Barry Andrews is the CEO of GOAL, an international humanitarian agency dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the poorest of the poor.
Why no one cares about Syria
Category Archives: Syria
The battle for Kobane offers a glimpse of Kurds’ new model democracy
By Karthick Manoharan, University of Essex
As the battle against Islamic State fighters draws in viewers across the world, there has been some attention given to the men and women resisting them in northern Syria. The Syrian part of Kurdistan, or Rojava, as the Kurds would like to call it, has been fighting Islamists for well over two years now but only recently has the battle for the border town of Kobane brought them to light.
And while it’s easy to portray the Kurdish people as pitted against this new terrorist threat, they are actually involved in something far more profound. Kobane is symbolic and the conflict there carries a universal significance. Not only are the Kurds battling the Islamists, but they are also attempting to create a model of democracy that might actually bring stability to a war-torn region.
The Kurdish political vision is not founded on any particular racial, ethnic, regional or religious belief but rather on an idea, or a set of ideas, that should resonate with people everywhere.
Fighters in Kobane claim to be standing up for the freedom of everyone in the region, be they Kurds, Turks, Arabs or anyone else. The way the fighters in Kobane have challenged stereotypical gender roles is just one example.
As far as religious difference goes, Kobane disproves both Islamophobes who believe the Middle East to be incapable of progress and politically correct Islamophiles who push the patronising idea that religious identity is a top priority for Muslims the world over. In their readiness to defend the Yazidi minority against persecution from IS, the Kurds have essentially been promoting a radical secularism and a vision of tolerance in a region torn by religious strife.
Syria Kurds ‘recapture’ areas of Kobane from ISIS
AFP reports: Kurds battling the Islamic State jihadist group in Kobane reportedly made advances Tuesday in the south of the flashpoint Syrian town on the border with Turkey.
Top Kurdish officials told AFP their fighters were advancing “street by street”, voicing confidence that the IS would soon be ejected.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights backed up the report.
“The (Kurdish) People’s Protection Units (YPG) recaptured streets and buildings in the south of Kobane, after a fierce battle against the IS that began yesterday (Monday) evening,” said the Britain-based Observatory. [Continue reading…]
Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history
Robert Fisk reports: In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins.
This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.
Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”. [Continue reading…]
Syrian Kurds give women equal rights, snubbing jihadists
AFP reports: The local government in a majority Kurdish area of Syria has passed a decree granting women equal rights in what a monitoring group called “an affront” to discriminatory jihadist moves.
Published on the local government’s official Facebook page on Wednesday, the decree states that women and men should enjoy “equality… in all walks of public and private life.”
Last year, Syria’s Kurds created autonomous governments in the three regions where they are a majority, establishing self-proclaimed rule.
Arabs also hold office, and the decrees apply to all ethnicities living in the self-governing areas.
The decree, passed by the leaders of the Al-Jazira canton — officially Hasakeh province — stipulates that women have the right to equal labour rights, including pay.
Women must be 18 years old to marry, and they are cannot be married off without their consent.
“Polygamy is forbidden,” the decree states, adding that women have the same right to bear witness in court as men, and that they have full inheritance rights. [Continue reading…]
War on ISIS: Only one of every four strike missions result in airstrikes
The New York Times reports: More than three months into the American-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria, commanders are challenged by spotty intelligence, poor weather and an Iraqi Army that is only now starting to go on the offensive against the Islamic State, meaning that warplanes are mostly limited to hitting pop-up targets of opportunity.
Weekend airstrikes hit just such targets: a convoy of 10 armed trucks of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, near Mosul, as well as vehicles and two of the group’s checkpoints near the border with Syria. News reports from Iraq said the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been wounded in one of the raids, but American officials said Sunday that they were still assessing his status.
In Iraq, the air war is tethered to the slow pace of operations by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces. With relatively few Iraqi offensives to flush out militants, many Islamic State fighters have dug in to shield themselves from attack.
