Category Archives: Issues

Turkey and the PKK: How to deal with Syria’s Kurds

The Economist: Turkey is deeply unnerved by the emergence of yet another Kurdish entity on its frontier. Making matters worse is that, unlike Iraqi Kurdistan, which is now Turkey’s biggest regional ally and trading partner, the Syrian Kurdish region, known as Rojava in Kurdish, is dominated by Turkey’s biggest foe, the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party].

This unforeseen twist shoved Turkey’s long-festering Kurdish problem beyond its borders, propelling a panic-stricken AK to resume peace talks with [PKK leader Abdullah] Ocalan. “Rojava’s fate and the peace process in Turkey are inseparable,” argues Arzu Yilmaz, an academic. Turkey’s plan, she adds, is to keep the ceasefire running until next summer’s parliamentary elections by throwing titbits at the Kurds.

These were supposed to include the introduction of optional Kurdish-language lessons in state run schools. But the scheme has not taken off. “For the past three years my children have been trying to sign up for Kurdish classes but they either tell us that there are no teachers or not enough demand,” complains Altan Tan, an MP for the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party. The Kurds have attempted to set up informal Kurdish-language schools of their own, but these were promptly shut by the police last month. A group calling itself the PKK’s youth wing responded by torching more than 30 government schools in the Kurdish region, provoking a barrage of outrage among ordinary citizens, Kurds included.

Yet even though the PKK moans about the lack of progress in Turkey, much of their horse-trading with the AK currently revolves around Syria’s Kurds. Turkey is pressing the PYD to end its undeclared non-aggression pact with Mr Assad and to join the rebels seeking to overthrow him. At the same time they are being told to share power with rival Syrian Kurdish groups. More implausibly still, Turkey also wants the PYD to sever ties with the PKK and perhaps even to cede control over Kobane, which would become part of a planned “safe pocket” to park refugees and to train and equip the rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish PM: Syrian Kurds paying the price for siding with Assad

Daily Sabah reports: Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has blamed a lack of cooperation between opposition groups in Syria for failing to stem the advance of extremist fighters.

Davutoğlu said the people of Kobani, a Syrian Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) for more than two weeks, were paying the price for the failure of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) to join forces with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Speaking at Wednesday night’s reception to mark the start of the new legislative year in Ankara, the Turkish capital, Davutoğlu said the government contacted the PYD and FSA last year and told them to act together to “avert the terror threat and regime attacks in the northern belt.”

He added, “If the PYD, instead of cooperating with the regime, had joined forces with the FSA and with the opposition, ISIS would not have found that much opportunity in the field.” [Continue reading…]

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How a blonde tattooed Texas girl became an ISIS Twitter star

Jennifer Williams writes: Last Monday, I had 60 followers on Twitter. Today, I have more than 4,300. Not to brag or anything, but that’s more than Benjamin Wittes; more than Bobby Chesney; more than Jack Goldsmith; more than my boss, Daniel Byman [all of them editors at Lawfare]. But here’s the problem: A healthy number of them are Islamic extremists, including no small number of supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A lot of them live in Saudi Arabia.

And some of them want to marry me.

The reason is a single tweet.

Early last week, the hashtag “#MuslimApologies” began trending on Twitter. The hashtag was a tongue-in-cheek response to those — such as right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham — who, in the wake of the beheadings of Westerners by ISIS, have questioned why Muslims have not been more vocal about denouncing terrorism carried out in the name of Islam (except that many have). Tired of constantly being asked to apologize for the acts of a few vile individuals who twist Islam to justify their barbarism, Muslims on Twitter decided to take a humorous stand — by apologizing for everything: the Twilight saga, World Wars I and II, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, my personal favorite, that Mufasa had to die in The Lion King. Some also used the hashtag to sarcastically apologize for the important contributions Islamic culture has made to the world, from algebra to coffee to the camera obscura.

