Category Archives: Iraq

ISIS forces 180,000 to flee in Iraq

Reuters reports: Fighting in Iraq’s western Anbar province has forced up to 180,000 people to flee since the city of Hit fell to Islamic State earlier this month, the United Nations said on Monday.

Islamic State fighters extended that advance by overrunning a military base that the Iraqi army had abandoned 8 km (5 miles) west of Hit earlier on Monday, according to an army officer and members of a government-backed Sunni militia.

Islamic State has been on the offensive in the desert province of Anbar, bordering Syria, in recent weeks, taking the town of Hit on Oct. 2 and nearby Kubaisa on Oct. 4.

That has raised concerns in the West because it is close to Baghdad and demonstrates the group’s reach; while operating successfully in Anbar, it is also on the verge of taking the strategic town of Kobani hundreds of miles away in northern Syria on the border with Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS officially admits to enslaving Yazidi women

Matthew Barber writes: I first began tweeting about the Islamic State’s campaign to kidnap and enslave Yazidi women when I was in Iraq this past August. Though analysts were skeptical and online jihadists who defend IS vehemently denied my claims, I was communicating with the families of the kidnapped women and with those engaged in rescue efforts. I have even spoken by phone directly with kidnapped Yazidi women in captivity. One month ago, I sounded the alarm regarding the plight of the kidnapped Yazidi women for whom time is running out, detailing how an effective rescue operation would be possible. A number of journalists had written amazing stories, directly interviewing survivors — girls that had been kidnapped and placed into the homes of IS jihadists as slaves. These stories continue to emerge, TV interviews have taken place, and the UN issued a report on the kidnapping issue.

Despite the widespread doubt, I and the team I work with have been able to collect the names of thousands of kidnapped Yazidis — mostly women and girls, but also a number of kidnapped and imprisoned men that have been forced to convert to Islam. A month ago, our estimate of kidnapped Yazidis was below 4,000 individuals, but as we continue to gather data, our number now stands at almost 7,000.

Ongoing efforts to shed light on this crisis notwithstanding, the media hasn’t lingered on the issue. Evidence in the form of firsthand accounts of survivors gathered by credible journalists and academics wasn’t enough; skepticism seemed to reign in the absence of photographic evidence — something nearly-impossible to obtain. How would one snap photos of women distributed through private IS networks and placed into the homes of individual IS jihadists? Even a photograph of a Yazidi woman in an Arab home wouldn’t indicate that she was in fact enslaved as a “concubine.”

But today this controversy can be laid to rest. IS has just released the fourth installment of Dabiq, an official publication that they began to produce in July. This issue, called “The Failed Crusade,” contains an article entitled “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which details how IS fighters kidnapped and distributed Yazidi women as slave concubines. The article also provides their rationale for reviving slavery, which they root in their interpretation of the practice of the earliest Islamic communities. The Islamic State has now officially disclosed that it engages in the sexual enslavement of women from communities determined to be of “pagan” or “polytheistic” origin. [Continue reading…]

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Syria doesn’t matter to the United States

Michael Weiss writes: For a while there, he had us going. When President Obama announced last month his long-contemplated strategy for confronting the Islamic State (ISIS), and made it clear that this would necessitate air strikes in Syria, many Syrians rejoiced at the news, believing that any intervention in their ravaged country was better than no intervention at all. Mission creep, it was hoped, would force the United States into an eventual showdown with Bashar al-Assad, a mass-murdering dictator who, as Obama was keen to reassure everyone, was not going to be a US partner in this counterterrorism coalition since he had lost all “legitimacy” through his barbarism and would therefore be negotiated out of power — once the more pressing ISIS menace was dealt with.

Except that there are growing signs that Washington has worked quietly, if indirectly, with Assad to avoid any such confrontation in the skies over Syria. US and Syrian warplanes share the same coordinates in Deir Ezzor, for instance. And as I suggested in a prior NOW column, there is evidence that US intelligence may have only discovered the “imminent” terrorist plot of the so-called Khorasan Group of Al-Qaeda from information first gathered by Syria’s mukhabarat and abettedby Tehran’s release of Khorasan’s commander, Muhsin al-Fadhl, who found his way into Idlib in the last year. (Inveigling Washington into further wedding its anti-ISIS strategy to the prerogatives of the Revolutionary Guard Corps has been a longstanding Iranian mission, one that appears to be yielding results in Iraq.) But now that the air forces of Sunni-led Arab nations are flying alongside US F-16 and F-22s, the actual US policy has come into the clear; it’s suddenly permissible to “manage expectations,” as General John Allen, the US military envoy to the coalition, put it, or revise the marketed plan to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. In fact, as has been proven in the last week, ISIS’s elimination in Syria is not actually an American objective at all.