The vast majority of bombing runs, including the weekend strike near Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, are now searching for targets of opportunity, such as checkpoints, artillery pieces and combat vehicles in the open. But only one of every four strike missions — some 800 of 3,200 — dropped its weapons, according to the military’s Central Command. [Continue reading…]
Oil politics and the battle for Kobane
By Mika Minio-Paluello, Open Democracy, November 7, 2014
Kobane was supposed to fall. As ISIS assaulted the town, Turkish troops besieged it from the north, preventing reinforcements and arresting hundreds fleeing. US jets bombed ISIS forces elsewhere, driving them towards Rojava: the largely Kurdish region in northern Syria self-administered by the movement for a democratic society (Tev-Dem), headed politically by the PYD, and defended by the YPG and YPJ. A month into the battle, Kerry admitted that defending Kobane was still not a US strategic priority, despite growing pressure for an airdrop.
But Kobane didn’t fall. Unlike the Iraqi Army with its tanks and Humvees, the lightly-armed YPG and YPJ guerillas held firm. Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik argues that, “The people of Kobane were massively outgunned. But their will to fight kept them going. They are fighting for a fundamentally different future.”
Why was the US happy to see ISIS crush Rojava? The heavy violence in Syria is heavily influenced by oil-driven geopolitics. This goes well beyond the smuggling of crudely refined fuel from ISIS-controlled Deir Ezzor into Turkey. For decades, energy colonialism has enabled the repression of democratic movements.
Energy colonialism
Large oil fields and potential export routes contributed to Kurdistan – spread between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria – being subjected to intense violence. For over a century, foreign policy decisions made in Washington, London and Paris aimed to control oil reserves in the region and preserve corporate profits. Borders were drawn, autocrats were supported and weapons poured in. Kurdish movements were used opportunistically and encouraged to revolt – only to be abandoned and slaughtered once short-term goals were achieved.
The 2003 war on Iraq and 1990s sanctions followed a much older pattern: where democratic forces and organised labour grew, British and US governments, corporations and local elites crushed them. When oil workers in Iraq occupied a pipeline pumping station in 1948, the company surrounded them with machine guns and armoured cars, starving them out. The next year, the Syrian parliament refused to ratify construction of the Trans-Arabian pipeline. The oil companies had the CIA organise a coup and the new military government immediately completed the agreement.
Today’s pipeline routes are the product of wars and political struggles, expensive infrastructure, mass displacement, and intensive corporate lobbying. Kurdish communities were seen as a threat, and subjected to cultural assimilation, forced emigration and brutal crackdowns. The enormous twin Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipelines from Iraq to the Mediterranean snakes its way through the Kurdish mountains, carrying 1.6 million barrels of oil every day. Its construction brought thousands of Turkish troops along its the route and into nearby villages.
Oil reserves in both Syria and Turkey – while not enormous – are heavily concentrated in Kurdish areas. 60% of Syrian oil is in and around Rojava, while 99% of crude extracted in Turkey comes from the south-east. Shell recently started fracking for shale gas around Diyarbakir. More reasons why Turkish and Syrian governments opposed any Kurdish autonomy.
The conservative-nationalist Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq managed to leverage its oil resources to attain significant autonomy, largely by making itself an ally to western energy interests and neoliberal power. In contrast, the Kurdish movements in Turkey and Syria are aiming for greater social liberation.
Who can decolonise energy?
Kurdish autonomy in Turkey or Syria could threaten western oil interests, especially with the Öcalan-inspired PKK and PYD sister parties both espousing “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society”. The PYD is the driving force in Rojava, where popular assemblies have seen a “flourishing of a democratic culture that promotes popular participation, social emancipation, gender equality, ecological sensitivity, local self-organization, and ethnic and religious pluralism.”
Rojava’s deliberative politics has created a vision of an ecological society not subjugated to neoliberalism. Its political economy is characterised by community-based production and large-scale cooperatives. The Assad regime’s property was turned over to worker-managed co-operatives. A free Rojava is less open to exploitation for foreign interests, like Gulfsands, the London sanctions-dodging oil company that drilled for crude in Rojava.
The PKK and PYD are the most organised and democratic political forces in the region, and have the best chance to begin democratising and decolonising energy. Energy democracy in the Middle East would be transformative globally. Western elites use the control of oil overseas to weaken democratic forces at home, fearmongering about “energy security” and undermining the power of energy workers.