Of course, I wanted to get in on the fun. After tweeting my sarcastic apology for the terrible ending of the television show LOST, I decided to tweet something a little more serious: a 140-character summary of my conversion story:

If you were to pass me on the street, you would never suspect I’m a Muslim: I don’t wear hijab. I have platinum blonde hair and blue eyes. And I am heavily tattooed. I grew up in Texas and was raised Southern Baptist. I use the word “y’all” a lot — and not ironically. But I am Muslim. I also speak Arabic and hold a Master’s degree in International Security with a focus on terrorism and the Middle East. Several years ago, I realized that although I had long studied, analyzed, and written about Islamic political theory and how jihadist ideologues like Osama bin Laden use the Qur’an to justify their heinous acts of violence, I had never actually read the Qur’an. So I read it — and what I found in its pages changed my life. I found answers to questions about faith and belief and morality that had been plaguing me since my youth. I found the connection to God I thought I had lost. And three years ago, I converted to Islam. [Continue reading…]

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Iran, the thinkable American ally

Roger Cohen writes: The interim agreement with Iran, reached in November 2013, has had many merits. Iran has respected its commitments, including a reduction of its stockpiles of enriched uranium and a curbing of production. The deal has brought a thaw in relations between the United States and Tehran; once impossible meetings between senior officials are now near routine.

The rapid spread over the past year of the Sunni jihadist movement that calls itself Islamic State has underscored the importance of these nascent bilateral relations: ISIS is a barbarous, shared enemy whose rollback becomes immeasurably more challenging in the absence of American-Iranian understanding. Allies need not be friends, as the Soviet role in defeating Hitler demonstrated. President Obama’s war against ISIS makes war with Iran more unthinkable than ever. Absent a “comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful,” in the words of last year’s accord, the drumbeat for such a war would almost certainly resume. From Jerusalem to Washington countless drummers are ready.

It is critical that this doable deal get done, the naysayers be frustrated, and a rancorous American-Iranian bust-up not be added to the ambient mayhem in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic, 35 years after the revolution, is — like it or not — a serious and stable power in an unstable region. Its highly educated population is pro-Western. Its actions and interests are often opposed to the United States and America’s allies, and its human rights record is appalling, but then that is true of several countries with which Washington does business. [Continue reading…]

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‘We see ourselves as the vanguard’: the police force using drones to fight crime

The Guardian reports: The video begins with a suspect in a red car screeching to a halt outside an abandoned farmhouse with two police vehicles, sirens blazing, in hot pursuit. The suspect makes off on foot, waving a large handgun in front of him.

Then something unusual happens. Out of the back of a police car, officers grab a gadget about the size of a suitcase, assemble it within seconds and then launch it buzzing into the air. It hovers directly over the suspect, streaming images of the man from a high-definition camera down to a mobile computer screen. “I have a visual of the suspect,” an officer says into his radio device. “Positive ID of a gun in his right hand – proceed with caution.”

The film is an elaborate piece of theatre, replete with hard-rock soundtrack, designed to show off the law enforcement potential of the Qube, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The gadget – which has four rotor blades, is three feet long and weighs 5.5lbs – is at the forefront of the use of drone technology by police forces in the US. [Continue reading…]

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Todd Gitlin: As the globe warms, so does the climate movement

Don’t call it a “march.” It was a “stand” — and a first stand at that, not a last one.  The People’s Climate March, billed as the largest climate demonstration in history, more than exceeded expectations and was an experience that has yet to desert me.  Its moment couldn’t have been grimmer in global warming terms.  That week, record-breaking concentrations of greenhouse gases were reported in the atmosphere, with the added grim news that the oceans and the forests, the planet’s major “carbon sinks,” were starting to absorb less CO2. Under the circumstances, I had the urge to do my bit to make the march huge and so organized a group of 16 friends and family members, ranging in age from 2 to 72. Marchers were to gather on New York’s Central Park West between 86th Street and Columbus Circle at 59th, where the event was to kick off at exactly 11:30 a.m.  At 11, when our crew arrived at 72nd Street, designated as a meeting place for children, families, and oldsters like me, the main route along Central Park West was already jam-packed and feeder streets like ours were filling fast.

On our small, ever-tighter stretch of cement was a typically heterogeneous crew sporting small dogs, a large penguin doll, a gazillion handmade signs, and a strutting, dancing drum-and-cymbal band. Amid cheers, music, and conversation, time passed and passed and passed. Though those younger than me were getting texts indicating that the march had set off in a timely manner, we didn’t move.  Not an inch.  And then it began to dawn on me. This demonstration was going to be so big, with so many people feeding into it, that “marching” for many of us would be an alien activity. As TomDispatch regular Todd Gitlin makes thrillingly clear today, we were quite literally in the midst of a genuine movement being born.  In fact, our crew, only 13 blocks north of the starting spot, didn’t even inch forward for more than an hour and a half after the official launch.

