Category Archives: Syria

ISIS and the glamour of deadly convictions

McClatchy: Ben Carson stirred controversy last week when he suggested Americans could learn something from the Islamic State terrorist organization. “They’re willing to die for what they believe, while we are busily giving away every belief and every value for the sake of political correctness,” he told a Republican meeting.

In an interview Monday with McClatchy, the retired neurosurgeon, who is seriously considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, explained his views.

Carson believes ISIS is resolute in its commitment to destroy America: “Do we sit around and wait for them to do that, or do we take them out?”

Carson’s poverty of thought is evident in his cartoonish yet commonplace expressions.

If an ISIS fighter makes a video that appears on YouTube and in which he pumps his fist into the air, promising that America faces destruction, this is a threat that deserves to be taken about as seriously would a threat to destroy the planet by changing its orbit, hurling it towards a fiery collision with the Sun. Just because the threat is made, doesn’t make it credible.

ISIS can neither destroy America nor Europe but it has already and continues to cause an immense amount of destruction in the Middle East — not as much destruction as that wrought by the Assad regime, but it’s no exaggeration to say that ISIS threatens the stability of the whole region and threatens the lives and way of life of everyone within its reach.

How much harm ISIS can do in the West depends much less on the direct capabilities of the group than it does on the way governments and the public react to events such as the Paris attacks.

The issue for the West is not whether it needs to prevent ISIS taking over the world, but what it can do to limit, reduce and ultimately end what can objectively, without hyperbole, be described as a reign of terror.

(The fact that from overuse the phrase, reign of terror, has lost most of its punch, does not render it meaningless. A movement whose instruments of political control are public beheadings, crucifixions, throwing people off tall buildings, chopping off hands, turning women and girls into slaves, and engaging in frequent mass executions, is imposing what must be called a reign of terror.)

In this challenge, the U.S. and its European allies can and should have no more than a supporting role, so this is not a binary choice as Carson presents it, between “taking them out” or doing nothing.

At the same time, anyone who imagines that there might be some kind of purely non-military strategy for dealing with ISIS, seems to be indulging in wishful thinking.

When it comes to purity of conviction, the only group currently involved in the fight against ISIS that seems to be completely clear about what they are fighting for are the Syrian Kurdish men and women in the forces of the YPG.

If, as Carson sees it, the willingness to die and the willingness to kill, are the measure of the depth of someone’s convictions, then ISIS is indeed a force of unparalleled conviction.

The problem in reading the nature of these convictions in this way is that it presupposes that anyone who has formed such an intimate relationship with death, knows both what he is fighting for and what it means to die.

I suspect that large numbers of ISIS’s fighters understand neither and that the focus of their conviction is not a deeply understood cause served by death, but a conviction that killing and dying are inherently meaningful.

That meaning is not derived from self-knowledge or an understanding of life, but instead from a fatuous desire to be praised by others. In other words, death in ISIS, offers a gateway through which young men burdened by the sense of being nobody can (they imagine) instantly become somebody.

This is jihadist reality TV in which its stars make their names and enjoy their 15 minutes of fame on Twitter. It turns video games into real life and its appetite for carnage is no more meaningful than the make-believe carnage that gets churned out of Hollywood.

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U.S. signals policy shift on how to end war in Syria

The New York Times reports: American support for a pair of diplomatic initiatives in Syria underscores the shifting views of how to end the civil war there and the West’s quiet retreat from its demand that the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, step down immediately.

The Obama administration maintains that a lasting political solution requires Mr. Assad’s exit. But facing military stalemate, well-armed jihadists and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the United States is going along with international diplomatic efforts that could lead to more gradual change in Syria.

That shift comes along with other American actions that Mr. Assad’s supporters and opponents take as proof Washington now believes that if Mr. Assad is ousted, there will be nothing to check the spreading chaos and extremism. American planes now bomb the Islamic State group’s militants in Syria, sharing skies with Syrian jets. American officials assure Mr. Assad, through Iraqi intermediaries, that Syria’s military is not their target. The United States still trains and equips Syrian insurgents, but now mainly to fight the Islamic State, not the government.

Now, the United States and other Western countries have publicly welcomed initiatives — one from the United Nations and one from Russia — that postpone any revival of the United States-backed Geneva framework, which called for a wholesale transfer of power to a “transitional governing body.” The last Geneva talks failed a year ago amid vehement disagreement over whether that body could include Mr. Assad.