We need Rojava
This is one more reason why the US and Turkey are relaxed about ISIS and the YPG battling it out. No elite power wants a progressive and democratic revolution that could begin to transform our energy future. Neither the US or Russia, Turkey or Iran, the Israelis or Saudi Arabia.
By delaying meaningful airstrikes on ISIS positions around Kobane, the US ensured that the PYD became dependent on western support. The YPG needs heavy weapons – airdrops have begun and there is potential for more. The US excels at using “aid” to alter movement politics and enforce subservience. Guns come with strings attached and American military advisers to pull them. But the PYD/PKK have deep ideological roots and hopefully won’t roll over.
Whichever way the battle for Kobane ends, the longer struggle for Rojava will continue. We all need Rojava, as an inspirational model to draw on, and as an ally in dismantling energy colonialism that keeps us all weak. Rojava needs us, and we need Rojava.
This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net
‘ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks’
Newsweek reports: A former member of ISIS has revealed the extent to which the cooperation of the Turkish military and border forces allows the terrorist group, who now control large parts of Iraq and Syria, to travel through Turkish territory to reinforce fighters battling Kurdish forces.
A reluctant former communications technician working for Islamic State, going by the pseudonym ‘Sherko Omer’, who managed to escape the group, told Newsweek that he travelled in a convoy of trucks as part of an ISIS unit from their stronghold in Raqqa, across Turkish border, through Turkey and then back across the border to attack Syrian Kurds in the city of Serekaniye in northern Syria in February, in order to bypass their defences.
“ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks,” said Omer of crossing the border into Turkey, “and they reassured us that nothing will happen, especially when that is how they regularly travel from Raqqa and Aleppo to the Kurdish areas further northeast of Syria because it was impossible to travel through Syria as YPG controlled most parts of the Kurdish region.”
Until last month, NATO member Turkey had blocked Kurdish fighters from crossing the border into Syria to aid their Syrian counterparts in defending the border town of Kobane. Speaking to Newsweek, Kurds in Kobane said that people attempting to carry supplies across the border were often shot at.
National Army of Syrian Kurdistan (YPG) spokesman Polat Can went even further, saying that Turkish forces were actively aiding ISIS. “There is more than enough evidence with us now proving that the Turkish army gives ISIS terrorists weapons, ammunitions and allows them to cross the Turkish official border crossings in order for ISIS terrorists to initiate inhumane attacks against the Kurdish people in Rojava [north-eastern Syria].”
Omer explained that during his time with ISIS, Turkey had been seen as an ally against the Kurds. “ISIS saw the Turkish army as its ally especially when it came to attacking the Kurds in Syria. The Kurds were the common enemy for both ISIS and Turkey. Also, ISIS had to be a Turkish ally because only through Turkey they were able to deploy ISIS fighters to northern parts of the Kurdish cities and towns in Syria.”
“ISIS and Turkey cooperate together on the ground on the basis that they have a common enemy to destroy, the Kurds,” he added. [Continue reading…]
‘It was never my intention to join ISIS’: Interview with a former member
A former ISIS member going by the pseudonym Sherko Omer came from a privileged family in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He went to Syria to fight in the uprising against Bashar Al-Assad and ended up joining ISIS.
I witnessed horrible crimes committed by ISIS. I was so stressed in Al-Raqqa that I thought of suicide on several occasions. I wanted to escape but there was no way out. Only when I was deployed to the Kurdish region did the opportunity come to leave and I immediately surrendered to the YPG [National Army of Syrian Kurdistan] forces as they attacked our ISIS camp in the Kurdish city of Serekaniye.
I was held for several months and finally released after all sorts of investigations proved that I had no part in any crimes. I had been assigned to work in as a communication technician but my two friends became ISIS fighters. They were deployed to A’zaz – and both have been confirmed as dead.
While with ISIS, I noticed that the field captains and commanders spoke fluent Turkish. I rarely heard them speak in Arabic. ISIS commanders in Raqqa openly talked about the best foreign jihadists crossing into Syria from Turkey. Once, I heard that some ISIS foreign jihadists had been stopped by the Turkish border guards and police, but such were the ISIS connections that they were soon freed and safely on their way to Syria.