According to Leon Panetta, a former US defense secretary and CIA director who has lately joined the lengthening queue of White House retirees eager to declare that their erstwhile boss doesn’t know what he’s doing, the war against ISIS might last 30 years. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, insist that the US Central Command isn’t even trying to eliminate ISIS in its main base of operations.

Here is CNN:

“The primary goal of the aerial campaign is not to save Syrian cities and towns, the U.S. officials said. Rather, the aim is to go after ISIS’ senior leadership, oil refineries and other infrastructure that would curb the terror group’s ability to operate — particularly in Iraq.”

And here is the Wall Street Journal:

“In Iraq, the air campaign is meant to help Iraqi forces beat back Islamic State fighters controlling key parts of the country. In Syria, by contrast, the airstrikes are meant to rattle Islamic State sanctuaries and disrupt their offensive in neighboring Iraq, U.S. officials said. They aren’t designed to force the group from its strongholds.”

So if these airstrikes aren’t designed to “save Syrian cities and towns,” only “rattle” ISIS in its sanctuaries, then we can extrapolate what the not-too-distant future holds. ISIS will continue to seize more Syrian cities and towns, thereby terrorizing more Syrian civilians. It will continue to wage war against nominally Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels who are already chafing at the perception that they have been seconded as jihadi slayers or cannon fodder by a cynical US government which has promised them real support for three years for the purpose of degrading and ultimately destroying the Assad regime. As former Ambassador Robert Ford noted in a New York Times op-ed, former pro-American Syrians are beginning to burn American flags and denounce these airstrikes, while Islamist factions which have fought ISIS for the last eight months, such as Ahrar al-Sham, are defecting to the latter’s camp either in a show of solidarity or out of brute necessity, since they sense that they, too, might be next on the kill-list. This means that ISIS will continue to present itself to Sunnis in Syria as the only credible alternative to Assad’s reign, in marked defiance of Obama’s ostensible goal of empowering a third-way opposition. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish PKK fighters called back to Turkey after protests

AFP reports: A leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) warned Saturday that it had called all its fighters back to Turkey and could resume attacks, after protests over the government’s policy on Syria left dozens dead.

Cemil Bayik, one of the founders of the PKK which has waged a bloody 30-year insurgency for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey, said the peace process with Ankara was in danger of collapse after the deadly unrest.

“We have warned Turkey. If the state carries on like this then the guerrillas will resume the war of defense in order to protect the people,” Bayik told German broadcaster ARD in an interview recorded in Iraq.

As part of a fragile peace process, the PKK had started withdrawing its fighters from Turkey and moving them to its military base in northern Iraq.

But Bayik said these fighters had now returned to Turkey in reaction to the policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). [Continue reading…]

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Iraq asks for U.S. ground troops as ISIS threatens Baghdad

The Telegraph reports: Iraqi officials have issued a desperate plea for America to bring US ground troops back to the embattled country, as heavily armed Islamic State militants came within striking distance of Baghdad.

Amid reports that Isil forces have advanced as far as Abu Ghraib, a town that is effectively a suburb of Baghdad, a senior governor claimed up to 10,000 fighters from the movement were now poised to assault the capital.

The warning came from Sabah al-Karhout, president of the provisional council of Anbar Province, the vast desert province to the west of Baghdad that has now largely fallen under jihadist control.

The province’s two main cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, were once known as “the graveyard of the Americans”, and the idea of returning there will not be welcomed by the Pentagon.

But were the province to be controlled by Isil, it would give their forces a springboard from which to mount an all-out assault on Baghdad, where a team of around 1,500 US troops is already acting as mentors to the beleaguered Iraqi army. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: At least 45 people were killed in bombings in Baghdad and its rural outskirts on Saturday as the government continued to defend the capital against jihadists who four months ago seized major cities in northern Iraq.