One of the new concepts is a United Nations proposal to “freeze” the fighting on the ground, first in the strategic crossroads city of Aleppo. The other is an initiative from Russia, Mr. Assad’s most powerful supporter, to try to spur talks between the warring sides in Moscow in late January. Diplomats and others briefed on the plans say one Russian vision is of power-sharing between Mr. Assad’s government and some opposition figures, and perhaps parliamentary elections that would precede any change in the presidency.

But the diplomatic proposals face serious challenges, relying on the leader of a rump state who is propped up by foreign powers and hemmed in by a growing and effective extremist force that wants to build a caliphate. Many of America’s allies in the Syrian opposition reject the plans, and there is little indication that Mr. Assad or his main allies, Russia and Iran, feel any need to compromise. The American-backed Free Syrian Army is on the ropes in northern Syria, once its stronghold, and insurgents disagree among themselves over military and political strategy.

And perhaps most of all, the Islamic State controls half of Syria’s territory, though mostly desert, and it has managed to strengthen its grip even as the United States and its allies try to oust it from neighboring Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Alawite dissident: If there was just one viable alternative, Assad would lose all popular support

Syria Direct: As sons of Alawite and Druze families continue to come home in coffins year after year, members of Bashar al-Assad’s sect and other pro-regime minorities have begun to express their discontent over the war’s human toll.

Alawites in the Latakia village of Basnada exchanged fire with regime forces late last year following the burial of a local soldier, demanding that the regime stop sending their young men off to the front, reported pro-opposition news channel al-Aan TV.

This month, a group of Druze stormed a regime recruitment station in Salhkad in Swuyada province and forcibly removed a young man arrested for avoiding military recruitment, reported pro-opposition All4Syria. Similar incidents have occurred in Swuyada as far back as December 2013, when a group of elders broke into a military barracks and removed 450 young men wanted for military service, according to All4Syria.

“Every family has suffered the death of sons, the widowing of daughters, ” Abu Muhammed al-Latakani, the alias of an Alawite writer from Latakia now residing in Damascus tells Syria Direct’s Ghardinia Ashour.

“The rope of misery is growing tighter around their necks without them seeing a convincing reason for the war.”

But the possibility of an uprising against the president is “a dream,” the writer says, because hardline Islamist militias such as Jabhat a-Nusra and the Islamic State “constantly remind the vast majority [of Alawites] that they will eliminate them entirely.”

Q: Seeing as you belong to a specific sect, does this mean that your political point of view is predetermined?

Personally I don’t belong to any sect. Rather, I think that sects are a cover that hides the truth: people don’t have a role in their destinies.

Sectarian interests monopolize, control and take away from people their role [in determining their fate] and the scope of their real actions. Nothing remains for them except for these vertical, divine choices that they call on to replace their earthly failures.

When people take control of their own roles, and their leaders are born of their aspirations and express their interests and strive to ensure their honor and to be of service to them, then the people will rip up these repugnant sectarian covers.

As far as I’m concerned, seeing as I was born in that province and to this group, yes my political point of view is predetermined as long as the Syrian street doesn’t know any alternative powers. I mean, alternative to the criminal and degenerate parties that divide up the land. Reality is my choice, until powers come about that include, and mend, and build bridges. [Continue reading…]

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For Syrian refugees in Yemen the future has become fearfully uncertain

Middle East Eye reports: When Abu Saleh [a pseudonym] sits down to talk about why Syria’s unremitting civil war forced him to seek refuge in Yemen, he stops every few minutes to scroll through photos on his phone.

“See here,” he said, pointing to a snapshot of six young men, their grins and embrace of one another discernible even through the phone’s cracked screen. “All dead.” More photos follow. More loved ones lost to Syria’s spiraling violence.

Abu Saleh then returns to explain why Jordan is too expensive, in Turkey he doesn’t speak the language, the welcome for refugees in Egypt has grown painfully thin, uncertainty has long loomed in Iraq and when he briefly found himself in Lebanon, Hezbollah tried to recruit him.

Syria’s neighbouring countries – whose infrastructure and social fabric have been buckling under the strain of hosting the majority of the more than three million refugees that have fled Syria’s bloody civil war – did not seem like options for him. But neither did remaining in Syria.

The 25-year-old former soldier feared persecution after he fled Bashar al-Assad’s army when he received orders to fire at protests in early 2011 challenging the government’s rule. This was all before Syria came to be called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

Abu Saleh fled to Yemen two years ago to escape the fate of his friends in the photos.