The last time I talked to one of my friends on the telephone, he had had enough of the whole organisation and he too had witnessed ISIS killing innocent people. He said he was scared to make an escape because he had witnessed ISIS publically beheading its own members who had tried to run. [Continue reading…]
Obama promised Iran’s Khamenei that U.S. campaign against ISIS poses no threat to Assad
The Wall Street Journal reports: President Barack Obama secretly wrote to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the middle of last month and described a shared interest in fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, according to people briefed on the correspondence.
The letter appeared aimed both at buttressing the campaign against Islamic State and nudging Iran’s religious leader closer to a nuclear deal.
Mr. Obama stressed to Mr. Khamenei that any cooperation on Islamic State was largely contingent on Iran reaching a comprehensive agreement with global powers on the future of Tehran’s nuclear program by a Nov. 24 diplomatic deadline, the same people say.
The October letter marked at least the fourth time Mr. Obama has written Iran’s most powerful political and religious leader since taking office in 2009 and pledging to engage with Tehran’s Islamist government.
The correspondence underscores that Mr. Obama views Iran as important—whether in a potentially constructive or negative role—to his emerging military and diplomatic campaign to push Islamic State from the territories it has gained over the past six months.
Mr. Obama’s letter also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces. [Continue reading…]
U.S. airstrikes on Jabhat al Nusra undermine opposition to Assad
The Daily Beast reports: It’s the clearest signal yet that the U.S.-led military campaign in Syria is widening: American warplanes on Thursday struck at al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who attacked two groups of Western-backed rebels — fighters that the Obama administration is counting on to battle ISIS.
In an apparently improvised effort to relieve the rebels and prevent the loss of more of their strongholds close to the Turkish border, the U.S. bombed positions of Jabhat al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s Syria branch. It was a remarkable turnaround, because previously the administration had said it was avoiding attacks on the group, which used to occasionally fight alongside the American-supported rebels.
But it’s a turnaround the White House should have seen coming. In meetings of senior Obama administration officials before the first airstrikes began in Syria on Sept. 22, which hit both ISIS and al Qaeda positions, U.S. intelligence officials warned that any additional American attacks against al Nusra could drive a wedge between the group and their erstwhile allies in the American-backed, moderate opposition.
The U.S. intelligence community’s fear, according to individuals involved in the discussions, was that hitting al Nusra could draw a giant target on the rebels’ backs — which is precisely what appears to have happened. In the initial round of airstrikes in late September, the U.S. struck targets occupied both by al Nusra and a third group, an al Qaeda unit known Khorasan that U.S. intelligence agencies believed was plotting attacks against commercial airliners. Khorasan may have been the target, but Nusra was hit, too, and the impression on the ground was that the U.S. had meant to go after al Nusra all along. (Some Syrian rebel groups maintain that the Americans invented Khorasan as a pretext for the attack.) Soon after, al Nusra turned on U.S.-backed rebels, labeling them in official statements last week as “corrupt” lackeys of the Obama administration.
The administration now finds itself in the very position it had hoped to avoid, fighting a broader war against al Nusra forces and risking further alienation of Syrian civilians.
“The goal of the airstrikes has evolved from combatting ISIS in Iraq to combating ISIS and Al Nusra in Syria, because they pose an increasing threat to the opposition,” said a former U.S. official.
It’s those rebel forces that the Obama administration wanted to train and equip to help destroy ISIS. And it’s those forces that the U.S. military is now trying to save with these latest bombing raids against al Nusra.
“If the U.S. attacks Nusra without attacking Assad, all the average Syrian sees is that the U.S. is enabling, emboldening, and strengthening the Assad regime,” said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, which monitors developments in Syria. “It’s not that the Syrian people love Nusra; it’s that Nusra has been in the fight against Assad, and the U.S. has looked for every excuse to stay out of the fight against Assad.” [Continue reading…]
From Portsmouth to Kobane: the British jihadis fighting for ISIS
Shiraz Maher, from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), an academic research unit at King’s College London, has over the last year been interviewing dozens of British fighters who joined ISIS in Syria. He says that social media has played a crucial role as a tool for recruitment.
The use of the internet by jihadists is hardly new but the manner in which its potential is being harnessed has vastly changed. During the Iraq war, sympathisers of al-Qaeda needed access to password-protected forums, where they could learn about events on the ground. These forums were not easy to find and access was harder to gain. Crucially, most of the conversations were in Arabic, a language alien to most British Muslims.
