Kobane key to U.S. strategy against ISIS

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. isn’t sure why IS is fighting so hard for control of Kobani, a city with few resources and far removed from any capital. But like the U.S. with Kobani, a loss to a ragtag group of Kurdish fighters would be a propaganda loss for IS.

Much of the daily fighting in Kobani is caught on camera, where TV crews and photographers on the Turkish side of the border have captivated the world’s attention with searing pictures of refugees, black plumes of smoke from explosions, and the sounds of firefights on the city’s streets. In video after video, refugees just across the border can be seen and heard cheering as U.S. airstrikes pound the extremists.

Last week, in pictures and Tweets, the militants’ supporters declared Kobani as theirs, and changed the city’s name to Ayn al-Islam, or Spring of Islam. The online jeering has quieted considerably after the airstrikes of the last several days.

The Islamic State relies on its global online propaganda machine, run largely by supporters far from the battle, to entice fighters, funding and other aid to the front. If the militants’ victories begin to ebb in such a public forum, U.S. officials believe, so too will their lines of support. That alone makes the battle for Kobani a must-win fight for the U.S. strategy.

And that is not lost on Washington. “What makes Kobani significant is the fact that ISIL wants it,” Kirby said. [Continue reading…]

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Fleeing Kobane: Taking only the things they could carry

Middle East Eye reports: When Islamic State militants began to close in on Kobane, the town erupted into chaos.

Most fled with just the clothes they were wearing, and any money stashed away in the house they could grab quickly.

Taking the time to pack bags was a gamble, especially for families living on the outskirts of the town, who had long heard about the notoriety of the advancing militants that have captured world attention for the particular brand of cruelty they unleash on their opponents.

Yet, even amid the chaos, a few individuals managed to take an object of sentimental value, an item that in their mind could not be left behind and could not be replaced. In disarray and terror, a small piece of comfort was nonetheless carried over the Syrian border to safety.

As mortars rained down on their hometown, and the fighting between the Peoples Protection Unit (YPG) Kurdish forces and Islamic State militants descended from the rural outskirts into the city, Khaled Khalil Bisiki and his family made the decision to flee Kobane.

Two weeks ago in the middle of the night, as they hurryingly packed their lives into the family’s small battered car, Bisiki ran back inside to grab the deeds to his lands in Kobane. His wife, Maram, quickly followed, grabbing precious family photos.

“We left so fast we couldn’t bring anything with us really, it was all so fast, so you just grab the things you think you can bring with you,” Khaled told Middle East Eye.

“When you remember something is important, it becomes so important. I remembered our land deeds, I want to always have proof that this is my family’s place – to never lose that – and my wife grabbed the family photos.” [Continue reading…]

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Partisangirl’s false-flag semaphore supporting Assad and her alliance with MIT’s Ted Postol

Ted Postol and Maram Susli

Ted Postol and Maram Susli

Noah Shachtman and Michael Kennedy write: She thinks that Ebola could be an American military bioweapon. She thinks that the Defense Department’s advanced research arm is covertly intervening in the GamerGate debate about feminism and video games. She’s fond of extremist groups like Hezbollah. She believes the Illuminati are leaving secret clues in, among other places, the viral Kony 2012 video. Oh, and she also says she’s in contact with the Syrian Electronic Army, the hacker group tied to the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Meet the Damascus regime’s biggest fangirl on social media — at least in English language social media. Her name is Maram Susli. Or Mimi al-Laham. Or Partisangirl. Or Syrian Girl. Or it would appear, or Syrian Sister. She goes by many handles.

As “Partisangirl,” Susli has emerged from the fever swamps of online conspiracy forums and onto social media to become a darling of truthers and state propaganda channels alike. Whenever there’s unpleasant news about the Syrian military or government, Susli (that’s her surname) seems to be there to interpret the false flag semaphore for her rapt audience. The chemical-weapons attack that killed hundreds in the Damascus suburbs? The rebels’ fault. The massacre of more than 100 men, women, and children in Houla? Oh, that was British intelligence. The U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria? Just an elaborate show, since American is taking it easy on ISIS. And the ghastly videos featuring the murder of Western aid workers? Many of them are fakes.