That’s what it turns out to mean to have 400,000 people crammed into a New York mile and cordoned off by the police (who control the streets, effectively imprisoning crowds).  By the time I reached the official beginning of the march at 59th Street, three and a half hours after we arrived, my legs were goners.  So, for another half an hour, I stopped with a friend, Peter Dimock, and watched the march pass in all its strange splendor and remarkable youthfulness, a kaleidoscope of floats and signs and costumes and performances spilling by, and still I couldn’t see the end of it. It’s the only demonstration I’ve ever attended where, officially speaking, I never began — and that represents a triumph of organizing and evidence of a growing concern for the state and fate of our planet.

Peter spent much of the march scribbling down what was on the panoply of signs around us, almost all made by individuals to express some urge about our degrading world, so many that his list of hundreds could make a dispatch in itself.  And yet he caught only a small fraction of the march’s signs.  Here are just a few of those to give you a taste of what may, as Gitlin suggests, have been a defining moment of hope in an otherwise grim era:

“Being Cool Has Never Been So Hot,” “Another Grandmother for Climate Justice,” “Our Planet is Not Something You Can Negotiate,” “I’m Sure the Dinosaurs Thought They Had Time, Too,” “Frack Off: Indigenous Women Leaders Leading Media Campaign to Defend Our Planet,” “Tax CO2,” “The Answer, My Friend, Is Blowing in the Wind” (with an image of a wind turbine), “Even Princeton” (sign held by one of a group of Princeton engineering and technology students marching together), “Don’t Panic, Learn to Swim,” “Evolve or Dissolve,” “Infinite Economic Growth (crossed out), Finite Planet,” “‘Natural Gas’ Is Not the Answer,” “There is No Planet B,” “I’m Marching for the Only Habitable Place in the Universe,” “Wall Street, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” “Save the Snowmen,” “We Did Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors. We Borrowed It From Our Grandchildren.” Tom Engelhardt

A change in the climate
The climate movement steps up
By Todd Gitlin

Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: the People’s Climate March changed the social map — many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 countries. That march in New York City, spectacular as it may have been with its 400,000 participants, joyous as it was, moving as it was (slow-moving, actually, since it filled more than a mile’s worth of wide avenues and countless side streets), was no simple spectacle for a day. It represented the upwelling of something that matters so much more: a genuine global climate movement.

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Obama and Erdogan have left Kobane to ISIS

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Moazzam Begg to be freed as prosecutors drop terror charges

The Guardian reports: The prosecution of former Guantánamo inmate Moazzam Begg has dramatically collapsed after the prosecution said there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial on terrorism charges.

An Old Bailey judge entered a formal verdict of not guilty on Wednesday and ordered that Begg be set free immediately from Belmarsh high security prison.

The 45-year-old from Birmingham had spent seven months in custody after being arrested and questioned over a trip he had made to Syria.

He was facing seven charges of possessing a document for the purposes of terrorism funding and training, and attending a terrorism training camp.

At a hearing five days before his trial was due to begin, Christopher Hehir prosecuting, said: “The prosecution have recently become aware of relevant material, in the light if which, after careful and anxious consideration, the conclusion has been reached that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction in this case.

“The prosecution therefore offers no evidence.”

Begg’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, said he should never have been charged, as his activities did not amount to terrorism.

“This is a good man trying to the right thing in a very difficult world,” she said. [Continue reading…]

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Feeling good about feeling bad

Nathan Thrall reviews My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit: Ari Shavit is a Haaretz columnist admired by liberal Zionists in America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never been to Palestine and hoped Bentwich’s group would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress which was to be held in Basel in August that year. Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European and religious. Herzl and most early Zionists were chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of secular and emancipated Jews in Western Europe who were becoming assimilated. A solution to the problems of both groups, he believed, could be found by resurrecting the Land of Israel in Palestine.