Social media has changed all this, empowering individual fighters to become recruiting sergeants in their own right. What makes them so powerful is their sheer ordinariness. Indeed, most fighters tend to stress their unremarkable nature: “There’s nothing special about me,” they might say. “I just decided to come. If I can do it, you can do it.”
The effect of social media is to normalise the experience, while also motivating and inspiring potential recruits. Perhaps most significant is that the conversation runs two ways. In the past, al-Qaeda would issue unidirectional edicts and vague instructions to followers to “do something” at home. Today, you can talk to fighters directly and have a proper conversation.
These interactions help prospective fighters overcome lingering fears and emotional barriers. Fighters are asked, for example, how they broke the news to their parents and how their families are coping with their decision. Others ask what living arrangements are like in Syria, or how to cross the border safely.
Maher classifies the fighters in the following way:
There are those who are principally motivated by the region’s human suffering, whom we call missionary jihadis; there are martyrdom seekers, who regard the conflict as a shortcut to paradise; there are those simply seeking adventure, for whom the supposed masculinity of it all has great appeal; and, finally, there are long-standing radicals for whom the conflict represents a chance to have the fight they had been waiting for.
Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, had been a supervisor at a clothing store in Portsmouth before going to Syria. He craved martyrdom.
Speaking with Rahman was difficult. During our first exchange, he was deeply suspicious of me and recommended that I quit my job in order to join him in Syria. We didn’t talk for several months.
Then, one day, he resumed contact shortly after IS had swept into Iraq and taken Mosul. Despite his obvious excitement and pride, Rahman painted a sober picture of daily life. “One of the hardest things about being here is the waiting,” he told me. “We are trying to build a state. This is why a lot of ribat [guard duty] is required, so the area is secure.”
The downtime is something that a lot of foreign fighters complain about. The reality on the ground is a world away from the glamour of well-produced recruitment videos. Boredom is not just confined to those in IS. Foreign fighters with Jabhat al-Nusra and lesser-known, independent groups complain of the same thing.
At the same time, however, many use the phrase “five-star jihad” to describe their living arrangements on the camps. Some have taken to posting pictures of themselves online, posing with chocolate bars or jars of Nutella to prove that they can still access their home comforts on the Syrian front line.
A callousness towards the concerns of ordinary Syrians had also crept into the attitude of these fighters – the constituency in whose defence they once claimed to be acting. When asked what he thought of those Syrians who opposed Islamic State, Rahman conceded, “There are a number of them that dislike us. However, the lands belong to Allah’s [sic] not them. Also I [came] here to please my creator and not them.” [Continue reading…]
Was David Drugeon — target of latest U.S. airstrikes in Syria — a French intelligence agent?
The Associated Press reports: American airstrikes overnight in Syria targeted a cell of al-Qaida militants, hitting and possibly killing a top bomb-maker in the group, a senior U.S. official said Thursday, amid widespread reports that other rebel factions were also hit.
It wasn’t certain whether the bomb-maker, French militant David Drugeon, was killed or injured, but the official said the strikes hit their intended targets near Sarmada, in the country’s northwest. The official was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Central Command commander in charge of U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East, said separately at a Washington forum that he would not discuss results of the strikes until they had been more fully studied. He suggested, however, the Drugeon may have been hit, or at least targeted.
“He is clearly one of the leadership elements and one of the most dangerous elements in that organization,” Austin said. “And so any time we can take their leadership out, it’s a good thing.”
At the Pentagon, Army Col. Steve Warren said the strikes hit five targets at two locations.
Noting that reports coming out of the region suggest members of other militant groups were hit, Warren that the Khorasan Group was the pre-planned target of the strikes.
The Khorasan Group, he said, “is a group of personnel, some of whom are also al-Nusra affiliated, some of whom are al-Qaida affiliated, some of whom are affiliated with other organizations. But these strikes weren’t specifically targeting any of those other organizations. They were targeting the Khorasan group. If a terrorist happens to be a member of both groups, so be it.”
Austin said none of the airstrikes was aimed at al-Nusra.