“There’s an elite and they’re trying to manipulate people’s minds,” Susli told The Daily Beast. “It’s claimed that we’re living in a free democracy but we’re really not. It’s just an illusion. And the more people know that, the more they distrust what they’re hearing.”

The Internet’s always had a well-populated fringe and Susli’s place in its firmament might not otherwise be noteworthy. But with the help of a distinguished MIT professor — whose work has been cited by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — she’s trying to move beyond the chemtrails crowd. Her YouTube videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. She’s been interviewed uncritically by Vice. A lapsed graduate student in chemistry at the University of Western Australia, she’s been brought into the academy to become a source of expertise on the chemical-weapons attack that brought America to the brink of war in Syria last year. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS holding thousands of women and children as slaves in Iraq and Syria

Emily Feldman reports: The Islamic State is currently holding thousands of people hostage inside ISIS territory, having taken members of the minority Yazidi sect captive this summer during a brutal campaign across northern Iraq.

While the United Nations has put the number of captives at about 2,500, other estimates are as high as 7,000. And prospects for any rescue are bleak.

Even as the U.S. and its allies bomb ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, the group has managed to hold on to key cities where it is reviving the practice of slavery.

The latest edition of Dabiq, an ISIS magazine, includes an impassioned argument for the practice as well as an account of how the Yazidi women from the Sinjar region of Iraq were distributed among the fighters.

“The Yazidi women and children were divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operation…to be divided as khums,” a kind of tax.

“The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.”

The magazine also warns “weak-minded and weak-hearted” ISIS followers who might question or object to the practice of slavery.

“Enslaving the families of the [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah,” the article says. “If one were to deny or mock [it], he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Quran.”

The article’s description of how prisoners were dealt with closely mirrors accounts from the few who have escaped or managed to contact their loved-ones by phone.

Women were sold at slave markets, forced to marry and imprisoned in the homes of ISIS fighters across both Iraq and Syria. [Continue reading…]

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After repelling ISIS, PKK fighters are the new heroes of Iraqi Kurdistan

Al Jazeera reports: The body of Zanyar Kawa is making its final journey to Sulaymaniyah, in northeastern Iraq. The slain fighter died 500 miles from his hometown battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, in Kobane, a Syrian town near the Turkish border.

Though an Iraqi Kurd, Kawa did not die serving the Iraqi Kurdish security forces, known as the peshmerga. Rather, he was killed fighting alongside guerrillas associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which seeks self-determination for Kurds in Turkey and across the region. Both Turkey and the United States consider the PKK a terrorist organization.

Nearly a hundred people have gathered on a grassy plaza in the city’s center to receive Kawa’s body and accompany it home. PKK flags are flying, along with banners of Abdullah Öcalan, the group’s founder. While most in the crowd are Turkish Kurds who live in exile, there are Iraqi Kurds, too.

In the past, the PKK did not count many Iraqi Kurds among its members, nor was the separatist group a critical player in Kurdistan’s internal affairs. But since ISIL fighters swept through northern Iraq this summer, that has changed. Increasingly, Iraqi Kurds are embracing the PKK fighters as heroes, lauding them for recapturing the northern Iraqi town of Makhmour and its surrounding villages and for rescuing thousands of members of the Yazidi ethnic group who were trapped in nearby Sinjar. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s ‘shadow commander’ Major General Qassem Suleimani steps into the light

The Atlantic reports: On October 16, Iran’s Fars news agency proclaimed the “magnificent role of General Suleimani in the fight against the terrorists of Daesh,” using an alternative acronym for ISIS.

Fars, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, boasted that The Guardian had noted the role of Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force — the branch of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for overseas operations — in combating Islamic State militants.