At the end of the 18th century, roughly 250,000 people lived in Palestine, including 6500 Jews, nearly all of them Sephardic. By 1897, when Bentwich’s delegation made its visit, the Jewish share of the population had more than tripled, with Ashkenazi Zionist immigration pushing it up towards 8 per cent. Bentwich, Shavit writes, seems not to have noticed the large majority of Gentiles – the Arab stevedores who carried him ashore, the Arab pedlars in the Jaffa market, the Arab guides and servants in his convoy. Looking out from the top of a water tower in central Palestine, he didn’t see the thousands of Muslims and Christians below, or the more than half a million Arabs living in Palestine’s twenty towns and cities and hundreds of villages. He didn’t see them, Shavit tells us, because most lived in hamlets surrounded by vacant territory; because he saw the Land of Israel as stretching far beyond the settlements of Palestine into the deserts of present-day Jordan; and because there wasn’t yet a concept of Palestinian national identity and therefore there were no Palestinians.

Bentwich’s blindness was tragic, Shavit laments, but it was necessary to save the Jews. In April 1903, 49 Jews were murdered in a pogrom in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova. More than a million Jews fled Eastern Europe over the next decade, the majority of them to America. Most of the 35,000 who immigrated to Palestine were secular and idealistic. They believed Palestine could accommodate Arabs and Jews. They lived in communual agrarian settlements, and transformed the pale, effete Jew of the ghetto into the tanned, masculine pioneer of the socialist kibbutz. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey moves closer to intervention in Syria, Iraq

The Washington Post reports: Turkey’s government edged closer Tuesday to direct intervention in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, bolstering security along its frontier with Syria and asking parliament to authorize a deployment of Turkish troops to the two war-ravaged countries.

Turkey on Tuesday dispatched hundreds of soldiers and tanks to the Syrian border to contain potential violent spillover from an Islamic State siege on the Syrian border town of Kobane.

Its cabinet also sent a motion to parliament that would potentially allow Turkish troops to enter Iraqi and Syrian territory to combat extremists. Parliament is scheduled to vote on the authorization in a closed session on Oct. 2. Proposed by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the motion is considered likely to pass.

In a news briefing after the cabinet meeting, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the proposal would include a wide range of options, including opening Turkish bases to foreign troops and deploying Turkish soldiers to establish safe zones for refugees inside Syria. The government wants the motion to be broad enough to avoid needing another parliamentary mandate for military action, he said. [Continue reading…]

What Turkey is calling “safe zones” or a “buffer zone” is viewed by many Kurds as a euphemism for an occupation — designed to restrict Kurdish autonomy rather than push back ISIS.

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ISIS closes in on Kobane

The Associated Press reports: Militants of the Islamic State group were closing in Monday on a Kurdish area of Syria on the border with Turkey — an advance unhindered so far by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, including one that struck a grain silo, killing two civilians, according to activists.

Islamic State fighters pounded the city of Kobani with mortars and artillery shells, advancing within three miles (five kilometers) of the Kurdish frontier city, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Nawaf Khalil, a Kurdish official.

The Islamic extremists intensified their shelling of the border region following U.S.-led strikes Saturday. The aerial assault appeared to have done little to thwart the militants, Kurdish officials and activists said, adding that of anything, the extremists seemed more determined to seize the area, which would deepen their control over territory stretching from the Turkish border, across Syria and to the western edge of Baghdad.

“Instead of pushing them back, now every time they hear the planes, they shell more,” Ahmad Sheikho, an activist operating along the Syria-Turkey border, said of the Islamic State fighters. He estimated he heard a rocket explosion every 15 minutes or so.

Three mortar shells landed in a field in nearby Turkey, the Turkish military said in a statement. After the strike, Turkey’s military moved tanks away from the army post in the area, positioning them on a hill overlooking the border. [Continue reading…]

Today’s Zaman reports: After a visit to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, a leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) called on the Turkish government to support Syrian Kurds’ fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to defend the besieged town near the Turkish border, saying this is a chance to strengthen Turkey’s peace process with the Kurds.

Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chairman of the HDP, was speaking to reporters on the Turkish side of the border after visiting Kobani.

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Turning point as Kurds push back ISIS at Iraqi-Syrian border

Rudaw reports: In a potential turning point in the fightback against the Islamic State, Kurdish forces on Tuesday said they had retaken the strategic Iraqi town of Rabia that straddles a main road near the border with Syria.

Rabia has provided a road link for the jihadists between their strongholds in Syria and Iraq, including the country’s second largest city of Mosul which IS captured in June.

