurdish militia defending the city told civilians in the town to leave.

“The YPG asked us all to leave. They said it was no longer safe for us,” said Khalid, one of those who tried to cross the border into Turkey.

But once Khalid (not his real name) crossed, he was detained along with at least 231 others, including 10 children, and taken to a small village called Aligor, north of Suruc.

“We are being asked, why did you leave Kobani so late?” Khalid said. “They are accusing some of us as belonging to the YPG.”

On their third day of detention, Khalid said they were in a school auditorium with the windows and doors kept closed most of the day, and only blankets given to them for sleeping on. Those detained were considering burning the blankets in protest, he said.

An earlier attempt at protesting by a hunger strike ended after less than two days because the Turkish security forces guarding them refused to give food to the children, aged between two and 10.

“They said, ‘either you all eat or none of you eat’,” Khalid said. [Continue reading…]

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