“According to this publication,” Fars enthused, “General Suleimani is playing a key role in the fight against the Islamic State group.”

It is no coincidence that Fars dedicated a whole news article to the fact that an “English newspaper” had commented on Suleimani’s presence in Iraq. Iran has made a concerted effort in recent weeks to show the world that Suleimani — and by extension, the Quds Force — is bolstering Shiite militias against ISIS.

Numerous photographs have circulated on social media and in Iran’s state press showing Suleimani in Iraq and Syria. They are notable largely because until now, Suleimani has been an elusive figure, a subject of great media interest and speculation but also great secrecy. Suleimani’s name has appeared frequently in the Western press, but usually accompanied by the description “shadowy,” as in “shadowy figure,” or even “Shadow Commander.”

Yet this month, the hitherto rarely glimpsed Suleimani has been snapped in Irbil, grinning with Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters; meeting with a top Shiite commander, Mohammad Kazmi, at the Quds Force headquarters in Iraq; and hanging out with Shiite militias while wearing a reversed baseball cap and Palestinian keffiyeh: [Continue reading…]

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The Balfour declaration ‘seems like a sick joke’ — the astonishing debate on Palestine in the British Parliament

Philip Weiss writes: Yesterday [October 13] the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly (274-12) to recognize a Palestinian state, and if you listened to the debate, one theme above all else explains the crushing victory: The British public has been horrified by Gaza and its opinion of Israel has shifted. Even Conservative members of Parliament cited pressure from the public. As Labour’s Andy Slaughter said, Britain has witnessed a new “barbarism”:

I think that the British people have been on the same sort of the journey as the right hon. Member for Croydon South [Conservative Sir Richard Ottaway] described — it is certainly true of the Labour movement — from being very sympathetic to Israel as a country that was trying to achieve democracy and was embattled, to seeing it now as a bully and a regional superpower. That is not something I say with any pleasure, but since the triumph of military Zionism and the Likud-run Governments we have seen a new barbarism in that country.

Slaughter and a fellow Labour member, Kate Green, said that just as the British Parliament sent a message to Obama a year ago in voting to oppose the Conservative Prime Minister on attacking Syria, a vote Obama heeded in reversing course on a Syria attack, today the British Parliament aims to influence U.S. policy on Palestine.

The Parliamentary debate was conducted in moral terms throughout, a fact that the parliamentarians described as historic. And the discussion was astonishing in its contrast to the stifled debate on these issues in the US Congress. [Continue reading…]

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The healing power of silence

Daniel A. Gross writes: One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme — it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s renowned educational system and school of functional design. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.”

“We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing,” explains Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com.

Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.

The word “noise” comes from a Latin root meaning either queasiness or pain. According to the historian Hillel Schwartz, there’s even a Mesopotamian legend in which the gods grow so angry at the clamor of earthly humans that they go on a killing spree. (City-dwellers with loud neighbors may empathize, though hopefully not too closely.)

Dislike of noise has produced some of history’s most eager advocates of silence, as Schwartz explains in his book Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. In 1859, the British nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale wrote, “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.” Every careless clatter or banal bit of banter, Nightingale argued, can be a source of alarm, distress, and loss of sleep for recovering patients. She even quoted a lecture that identified “sudden noises” as a cause of death among sick children. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS ‘being driven out of Syria’s Kobane’

BBC News reports: The Islamic State (IS) militant group has been driven out of most of the northern Syrian town of Kobane, a Kurdish commander has told the BBC.

Baharin Kandal said IS fighters had retreated from all areas, except for two pockets of resistance in the east.

US-led air strikes have helped push back the militants, with another 14 conducted over the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, the new UN human rights commissioner has called IS a “potentially genocidal” movement.

Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein described the group as the antithesis of human rights.

Speaking by phone, Kurdish commander Baharin Kandal told the BBC’s Kasra Naji that she hoped the city would be “liberated soon”.