But as an earlier AP report notes: [B]y striking groups whose primary focus is fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad, the U.S. risks further enraging many Syrians in opposition-held areas who believe Washington is aiding Assad in his struggle to hold onto power in the country’s 3 ½-year-old civil war. Purported civilian casualties have only compounded those frustrations, and activists said Thursday that at least two children were killed in the overnight strikes.
“We are tired of people saying they are coming to help us, and then they kill us,” said activist Asaad Kanjo, based in Idlib.
McClatchy’s Mitchell Prothero published a report in early October claiming that Drugeon was “a former French intelligence officer who defected to al-Qaeda,” but Daveed Gartenstein-Ross casts doubt on that claim.
Many readers have interpreted Prothero’s report as suggesting that the French spy is extraordinarily high-ranking. This interpretation isn’t unreasonable, as Prothero reported that “two European intelligence officials described the former French officer as the highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group.” Given the large number of intelligence defectors to jihadist groups in the Arab world, including Syrians and Iraqis, that statement is doubtless incorrect: After all, Drugeon is only in his mid-twenties. However, it is possible that some qualifying context in the European officials’ statement was lost. For example, these sources may have been trying to say that Drugeon is the highest-ranking European defector.
So the question remains: Was Drugeon a French agent who defected? It is worth understanding the distinction between an agent and an asset. The short version of the difference between them is that an agent is given something back from the spy organization for which he is working, such as training or information. In contrast, an asset simply gives the organization information and doesn’t receive anything like training (although he obviously gets paid for his work).
Two articles in the French media elliptically state that Drugeon had received training. A French defense ministry official denied to L’Express that Drugeon had joined the army, but stated that “he trained with a civilian organization,” without specifying which one. (That official also categorically denied that Drugeon was a “French James Bond.”) And a defense ministry official (perhaps the same one, but it is not clear) told Le Monde that “this Frenchman [referred to in McClatchy’s report] exists, but he is neither a former member of secret services nor former military. As far as we know, he merely trained with former members of the French army.”
Turkish soldiers kill activist Kader Ortakaya at Kobane border
#KaderOrtakaya shot dead today on the #Kobane-Suruç border by Turkish soldiers
http://t.co/tcr7ZbdTzc
#TwitterKurds pic.twitter.com/FjxVobynHg
— Aso Viyan (@AsoViyan) November 6, 2014
Firat News Agency reports: It came out that the woman killed in the attack by Turkish troops at Suruç-Kobanê border today is 28-year-old Kader Ortakaya, an activist from the Collective Freedom Platform and post-graduate at Marmara University.
Kader Ortakaya has lost her life after being shot on the head as Turkish troops fired real bullets and intense tear gas on artists affiliated to the Initiative for Free Art who formed a human chain at Suruç-Kobanê border today.
Soldiers also fired tear gas and real bullets on the people at the Kobanê side of the border.
The young woman’s body has been taken to the hospital in Kobanê and will reportedly be transferred to the Forensic Medicine Institution in Urfa via the Mürşitpınar border crossing.
Kader Ortakaya was from Siverek district of Urfa and doing master degree at Marmara University in Istanbul after graduating from the department of sociology. Ortakaya was joining the resistance vigil in the villages of Mehser and Miseynter for around 25 days. She had also taken part in the works of women’s academy in Amed, Gezi protests of last year, as a person known to be sensitive towards social events.
Pope Francis: ‘The Vatican is with the Kurdish people’
Kurdish Question reports: In a gathering of the Global Meeting of Popular Movements hosted by the Vatican in Rome between the dates of 27-29 October, Pope Francis met with Kurdish activists from Kurdish Network.
The event was attended by trade unions, women’s movements and land movements from 50 countries. The discussions revolved around struggling against the structural causes of inequality and how the struggles of the people should unify in order to bring about change that transcends national, continental and religious boundaries.
Pope Francis met with several delegations from different countries. Members of the Kurdish Network based in Rome met with Pope Francis to discuss the situation in Kobane and ask for support for the Kurdish people’s resistance against ISIS. The Pope stated that he was following the situation closely and that the “Vatican is with the Kurdish people”.