The loss of Rabia would be the most significant setback for ISIS forces in northern Iraq since the launch of U.S. and allied air strike earlier this month.

A Peshmerga commander, Shiekh Ahmad Mohammad, told Rudaw: “Rabia is under the control of Kurdish forces. We are leaving their bodies behind and picking up their abandoned weapons.”

The YPG, the protection force of the Kurdish-held zone in neighbouring Syria, said the capture of Rabia was a joint operation between them and the Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) but this was not immediately confirmed by the Peshmerga side.

The YPG has been harassing ISIS forces in the area, while further west, in Rojava, its units have been resisting the advance of ISIS forces against the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobane.

Selahattin Demirtas, a leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) crossed the border into Kobane on Tuesday in a visit of solidarity. He later called on the Turkish government to support the fight of Syrian Kurds against ISIS. He said this was an opportunity to strengthen Turkey’s peace process with its own Kurdish population. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s clumsy politics and the Kurdish question

Cengiz Aktar writes: As the US-led war on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) gathers steam, there has been a great deal of speculation over the role Turkey might play in the campaign. Ankara kept a low profile while 49 of its nationals were held hostage by ISIL in Mosul. Since their release on September 20, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made statements affirming Turkey’s commitment to take part in the campaign.

Yet Ankara’s ISIL policy is not only ambiguous in the eyes of many but appears at odds with its regional Kurdish policy. Conflicting statements made by various Turkish officials do not help either. For instance on September 28, a deputy of the ruling AKP party Yalcin Akdogan declared that he thought the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an armed Kurdish group from Turkey, should fight ISIL instead of resting in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan where they are currently based.

Well, it so happens that the PKK has been engaged in this fight for some time, supporting the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds in their battles against ISIL. Not to mention, the irony of a Turkish deputy calling for assistance from a group still designated as “terrorist” by the government – especially when on that same day, the president makes a statement comparing PKK to ISIL. This, despite the “peace talks” Erdogan himself inaugurated in January 2013 to resolve the festering decades-long conflict with the PKK. [Continue reading…]

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Causes of California drought linked to climate change

EurekAlert!: The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought currently afflicting California are “very likely” linked to human-caused climate change, Stanford scientists say.

In a new study, a team led by Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure hovering over the Pacific Ocean that diverted storms away from California was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.

The research, published on Sept. 29 as a supplement to this month’s issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is one of the most comprehensive studies to investigate the link between climate change and California’s ongoing drought.

“Our research finds that extreme atmospheric high pressure in this region—which is strongly linked to unusually low precipitation in California—is much more likely to occur today than prior to the human emission of greenhouse gases that began during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s,” said Diffenbaugh, associate professor of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

The exceptional drought currently crippling California is by some metrics the worst in state history. Combined with unusually warm temperatures and stagnant air conditions, the lack of precipitation has triggered a dangerous increase in wildfires and incidents of air pollution across the state. A recent report estimated that the water shortage would result in direct and indirect agricultural losses of at least $2.2 billion, and lead to the loss of more than 17,000 seasonal and part-time jobs in 2014 alone. Such impacts prompted California Governor Jerry Brown to declare a drought emergency, and the federal government to designate all 58 California counties as “natural disaster areas.” [Continue reading…]

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‘Where’s Obama?’ Refugees flood across Turkish border as ISIS steps up attacks on Syrian Kurds

The New York Times reports: Shelling intensified Sunday on Kobani, the Syrian town at the center of a region of Kurdish farming villages that has been under a weeklong assault by Islamic State militants, setting fire to buildings and driving a stream of new refugees toward the fence here at the border with Turkey.

The extremist Sunni militants have been closing in on the town from the east and west after moving into villages with tanks and artillery, outgunning Kurdish fighters struggling to defend the area. The Kurds fear a massacre, especially after recent Islamic State attacks on Kurdish civilians in Iraq. More than 150,000 people have fled into Turkey over the past week.

There were no sounds of jets overhead to indicate to the Kurds that help was coming from the American-led coalition, whose stated mission is to degrade and destroy the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Two airstrikes on the eastern front hit Islamic State armored vehicles on Saturday, but did not appear to halt the advance.