Yemen’s low cost of living, ease of obtaining entry and relative stability at the time of his arrival offered Abu Saleh – like many of the Syrians who have found their way to the southern Gulf nation – a potentially ephemeral retreat from the bombs of his home country. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS threatens to kill two Japanese hostages, demands ransom from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

The Washington Post reports: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shifted his Middle East visit into crisis mode Tuesday after the Islamic State threatened to kill two Japanese hostages unless the extremist group receives a $200 million ransom within the next 72 hours.

The video, posted on militants’ Web sites Tuesday, shows an apparent Islamic State fighter wielding a knife and standing between two hostages wearing orange jumpsuits, whom the militants identify as Kenji Goto Jogo and Haruna Yukawa.

A senior Japanese diplomat, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak on the subject, said Goto, a well-respected Japanese journalist, was last heard from on Oct. 24. He had told friends he was traveling to Kobane, a flashpoint town on the Turkish-Syrian border, but it is unclear exactly where he was kidnapped.

“I’m in Syria for reporting,” he told the AP in an e-mail late last year. “I hope I can convey the atmosphere from where I am and share it.”

Yukawa went missing in August.

“We don’t know what he does exactly,” the diplomat said. “He says he runs a private military company, but we don’t have these kinds of companies in Japan. We believe he is a military fanatic, but he doesn’t have any official military experience. He’s not a fighter.”

“Officially, we don’t pay ransoms,” he added. “In some incidents in the past we might have paid, but we’d never announce it. I don’t know what will happen now.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran: Israeli air strike killed general advising Syrian government forces

McClatchy: Iran said Monday that a general in its elite Revolutionary Guards who’d been sent to Syria to help that country battle rebels died in an Israeli air strike on Sunday, raising tensions and heightening expectations of possible retaliation.

A statement on the website of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said that Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi was killed when Israeli planes bombed a convoy in southern Syria, where troops loyal to President Bashar Assad have been fighting rebels that include al Qaida’s Nusra Front.

The statement said Allahdadi had been helping the Syrian government “confront the takfiri Salafist terrorists,” using religious terms to refer to the Sunni Muslim rebels who’ve been trying to topple Assad for nearly four years.

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Escape to Syria of Charlie Hebdo suspect shows Turkey’s role as jihadi highway

McClatchy reports: For the wife of the gunman accused of killing four people at a kosher super market in Paris 10 days ago, the escape from questioning about complicity in the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks was relatively easy.

Once Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, got to Turkey, she followed the path of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other European jihadi volunteers before her – into the self-declared Islamic State.

Aided by smugglers in the Turkish border town of Akcakale, and several companions, she walked through a disused border crossing on Jan. 8 and into the Syrian town of Tal Abyad, which has been an Islamic State stronghold for months.

She would have passed a guard shack on the old road between Alcakale and Tal Abyad, but if Turkish border guards took any notice, they made no effort to stop her, according to a Turkish security official, who spoke anonymously because speaking on the record was not allowed.

By the time French police identified Boumeddiene as one of the suspects in a terrorism onslaught that cost 17 people their lives and that France is calling its equivalent of 9/11, she was beyond their reach. The other three suspects, her husband, Amedy Coulibaly, who is believed to have killed a policewoman in addition to the four at the supermarket, and Said and Cherif Kouachi, blamed for the deaths of 12 at the Charlie Hebdo offices, would die in shootouts with police.

The Algerian-born Boumeddiene is not the first foreigner to cross into Islamic State territory from Akcakale and the surrounding region. But her escape focuses fresh attention on what is a sore point between Turkey and its European neighbors – the ease with which disaffected European youth are able to cross into Islamic State territory from Turkey and join the jihad.

Turkey insists it is taking steps to stop the flow of recruits to the Islamic State. But visits by a McClatchy reporter to Akcakale and three nearby villages found that a foreigner can easily cross into Syria. Smugglers’ fees are a pittance, as little as $30, and daylight crossings are common. Official efforts to discourage crossings to Syria appeared non-existent. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurds battling ISIS capture strategic Kobane hilltop

AFP: Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadist group in Syria’s Kobane have captured a strategic hilltop, giving them line of fire over the town, a monitor said Monday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Kurdish People’s People Units (YPG) had seized the Mishtenur hilltop after fierce clashes overnight.

“The military operation led to the deaths of at least 11 Islamic State fighters, and the seizure of large quantities of weapons and ammunition,” the Observatory said.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the advance was a key strategic victory for the YPG, putting ISIS resupply lines to Aleppo in the west and Raqa in the east within their line of fire.

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10-year journey of deepening radicalism turned Paris brothers into hardened killers

The New York Times reports: In the year after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza delivery man here couldn’t take it anymore. Sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to go fight United States forces. He studied a virtual AK-47 on a website. Then he took lessons from a man, using a hand-drawn picture of a gun.