Ms Kandal said her militia group had been receiving arms, supplies and fighters but she refused to say how, reports our correspondent, who is on the Turkish border near Kobane. [Continue reading…]

CBS/AP report: A Syrian Kurdish official called on the international community on Thursday to allow weapons into the border town of Kobani, saying the town is still in danger from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Idriss Nassan, deputy head of Kobani’s foreign relations committee, said ISIS can bring in reinforcements and weapons at any time and endanger the town near Turkey. He said airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition are “effective” but not enough to defeat the jihadis.

Nassan’s comments came a day after the Pentagon spokesman said Kobani remains under threat of falling to the ISIS fighters. Rear Adm. John Kirby said two weeks of airstrikes have killed hundreds of ISIS fighters, and have stiffened Kobani’s defenders.

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My childhood friend, the ISIS jihadist

Jakob Sheikh writes: Amir and I are childhood friends. We grew up in the same estate in Western Copenhagen. We played in the same courtyard, played football together at the street pitches in Saxogade Road, bought slush-ice and small blue chewing gums with stickers of American wrestlers in the same tobacconist on New Carlsberg Road.

We are both 27 years old — Amir was born four months before I was. During our childhood we shared the same interest in sports and computer games. Like me, Amir has a Danish mother and a Pakistani father. Our fathers even come from the same region in Pakistan, the military city of Rawalpindi.

Yes, Amir and I have had more or less had the same upbringing, a path to ease in Danish society. We have been formed by the same institutions, saw the world through the same eyes.

But our lives have taken completely different paths. How did that happen? I find it difficult to understand. In fact, I had no idea what had happened to Amir before I met him by chance on Istedgade Road a few weeks ago.

“Hi Bro. What gives?” he asked and gave me a friendly hug.

It was warm outside but Amir was wearing a big, black down jacket drooping loosely over a pair of dark Adidas training trousers. He had a crew cut, his eyes had a warm glow and he looked as if he compensated for his small stature with regular visits to the training centre. His stubble was not much longer than mine, and while we were talking Amir had his hands politely behind his back, to show he was listening with interest to my story.

I, on the other hand, was more interested in his. And a few minutes into the conversation it took a more interesting turn.

“I’ve been in Syria, my friend,” he said, adding, “I’m going back soon.”

Amir, my childhood friend had become a jihadi. The polite man full of empathy, had killed in God’s name. I, on the other hand, have been employed as a journalist. I write about jihadi just like Amir.

Soon Amir was to embark on yet another crusade. This time for what is arguably the most violent terrorist group of all: Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey will force detained Kobane Kurds to return Syria, says MP

AFP reports: Turkey is planning to expel a group of Syrian Kurds who fled the besieged town of Kobane but were then detained for over a week on suspicion of having links to rebel Kurdish groups, a Turkish lawmaker said on Oct. 16.

İbrahim Ayhan, a lawmaker from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said a group of over 150 Kurds still being held did not want to return to Syria amid the advance by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists.

The Turkish authorities last week arrested some 270 Syrian Kurds from Kobane on suspicion of having links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), holding them in a sports hall in the the border town of Suruç.

Over 100 have already been released and the remaining detainees, who have been on hunger strike to protest their conditions of detention, will now be forced to leave Turkey.

“Turkey has decided to expel these people but they don’t want to return to Kobane and they are protesting over their abusive detention,” Ayhan said.

He said they neither wanted to return to Kobane nor the other so-called “cantons” of Kurdish northern Syria – Jazeera and Afrin. Contacted by AFP, local officials in Suruç declined to comment.

The Kurds being held in Suruç are believed to be affiliated to the main Kurdish political party of Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD). [Continue reading…]

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White House says expired War Powers timetable irrelevant to ISIS campaign

The Guardian reports: The White House on Wednesday said a timetable that expired over a week ago limiting its ability to continue a war unauthorized by Congress does not apply to the operation against the Islamic State (Isis) militant group.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution holds that presidents have a 60-day window to conduct hostilities without an act of Congress blessing the conflict. Absent such an explicit authorization, wars are supposed to lose their legal force.