Islamic State (IS) fighters, who took control of large sections of Iraq this year, regularly target Shi’ite districts in Baghdad and are penetrating surrounding farmland where Iraqi security forces and Shi’ite militias try to push them back.

In west Baghdad, 34 people were killed by three car bombs in Shi’ite neighborhoods on Saturday evening, police and medical officials said.

A suicide bomber blew up his vehicle up at a traffic roundabout in Kadhimiya, killing 11 people, three of them police officers, officials said. Another 27 were wounded.

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ISIS ‘publicly executes Iraqi journalist’

Al Jazeera reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has publicly executed a news cameraman and three civilians in northern Iraq, according to the journalist’s relatives.

ISIL shot Raad al-Azzawi, 37, his brother and two other civilians on Friday in the village of Samra, east of Tikrit, in the country’s Salaheddin governorate, the relatives said.

“They came to his home and took him and his brother,” one relative said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He did nothing wrong; his only crime was to be a cameraman. He was just doing his job.” [Continue reading…]

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Kobane’s fall would be symbolic setback for Obama Syria strategy

Reuters reports: It’s not a particularly strategic location, the United States and its allies never pledged to defend it, and few people outside the region had even heard of it before this month.

But the symbolism of U.S.-led airstrikes failing to stop Islamic State militants from overrunning the Syrian city of Kobani could provide an early setback to U.S. President Barack Obama’s three-week old Syria air campaign – far beyond its battlefield importance.

If Islamic State seizes full control of the city – which U.S. officials acknowledge is possible in coming days – it would be able to boast that it has withstood American air power. A U.S.-led coalition has launched 50 strikes against militant positions around the city, most of those in the last four days.

Islamic State also would be able to free up thousands of fighters to pursue territorial gains elsewhere in Syria and Iraq, analysts said.

Inevitable questions would arise over Obama’s pledge to keep U.S. ground troops out of the fight and the strength of his international coalition. Turkey, whose border abuts Kobani, has declined to join military action against Islamic State.

“Judging the overall coalition from a single town in northern Syria … is slightly unfair,” said Shashank Joshi of London’s Royal United Services Institute. “But I think it will dent overall confidence in the coalition and it will concern many people as to whether the U.S. can really stop this movement.”

A Kobani victory would also provide valuable propaganda for the Islamic State, which has proved adept at providing packaged video footage of its fighters in action, while the United States can only produce fuzzy pictures of air-launched bombs and missile blowing up often unidentifiable objects on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS fighters are threatening to overrun Iraq’s Anbar province

The Washington Post reports: Islamic State militants are threatening to overrun a key province in western Iraq in what would be a major victory for the jihadists and an embarrassing setback for the U.S.-led coalition targeting the group.

A win for the Islamic State in Anbar province would give the militants control of one of the country’s most important dams and several large army installations, potentially adding to their abundant stockpile of weapons. It would also allow them to establish a supply line from Syria almost to Baghdad and give them a valuable position from which to launch attacks on the Iraqi capital.

The Islamic State’s offensive in Anbar has received less attention than its assault on the Syrian border city of Kobane, which has played out in view of news photographers standing on hills in nearby Turkey. But in recent weeks, Islamic State fighters have systematically invaded towns and villages in Anbar, besieged army posts and police stations, and mounted attacks on Iraqi troops in Ramadi, the provincial capital.

The Islamic State secured a major foothold in Anbar province in January when it seized the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi. It pushed farther into the province in June, but Iraq’s government was able to maintain small pockets of authority in the majority-Sunni region. [Continue reading…]

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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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Iran says it’s under attack by ISIS

The Daily Beast reports: On May 13, 2014, a pickup truck approached a caravan of white vans moving on a road near Baqubah, east of Baghdad, in Iraq. Within few meters of the caravan, the pickup exploded, leaving five Iranian engineers and several of their Iraqi guards dead, according to local news reports. The attack came less than 24 hours after a threat by ISIS spokesperson, Abu Mohammad al Adnani.

ISIS could — and very much wanted to — “transform Iran into pools of blood,” Adnani said. After all, Iran was the “bitterest enemy” of the Islamic State.