It was an almost laughable attempt at jihad, and as the day of his departure approached, the delivery man, Chérif Kouachi, felt increasingly unsure of himself.

When the police arrested him hours before his 6:45 a.m. Alitalia flight on Jan. 25, 2005, he was relieved. “Several times, I felt like pulling out. I didn’t want to die there,” he later told investigators. “I told myself that if I chickened out, they would call me a coward, so I decided to go anyway, despite the reservations I had.”

A decade later, Chérif Kouachi, flanked by his older brother Saïd, no longer had any reservations, as the two jihadists in black, sheathed in body armor, gave a global audience a ruthless demonstration in terror.[Continue reading…]

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ISIS losing ground in symbolic Kobane battle

The Associated Press: With more than a thousand militants killed and territory slipping away, the Islamic State group is losing its grip on the Syrian border town of Kobani under intense U.S.-led airstrikes and astonishingly stiff resistance by Kurdish fighters.

It is a stunning reversal for the Islamic State group, which just months ago stood poised to conquer the entire town — and could pierce a carefully crafted image of military strength that helped attract foreign fighters and spread horror across the Middle East.

“An IS defeat in Kobani would quite visibly undermine the perception of unstoppable momentum and inevitable victory that IS managed to project, particularly after it captured Mosul,” said Faysal Itani, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, referring to the militants’ seizure of Iraq’s second-largest city during its blitz into Iraq from Syria last summer.

It would also rob the group of a “psychological edge that both facilitated recruitment and intimidated actual and potential rivals, as well as the populations IS controlled,” Itani said.

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‘They run from our women’

In the Kurds war against ISIS, I see here quite a lot of women. Women are fighting like men in the PKK?

Chamil, guerrilla fighter (YPG), Syria: Not just like men, they fight better than lots of men. They fight better than men.

Really?

Yes, because they are good teachers and they know what they are fighting for.

It’s interesting, because ISIS treats its women as if they’re not human beings.

Honestly, they cannot stand from our women. They run from our women.

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Turkish military says Turkey’s intelligence service shipped weapons to al Qaeda

Fehim Taştekin reports: Secret official documents about the searching of three trucks belonging to Turkey’s national intelligence service (MIT) have been leaked online, once again corroborating suspicions that Ankara has not been playing a clean game in Syria. According to the authenticated documents, the trucks were found to be transporting missiles, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition. The Gendarmerie General Command, which authored the reports, alleged, “The trucks were carrying weapons and supplies to the al-Qaeda terror organization.” But Turkish readers could not see the documents in the news bulletins and newspapers that shared them, because the government immediately obtained a court injunction banning all reporting about the affair.

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was prime minister, he had said, “You cannot stop the MIT truck. You cannot search it. You don’t have the authority. These trucks were taking humanitarian assistance to Turkmens.”

Since then, Erdogan and his hand-picked new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have repeated at every opportunity that the trucks were carrying assistance to Turkmens. Public prosecutor Aziz Takci, who had ordered the trucks to be searched, was removed from his post and 13 soldiers involved in the search were taken to court on charges of espionage. Their indictments call for prison terms of up to 20 years. [Continue reading…]

In order to circumvent the ban imposed on the publication of the leaked MIT documents they have been posted by Anonymous.

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ISIS gaining ground in Syria, despite U.S. strikes

The Daily Beast reports: ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.

At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.

In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.

Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts. [Continue reading…]

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Paris gunman’s safe house could hold clues to 4th attacker

The Associated Press reports: Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages at a Paris kosher supermarket, rented a small suburban house the week before and filled it with an impressive arsenal of late-model weapons, police said Wednesday.

A published report said a search of the house has enabled police to identity a potential fourth attacker as investigators follow the money and supply systems for the three known killers, all of whom died in police raids. Police told The Associated Press as many as six members of the same radical Islamic terror cell may be at large.

“We have put our finger on some extremely dangerous people, men and women,” French police union spokesman Christophe Crepin said. “We are really in a war.”

Of special interest is the small attached house on a quiet street in the town of Gentilly south of Paris that Coulibaly rented about two weeks ago. French police officials refused to say what has been discovered inside the dwelling, but the newspaper Le Parisien reported detectives from the Paris Criminal Brigade and a special police anti-terrorism unit seized a scooter there that allowed them to identity “a fourth man” who acted as Coulibaly’s accomplice.