The White House repeatedly cited the War Powers Resolution throughout the summer, as it notified Congress about troop deployments and airstrikes that inaugurated the war. Initial troop deployments for the war began in mid-June, although some legal scholars doubted that the ostensibly non-combat deployments started the clock.

7 October marked 60 days after US warplanes began bombing Isis positions in Iraq. The newest war – officially christened Operation Inherent Resolve by the US military on Wednesday – now includes attacks on Isis targets in Syria and is expected to last for years.

But according to the White House, a pair of 2001 and 2002 congressional resolutions, known as Authorizations to Use Military Force (AUMF), satisfy the War Powers Resolution’s requirement for a “specific authorization” from the US legislature.

“Because the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs constitute specific authorization within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution, the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day limitation on operations does not apply here,” said Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the National Security Council. [Continue reading…]

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Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’

Shlomo Sand writes: During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.

Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.

Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from “Jew” to “Israeli”, I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.

By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism. [Continue reading…]

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Maybe better if you don’t read this story on public WiFi

Maurits Martijn writes: The idea that public WiFi networks are not secure is not exactly news. It is, however, news that can’t be repeated often enough. There are currently more than 1.43 billion smartphone users worldwide and more than 150 million smartphone owners in the U.S. More than 92 million American adults own a tablet and more than 155 million own a laptop. Each year the worldwide demand for more laptops and tablets increases. In 2013, an estimated 206 million tablets and 180 million laptops were sold worldwide. Probably everyone with a portable device has once been connected to a public WiFi network: while having a coffee, on the train, or at a hotel.

The good news is that some networks are better protected than others; some email and social media services use encryption methods that are more secure than their competitors. But spend a day walking in the city with Wouter Slotboom, and you’ll find that almost everything and everyone connected to a WiFi network can be hacked. A study from threat intelligence consultancy Risk Based Security estimates that more than 822 million records were exposed worldwide in 2013, including credit card numbers, birth dates, medical information, phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses, user names, emails, names, and passwords. Sixty-five percent of those records came from the U.S. According to IT security firm Kaspersky Lab, in 2013 an estimated 37.3 million users worldwide and 4.5 million Americans were the victim of phishing — or pharming — attempts, meaning payment details were stolen from hacked computers, smartphones, or website users.

Report after report shows that digital identity fraud is an increasingly common problem. Hackers and cybercriminals currently have many different tricks at their disposal. But the prevalence of open, unprotected WiFi networks does make it extremely easy for them. The Netherlands National Cyber ​​Security Center, a division of the Ministry of Security and Justice, did not issue the following advice in vain: “It is not advisable to use open WiFi networks in public places. If these networks are used, work or financial related activities should better be avoided.”

Slotboom calls himself an “ethical hacker,” or one of the good guys; a technology buff who wants to reveal the potential dangers of the internet and technology. He advises individuals and companies on how to better protect themselves and their information. He does this, as he did today, usually by demonstrating how easy it is to inflict damage. Because really, it’s child’s play: The device is cheap, and the software for intercepting traffic is very easy to use and is readily available for download. “All you need is 70 Euros, an average IQ, and a little patience,” he says. I will refrain from elaborating on some of the more technical aspects, such as equipment, software, and apps needed to go about hacking people. [Continue reading…]

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Kurds claim to have turned tide against ISIS in Kobane

The Washington Post reports: Kurdish fighters have turned the tide against Islamic State militants in the battle for control of the Syrian border town of Kobane after two days of relentless bombardment by U.S. warplanes, Kurdish officials and activists said Wednesday.

By nightfall, the town’s Kurdish defenders had pushed the jihadists back more than four miles from the western edge of the town and were advancing into the eastern and southern neighborhoods of the city, said Ihsan Naasan, the deputy foreign minister of Kobane’s self-proclaimed government, speaking from the Kurdish-controlled town.