But al Qaeda long has been known to have deep, complex relations with Iran. And so ISIS, which grew out of a branch of al Qaeda in Iraq, “held back its soldiers and repressed its rage over the years to preserve the unity” of al Qaeda’s ranks.

“So let history record that Iran owes an invaluable debt to al Qaeda,” he added.

But in May, Adnani announced a change of plans: ISIS would not respect al Qaeda requests any more. And while Adnani did not overtly threaten Iran, the May 13th attack turned out to be one in a string of purported terror attacks against Iran and Iranians. These attacks have been pinned by local media and Iranian officials to ISIS and other Sunni extremist groups.

The American intelligence community has heard the claims. But they’re not sure whether the violence can be blamed on the Islamic State — or some other Sunni militants. “While no one is ruling out the possibility of an ISIL presence in Iran,” a U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast, using the government’s preferred acronym for ISIS, “at this time we are not able to validate reports of any activity there.”

ISIS’s rampage through Iraq has produced collateral damage that’s been largely unnoticed in the West. Iran, on the other hand, has been paying close attention. When ISIS took over the city of Jalawlah near the Iranian border, several Iranian media outlets reported a heavy attack on a border guard post near the city of Qasr-e-Shirin—on Iranian soil. The initial toll was reported four guardsmen killed in the incident. Qasr-e-Shirin’s representative in the Iranian parliament, a hardliner conservative named Fathollah Husseini, denied any casualties. But less than two days later, Iranian media outlets reported on funerals held for privates killed in the incident. Later reports suggested at least 11 Iranian border guards were killed in the incident.

Iranian political and military leaders tend to censor terrorist threats inside Iran, to bolster their reign over the country. But the ISIS threat is so bold inside Iran that even the highest officials have publicly acknowledged it. [Continue reading…]

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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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Why did the U.S. help the Kurds in Iraq but leave ISIS to massacre them in Syria?

Cale Salih writes: The divergent US policy toward Kurds in Iraq and Syria is reflective of Washington’s general mistaken tendency to presume distinctions between the two countries that do not actually exist. According to US officials quoted this week in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, US airstrikes in Iraq are designed to help Iraqi forces beat back Isis, whereas in Syria, “We’re not trying to take ground away from them. We’re trying to take capability away from them.” A policy that decisively targets Isis in Iraq but half-heartedly in Syria is doomed to fail. It will, at best, only briefly postpone the immediate threat Isis poses to American interests in the region. And the new air strikes aren’t even really working.

A key difference between the new US war strategy in Kurdish-majority parts of the region was Washington’s decision to bolster its Kurdish partners on the ground in Iraq but not in Syria. In Iraq, the US not only carried out air strikes but also armed the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and sent military “advisors”. As a result, the peshmerga were able to provide ground intelligence to guide US air strikes, and, in conjunction with Kurdish fighters from Turkey and Syria, they followed up on the ground to retake important territories lost to Isis.

In Syria, the US has been more hesitant to develop such a bold Kurdish partnership. At first glance, the Kurdish fighting force in Syria – the People’s Defence Units (YPG), linked to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which the US designates as a terrorist group due to its decades-long war with Turkey – is a less natural partner than the widely recognized Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. Yet it was YPG and PKK forces that provided the decisive support on the ground to the Iraqi Kurds, allowing KRG peshmerga to regain territory lost to Isis in Iraq. The US in great part owes the limited success of its airstrikes in north Iraq to the PKK and YPG.

The lesson the US should learn from its experience in north Iraq is that you can’t win a war in the air alone. Iraq showed that air strikes against Isis can work – but only when combined with efforts to arm and advise a reliable local force capable of following up to actually retake and hold territory on the ground. The YPG is that force in Syria, and any air strikes without the kind of support sent to the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga will be futile. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. carry out 90% of airstrikes in anti-ISIS operation

AFP reports: Arab and other allied countries have carried out about 10 percent of the nearly 2,000 air raids against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria since early August, US defense officials said.

US warplanes have conducted 1,768 air strikes since August 8, while other coalition aircraft have carried about 195 air raids against the IS jihadists, defense officials told AFP, citing a tally through Sunday.

The numbers, which for the first time shed light on the participation of Arab coalition partners, reflect the dominant role of the US military in the air campaign.

But Pentagon officials have insisted the role for Arab and European partners is likely to grow over time.