The newspaper did not identify the man by name, but said he may have shot and seriously wounded a jogger in nearby Fontenay-aux-Roses on Jan. 7, the same day two friends of Coulibaly, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

“The fourth man,” who has a lengthy criminal record, may have been involved in that attack, the newspaper reported, adding that he may have already escaped to Syria.

When an AP reporter visited the Gentilly house this week, neighbors said they had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, with one saying the muscular, 5-foot-5 (165 cm) Coulibaly had been a regular at the local weight room.

Officials said the attackers accumulated a veritable arsenal that included three late-model Kalashnikov assault rifles, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a machine pistol, smoke grenades and bombs, fragmentation grenades, handguns and industrial explosives.

In addition to the weapons, investigators are painstakingly following the money trail. Former drug-dealing associates of Coulibaly told AP he was selling marijuana and hashish in the Paris suburbs as recently as a month ago. Multiple French news accounts have said the Kouachi brothers sold knockoff sporting goods made in China. [Continue reading…]

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Rapid deterioration in living conditions of Syrian refugees in Jordan

UNHCR: UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres says large numbers of Syrian refugees are sliding into abject poverty, and at an alarming rate, due to the magnitude of the crisis and insufficient support from the international community.

He made the statement at the launch of a new UNHCR study, Living in the Shadows, which reveals evidence of a deepening humanitarian crisis. High Commissioner Guterres is on a two-day visit to Jordan, where he will meet refugees profiled in the study in Amman and others at the Za’atari refugee camp.

“I am here to express my solidarity with Syrian refugees, as the impact of snowstorm Huda is still tangible and posing an even greater strain on their already dire living conditions.” Guterres is also meeting with Jordanian officials and with donors to coordinate efforts to improve living conditions for Syrian refugees and support the communities hosting them.

Conducted by UNHCR and International Relief and Development (IRD) the study is based on data from home visits with almost 150,000 Syrian refugees living outside of camps in Jordan in 2014.

According to the study, two-thirds of refugees across Jordan are now living below the national poverty line, and one in six Syrian refugee households is in abject poverty, with less than $40 per person per month to make ends meet.

Almost half of the households researchers visited had no heating, a quarter had unreliable electricity, and 20 per cent had no functioning toilet. Rental costs accounted for more than half of household expenditures, and refugee families were increasingly being forced to share accommodations with others to reduce costs.

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Did the Kurdish women of the YPJ simply fall from the sky?

Meral Çiçek, from the Kurdish Women’s Relations Office in Erbil, writes: “These Remarkable Women Are Fighting ISIS. It’s Time You Know Who They Are”

This was the title of an article published in the October issue of the women’s magazine Marie Claire: “There’s a group of 7,500 soldiers who have been fighting an incalculably dangerous war for two years. They fight despite daily threats of injury and death. They fight with weapons that are bigger and heavier than they are against a relentless enemy. And yet they continue to fight. They are the YPJ (pronounced Yuh-Pah-Juh) or the Women’s Protection Unit, an all-women, all-volunteer Kurdish military faction in Syria that formed in 2012 to defend the Kurdish population against the deadly attacks lead by Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate), and ISIS.”

Or so it was frequently reported in the world press about the “YPJ: The Kurdish feminists fighting the Islamic State”(The Week). There is hardly an internationally known daily newspaper, a magazine or broadcaster that has not sent their reporters in recent months to Kurdistan to document these ‘Amazons of the 21st century’. And so on the cover page of Der Spiegel there was a picture of a PKK woman fighter with a bazooka, while a YPJ fighter was depicted on the cover of Newsweek with a firm grip on her Kalashnikov.

The phenomenon of armed Kurdish women fighting against the terrorists of the Islamic State (IS), has been uncovered by the world press and the public realm due to the IS-attack on the Southern Kurdish/Northern Iraqi, predominantly Yazidi, town of Sinjar at the beginning of August 2014. Suddenly, Kurdistan became a Mecca for journalists. From everywhere, reporters and camera crews made pilgrimages to the Maxmur refugee camp (which was being shelled by the IS), to the guerrilla fighters of the PKK in the Qandil Mountains, to Sinjar and across the border into Rojava (northern Syria), where in September, the battle for Kobanê had begun.

The international coverage of the fighting against the Islamic State by the YPJ women and YJA-Star (Women’s Army of PKK guerrillas) can be looked at and interpreted from many different perspectives. One might, for example, examine how the fighters are portrayed visually, which of their characteristics come to the foreground, with what words they are described, etc. However, this is not the concern of this article. Rather, what is written here is that which was mostly omitted from the press coverage concerning the YPJ. [Continue reading…]

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