He claimed that Kurdish fighters with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, now control 80 percent of the town, after losing more than half of it in heavy fighting over the previous days.

“The YPG now have the initiative,” he said, crediting heavy U.S. bombardments in recent days alongside resistance by the outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish militia. “They are on the counteroffensive against the Islamic State.”

If the Kurdish fighters manage to retain their momentum and retake the town, it would mark the first time that U.S. airstrikes have helped eject the Islamic State from territory in Syria since the war was expanded to include the northern and eastern parts of the country a little over three weeks ago. [Continue reading…]

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Who remains in Kobane?

Fehim Tastekin writes: I called Idris Nassan, the Kobani canton’s deputy foreign relations minister, to ask how many civilians remain in Kobani. “Don’t ask me for a number because it could be misleading,” he said frankly. Then he went on: “There are many civilians who have not fled the city. Thousands of other people are waiting in the area between the Turkish border and Kobani. Some families who have sons and daughters fighting in the People’s Protection Units (YPG) ranks have stayed in their homes. Others are [physically] unable to leave. Some people, on the other hand, stay along the border but return home periodically to feed their livestock. IS controls 25% of the city, but life is still going on in a way. The administrative units remain largely operational. Only the Asaish [security forces] building has been seized by IS, while all other public buildings remain open.”

According to the UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, about 500-700 mostly elderly people remain in Kobani, while 10,000-13,000 are stuck in a nearby area close to the Syrian-Turkish border.

Is the YPG alone? Is there any other group fighting alongside them? Has the Euphrates volcano, the joint operation room the YPG set up with the Free Syrian Army and some elements of the Islamic Front, broken up? Isn’t there anyone backing the YPG?

According to Nassan, the following groups side with the YPG: Suwar al-Raqqa (Raqqa Revolutionaries), Suwar Umnaa al-Raqqa, Jabhat al-Akrad (Kurdish Front), Shams al-Shimal (Northern Sun), Ahrar al-Suriya and Shukr al-Sefira. He did not provide any figures for [the fighters of] those groups. [Continue reading…]

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Families struggle as German Kurds join ISIS in Syria

Der Spiegel reports: A few months before Sedat Aras set off to join the jihad, the young man took down the Kurdish flag which had been hanging on the wall of his bedroom in his family’s home in Hamburg, Germany. “I’m a mujahedeen now,” he said.

Aras’ family reacted with indifference at the time, his older sister Elif recalls. “I thought this was just my brother’s usual nonsense,” she says. “Sedat had been on an Islamist trip for quite a while.” Elif Aras shakes her head, her eyes dry and empty. “I had no idea what havoc this idiocy would wreak,” she says.

In July, her brother took off for Syria together with others holding similar beliefs. German domestic intelligence sources believe the group included around a dozen young jihadists from Hamburg. Sedat’s family are Alevi Kurds and yet he is now fighting on the side of Islamic State (IS), even though it is attacking Kobani, the Kurdish city in Syria that has become the symbol of the war against the Sunni terrorist organization. In his sister’s eyes, Sedat is waging war against his own people.

After her brother disappeared, Elif also left Germany and flew to Istanbul. The 33-year-old says she could no longer take the gossiping of her neighbors in Hamburg or the calls from worried friends. “I blame myself for not having noticed Sedat’s transformation earlier and for not having kept him from leaving,” she says.

The trip to Syria by German-Kurd Sedat Aras, 23, follows a rapid period of radicalization. His story combines the identity crisis experienced by some children born into immigrant families with the seemingly magnetic force exerted by radical Islam.

Many immigrants have had to work very hard to establish themselves and eke out a living for their families in Germany. But suddenly a conflict raging thousands of kilometers away in Syria and Iraq began intruding on their lives. Salafists began recruiting young Muslims in Germany to join the jihad. And so it was that the war in the Middle East also reached immigrants in Germany, driving a wedge between family members here. [Continue reading…]

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