The Kobane resistance was included in the final resolution of the meeting. The resolution stated that a corridor must be opened to Kobane, support for ISIS — both financial and logistical — should be ceased and the Rojava autonomous region must be recognised by the international community.
Latest U.S. airstrikes in Syria target groups fighting against Assad regime
The Associated Press reports: U.S. aircraft bombed al-Qaida’s Syrian branch as well as another hard-line rebel faction in northwestern Syria early on Thursday, activists said, in an apparent widening of targets of the American-led coalition against the Islamic State extremist group.
The series of airstrikes overnight targeted three different areas near the Turkish border, hitting a headquarters and a vehicle belonging to the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front as well as a compound of the deeply conservative Ahrar al-Sham rebel group. It marked only the second time the United States had expanded its aerial campaign against Islamic State militants to hit other extremists in Syria.
There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. officials, but the apparent strikes took place amid a Nusra Front offensive that has routed Western-backed rebel groups from their strongholds in Syria’s Idlib province near the Turkish border. The timing suggests that Washington could be trying to curb the militant assault and destroy weapons supplies of hard-line rebels and al-Qaida fighters.
But by striking groups whose primary focus is fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad, the U.S. risks further enraging many Syrians in opposition-held areas who believe Washington is aiding Assad in his struggle to hold onto power in the country’s 3 ½-year-old civil war. Purported civilian casualties have only compounded those frustrations, and activists said Thursday that at least two children were killed in the overnight strikes. [Continue reading…]
Inside Kobane
Ersin Caksu reports: Kobane is imbued with a tremendous spirit of solidarity.
Travelling around the city by day is simple because the first vehicle you meet on the street will stop and the driver will offer you a lift.
Maybe that solidarity helps explain why Kobane has held out for so long.
Very few people are still living in their own houses. When necessary, the doors of empty properties are opened and needy people are relocated.
Those still in their homes share the cheese, pickles, jams and dried vegetables they have stocked for the winter with those in need.
Although people have few belongings left, they get by through sharing what they have.
For example, if a car is needed, the YPG unlock a garage, put the owner’s name and the car’s number plate on record so that they can be compensated, and the vehicle is used.
There is no commercial activity in the city. The only business still open is the bakery.
The bread produced here is distributed free among the people.
Other food, which is mainly canned food from the stocks and from the humanitarian aid sent to Kobane, is distributed on certain days of the week as equally as possible.
Water is distributed by tankers. The local administration also distributes flour once every three days. Five households share a 50kg (110lb) sack of flour.
Those civilians who can provide voluntary help behind the frontline.
They repair vehicles, guns and generators, in a city that has had no electricity for the past 18 months.
They help doctors tend to the wounded, carry arms and ammunition to the frontline, cook for fighters and repair their clothes. [Continue reading…]
Kobane official calls for more outside help to defeat ISIS
Rudaw reports: Anwar Muslim, president of the Syrian Kurdish canton of Kobane, appealed for more international support and weapons to defeat Islamic State militants.
He thanked the United States, which has air dropped weapons, and the Iraqi Peshmerga, who crossed the Turkish border into Kobane last Friday and where they appear to have helped to halt ISIS attacks.
Muslim, who travelled from Kobane to Erbil for a conference, said the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian Kurdish militia, now considered itself part of the international coalition battling ISIS.
The town of Kobane and the surrounding canton had been under pressure from ISIS for months with no outside assistance to its defenders. Thanks to US air support and Peshmerga reinforcements, the town has now held out for more than 50 days.
Some 30 per cent of the canton was now out of the control of ISIS, Muslim told the second day of the Middle East Research Institute conference.
“ISIS is a disease just like cancer,” he said. “We acknowledge the help of all international forces and the giving of weapons in particular.”
ISIS had to be “killed” because of its savagery and opposition to humanitarian values and he hailed the YPG as “heroes”.
The co-operation between the US and Peshmerga with the YPG of recent weeks marks a significant shift in Washington’s attitude towards a group previously ostracised because of its links to the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organisation by Washington and Ankara.
The apparent political settlement or “marriage of convenience” between the US and the YPG could prove a model as Washington sought to create partnerships with other Syrian opposition groups, Max Hoffman of the Centre for American Progress, told the forum. [Continue reading…]