The Arab states involved in the operation in Syria — Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have been reluctant to divulge details of their participation in the air strikes.

But for Washington and the West, the presence of the Arab countries has carried crucial symbolism in the fight against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group.

France, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia have committed aircraft for the effort in Iraq, though their presence has been on a small scale so far. [Continue reading…]

And how much value can be attached to CENTCOM data when Kobane and Ayn Al Arab — the same city — are listed separately?

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ISIS adapts to U.S. airstrikes, holds territory and advances in American tanks, killing Kurds


A Wall Street Journal report shows that while the Pentagon claims that it has been successful in “disrupting” ISIS, what is much more obvious is the ease with which the organization has thus far adapted to the U.S.-led air campaign.

A U.S. official is quoted saying: “We’re not trying to take ground away from them [in Syria]. We’re trying to take capability away from them.”

And as the population of Kobane has witnessed, the U.S. is not even trying hard to prevent ISIS conquering new territory.

Islamic State fighters have reacted swiftly to the threat of airstrikes over the past weeks, moving out of captured military bases and government buildings in Syria, relocating weapons and hostages, and abandoning training camps, according to residents and rebels in the areas the militants control. In Syria and Iraq, they took down many of their trademark black flags, and camouflaged armed pickup trucks. They also took cover among civilians.

They also have maintained much of their financing and recruiting capability and continued to crack down on local populations, anti-regime activists and rebels in Syria said. At the same time, they publicized a series of beheadings of Western hostages.

In addition to holding territory after they came under attack, they pressed on with an ambitious offensive on the Syrian city of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani, close to the border with Turkey.

Analysts said the U.S. is having a hard time getting intelligence to act on, and, as a result, a fraction of sorties flown have resulted in bombings.

Syrian anti-Assad activists and members of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army said the U.S. is overestimating the impact it has had on Islamic State. Some residents living in areas controlled by the group in Syria maintain that the air campaign has had little effect.

Militants began moving weaponry and leadership away from their bases immediately after the U.S. announced in September it would strike targets in Syria, activists and rebels said. By mid-September, residents of Raqqa—Islamic State’s de facto capital in northeastern Syria—said the city was emptied of the group’s senior leadership.

“We used to see commanders around the city. But since the announcement [that airstrikes would begin], they’re gone,” said one Raqqa resident.

However, an official from one U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf defended the success of the strikes so far, saying they had slowed the militants’ advance in both countries and was slowly degrading their financing infrastructure.

“ISIS will have a big problem when winter starts,” said one aid worker who provides relief in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour.

“They gained some popularity by distributing [a monthly stipend] of gas to the population and lowering prices. They won’t be able to do that.”

An Islamic State member interviewed via Skype said strikes by the Syrian regime have been more damaging than the U.S.-led assaults, and claimed the group’s production and refining of oil—a major revenue source — continues.

Christopher Harmer, a defense analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the U.S. is having a hard time getting actionable intelligence. As a result, he estimated only about 10% of the sorties being flown by the U.S. and its partners have dropped bombs.

“ISIS is not really structured in such a way as to be vulnerable to airstrikes,” he said. “They don’t have a lot of static targets. We can bomb a building here, a building there, a tank here, a truck there. But ISIS fighters are very good at intermingling with the civilian population.”

U.S. officials have said the strikes have had a high degree of accuracy.

One U.K. defense expert said that the coalition so far has struck mostly static targets, when the better way to hamper the group’s mobility is attacking fighters moving from one area to another.

“What air power can do is cut down on that mobility,” said Michael Clarke, the director at the Royal United Services Institute, an independent think tank on defense and security. “But it’s not evident at the moment that the coalition of air power has succeeded in doing that.”

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U.S. airstrikes back local forces in Iraq but not Syria — Kobane feels ‘deserted and furious’

Bloomberg reports: The U.S military is monitoring the threat to Kobani, and has conducted airstrikes “in and around” the town in the past several days, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters in Washington yesterday. U.S. Central Command said today the coalition had carried out 14 strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq yesterday and today. Vehicles, artillery positions and a building were destroyed near Kobani, said in an e-mailed statement.