“Where’s Obama?” one Turkish Kurd demanded, watching in anguish near the border fence as the headlights of cars could be seen streaming out of Kobani toward the border, although there was no way to cross it. “Does he care about the Kurds?” [Continue reading…]

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Kurdistan on the horizon

Betsy Hiel reports: In June, as ISIS overran Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, the Iraqi army melted away. Kurdish forces — the peshmerga, or “those who face death” — raced to secure the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other areas that Kurds have long claimed as their own.

Amid the chaos, Kurdish President Masoud Barzani ordered preparations for a self-determination referendum.

In August, the outgunned, outmanned Kurds pulled back to defend Irbil, leaving scores of Iraqi Christians and Yazidis, a religious minority, to ISIS’ savagery.

Kurds accused Baghdad of withholding weapons and ammunition, including emergency aid from the United States.

ISIS’ defeat of the Kurdish peshmerga, long respected as fierce fighters, left many Kurds rethinking their timeline for independence — but not their ultimate goal.

Hiwa Osman, a Kurdish political analyst, considers it “a wake-up call for the Kurds, that what we have today … is not viable to give us complete independence.”

Only America’s airstrikes on ISIS, he said, “came to our rescue.”

Henri Barkey, an international relations professor and Kurdish expert at Lehigh University in Northampton County, predicts that if Kurds held a referendum, “90 percent would say ‘yes’ to independence. Who wouldn’t?”

But “the timing is bad now,” he added, because “ISIS is a real serious danger.”

Barkey, a trustee at American University of Iraq in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, believes the longer Kurds wait, the better their chance of achieving independence: “The more they play that centralizing-glue role, the more they build up chips, the more time they have to consolidate some of (their) positions … for instance, on Kirkuk.”

Osman believes the problem “is what kind of independence do we want?”

The “makeup of ISIS, the demographic and the geopolitics of ISIS, do not suggest that ISIS is going to end anytime soon,” he explained. “ISIS is a Sunni Arab problem — Kurds and Shias cannot end them; Sunni Arabs have to.

“My worry is that with the continuation of ISIS where they are, we will end up with a Taliban-style state just to our south. … We could become a strong-security state, ruled by an elite that isn’t accountable.

“When security kicks in, democratic values (can) be sacrificed,” he said. “That is what we really don’t want.

“Defending Kurdistan is one thing, but turning (it) into a security state is my biggest fear.” [Continue reading…]

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First airstrikes hit ISIS in Kobane outskirts

Rudaw reports: The US-led anti-Islamic State coalition launched airstrikes targeting militant strongholds on the outskirts of the beleaguered Kurdish city of Kobane for the first time early Saturday, according to local officials.

The strike follows a weeklong Islamic State (IS or ISIS) offensive that has driven over 140,000 Syrian Kurds across the Turkish border.

Ahmed Sulaiman, an official of the Democratic Progressive Party in Syria, told Rudaw that the mission targeted ISIS militants based in Jim-Hiran, Ali-Shar, Mirde Smill, and southern sections of Sheran, all villages east of Kobane, the unofficial capital of the autonomous Kurdish vilayets in Northern Syria.

The bombings began at approximately 6am, according to witnesses, and continued through the morning.

This is the first time that coalition airstrikes targeted the vicinity of the embattled Kurdish city, arriving after a week of desperate pleas from local residents and opposition militias for the coalition to intervene.

ISIS fighters retaliated by shelling the city from positions 10 kilometers away.

Residents reported five major explosions inside the city at 3:30pm. This is the first time the city itself has come under attack. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye adds: The US-led coalition overnight and this morning also expanded its campaign against militants in eastern and central Syria, hitting the Homs province for the first time on Saturday, and also targeting the town of Minbej, near the western limit of IS control, the Observatory said.

Further attacks were also unleashed on Raqqa, which Islamic State have made their headquarters, the Britain-based monitoring group said, while adding that IS-held oil fields had also come under attack from the air.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the targets hit in Homs province were far away from the front line with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, who control Homs city, Syria’s third largest.

“The US-Arab coalition has for the first time struck IS bases in the eastern desert of Homs province,” Abdel Rahman said, adding that the positions were in the area of Al-Hammad, east of ancient city Palmyra.

Washington has been keen not to let Assad’s forces exploit the air campaign against IS to take the upper hand in the more than three-year-old civil war.

However, speculation about increasing cooperation between Assad and the coalition is growing. [Continue reading…]

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