Kirby said the U.S. operation in Syria targets areas Islamic State can use as a “sanctuary and a safe haven,” compared with strikes in Iraq that are being conducted to back local forces. That doesn’t mean “we are going to turn a blind eye to what’s going on at Kobani or anywhere else,” Kirby said.

While Turkey’s government has vowed to prevent an Islamic State takeover of Kobani, Kurds aren’t convinced, accusing authorities in Ankara of using the crisis to smother a largely autonomous Kurdish region that has evolved during Syria’s three-year civil war.

The Kurds fighting Islamic State in Syria are linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, whose separatist ambition has long been considered Turkey’s top security threat.

“The people of Kobani feel deserted and furious,” Faysal Sariyildiz, another pro-Kurdish legislator, said yesterday.

The Washington Post adds: The real reason [for the limited number of airstrikes on ISIS near Kobane] appears to be that the main focus of the U.S.-led air war remains on Iraq, with any strikes conducted in Syria intended primarily to degrade the Islamic State’s capacity to operate there, according to Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“This is about stabilizing Iraq, not about minorities,” he said. “It appears Syria is secondary and strikes are not being carried out with a discernible political or humanitarian strategy.”

U.S. officials asked to explain the inaction in Kobane cast the answer in similar, if less explicit, terms.

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, noted to reporters Friday that airstrikes had been conducted in the vicinity of the town, adding that if they could be conducted “in such a way that we’re not going to cause any greater damage or civilian casualties, then . . . we’re going to do it,” he said.

But, he added, “we’re broadly focused, not just on one city and one town. We have to stay broadly focused on the whole region.”

“The focus in Syria has really been about the safe haven they enjoy,” he said of Islamic State fighters. “In Iraq, it’s really been much more focused on supporting Iraqi security forces and Kurdish forces on the ground.”

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In rare alliance, Shi’ites join Sunnis to defend Iraqi towns against ISIS

Reuters reports: When Islamic State fighters tried to storm the Tigris River town of Dhuluiya north of Baghdad this week, they were repelled by a rare coalition of Sunni tribal fighters inside the town and Shi’ites in its sister city Balad on the opposite bank.

The assault, which began late on Tuesday and ran into Thursday, was one of several major battles in recent days in which Sunni tribes joined pro-government forces against the militants, in what Baghdad and Washington hope is a sign of increasing cooperation across sectarian lines to save the country.

Further north, another powerful Sunni tribe fought alongside Kurdish forces to drive Islamic State fighters from Rabia, a town controlling one of the main border checkpoints used by fighters pouring in from Syria.

In western Iraq, Sunni tribes have fought alongside government troops in Hit, which was captured by Islamic State fighters on Thursday, and in Haditha, site of a strategic dam on the Euphrates.

Such local alliances are still rare: in most Sunni areas of Iraq, tribes have shown little sign of turning against militants as they did when they were recruited by U.S. troops in 2006-07. Many of the leaders of that Sunni “Awakening” movement were later arrested by Baghdad, in what Sunnis see as a betrayal.

Sectarian and ethnic animosity runs deep after a decade of civil war that has touched nearly every family, making it difficult for Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds to trust each other.

But nearly two months into a U.S.-led bombing campaign, this week’s battles have provided the strongest early signs yet of what Washington and Baghdad hope could be a revival of the alliance with tribes to counter Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish parliament authorizes military action in Syria, Iraq — but imminent action not expected

The Washington Post reports: Turkey’s parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly endorsed a measure authorizing Turkish and foreign troops to take military action in Iraq and Syria, potentially setting the stage for a deeper level of Turkish involvement in the expanding international war against the radical Islamic State group.

It was not immediately clear, however, how far Turkey is prepared to go to support the military effort against the Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot also known as ISIS or ISIL. The effort risks further complicating Turkey’s already tangled relationships with its own restive Kurdish population, the million or more Syrian refugees in Turkey and even the extremists themselves.

Turkish officials said they expect no immediate change to Turkey’s existing policy of facilitating humanitarian efforts to aid needy Syrians inside and outside Syria and supporting moderate Syrian rebels battling the Damascus government.

“I don’t think there will be any imminent action,” said a Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. [Continue reading…]

For reports and discussion on the battle for Kobane, listen to On Point:

U.S. Central Command reported that U.S. and other forces in the coalition conducted just four strikes on Wednesday and Thursday in Syria.

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