ISIS forces 180,000 to flee in Iraq

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

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

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

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

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Inside Bashar Assad’s torture chambers

Yahoo News reports: The State Department has obtained 27,000 photographs showing the emaciated, bruised and burned bodies of Syrian torture victims — gruesome images that a top official told Yahoo News constitute “smoking gun” evidence that can be used to bring war-crimes charges against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The photos are “horrific — some of them put you in visceral pain,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in an interview. “This is some of the strongest evidence we’ve seen in the area of proof of the commission of mass atrocities.”

The photos — a small number of which will be put on public display for the first time on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Museum — were smuggled out of Syria by an official regime photographer who has since defected and is known only by his code name, Caesar.

They were shown at a closed-door session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in July where Caesar, wearing a hood, testified. They are now being analyzed at Rapp’s request by the FBI in part as an effort to determine whether any U.S. citizens may have been among the victims — a finding that could be the basis to bring criminal charges in the U.S. against officials of the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]

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In a symbolic vote, Britain recognizes a Palestinian state

The New York Times reports: Against a backdrop of growing impatience across Europe with Israeli policy, Britain’s Parliament overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution Monday night to give diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state. The vote was a symbolic but potent indication of how public opinion has shifted since the breakdown of American-sponsored peace negotiations and the conflict in Gaza this summer.

Though the outcome of the 274-to-12 parliamentary vote was not binding on the British government, the debate was the latest evidence of how support for Israeli policies, even among staunch allies of Israel, is giving way to more calibrated positions and in some cases frustrated expressions of opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stance toward the Palestinians.

Opening the debate, Grahame Morris, the Labour Party lawmaker who promoted it, said Britain had a “historic opportunity” to take “this small but symbolically important step” of recognition.

“To make our recognition of Palestine dependent on Israel’s agreement would be to grant Israel a veto over Palestinian self-determination,” said Mr. Morris, who leads a group called Labour Friends of Palestine.

Richard Ottaway, a Conservative lawmaker and chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said that he had “stood by Israel through thick and thin, through the good years and the bad,” but now realized “in truth, looking back over the past 20 years, that Israel has been slowly drifting away from world public opinion.”

“Under normal circumstances,” he said, “I would oppose the motion tonight; but such is my anger over Israel’s behavior in recent months that I will not oppose the motion. I have to say to the government of Israel that if they are losing people like me, they will be losing a lot of people.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS may have used chemical weapons against Kurds in Kobane canton in July

Huffington Post reports: The Islamic State militant group may possess chemical weapons that it has already used to extend its self-proclaimed caliphate, according to photos taken by Kurdish activists and examined by Israeli researchers.

The group, making gains in Iraq and Syria, may have captured chemical agents in Iraq in June and used them in July to kill three Kurdish fighters in the strategically important region of Kobani in northwest Syria, according to suggests a report released Sunday by the Global Research in International Affairs Center, a branch of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

If verified, Islamic State’s possession of unconventional weapons could make international efforts against it more urgent, and bolster claims that the world has not responded quickly or powerfully enough to the threat. The group, also known as ISIS, has intensified its effort to conquer Kobani over the past month, and battles there have attracted global attention as the region’s defenders — both Kurds and U.S.-backed rebels — have urged international help.

Jonathan Spyer, author of the report, uses photographic evidence provided by Kurds in Kobani and a 2007 CIA report about the Iraqi chemical weapons production facility captured by ISIS in July to suggest that “on at least one occasion, Islamic State forces did employ some form of chemical agent, acquired from somewhere, against the [Syrian Kurdish forces] in Kobani.” He said Israeli chemical weapons experts examined the Kurds’ photographs. In response to questions from The Huffington Post, he declined to give their names.

“The probable possession by the Islamic State of a [chemical weapons] capability is for obvious reasons a matter of the gravest concern, and should be the urgent subject of further attention and investigation,” Spyer says.

The report accuses the Islamic State of using chemical weapons in a July 12 battle in an eastern part of Kobani during a previous offensive into the Kurdish enclave. The site of the battle is now controlled by ISIS. Spyer cites signs of a chemical weapons attack mentioned by the health minister of Kobani to the Lebanese online news outlet Al-Modon four days after the attack. In Spyer’s telling, the minister said that the corpses of three Kurdish fighters exhibited “burns and white spots … [that] indicated the use of chemicals, which led to deaths without any visible wounds or external bleeding.” The bodies had not been hit by bullets, the minister added.

Spyer’s report includes gruesome photographs of the bodies now circulating on social media alongside appeals for more help for the Syrian Kurds in Kobani.

In emails to The Huffington Post, Spyer said he had been given the pictures by Kurds in Kobani, whose identities he could not reveal. He said he takes them seriously because they were provided to him weeks ago — not to boost the case for international help to Kobani, but to spur an investigation by international authorities. [Continue reading…]

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The struggle for ‘democratic autonomy’ led by Kurds in Kobane

Carl Drott writes: Despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the Syrian Kurds in the autonomous “Kobani canton” have managed to build a well-functioning civilian administration over the past two years. The Kurdish police force, the Asayish, has kept the streets safe, and a sense of normality has prevailed despite the siege and constant attacks. A constitution drafted last year guarantees gender equality, human rights and secularism, while a sprawling civil society has given rise to organizations for women, youth, language, music and theater. The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has largely been calling the shots, but some former rivals have recently joined the administration as well. Hoping to resolve bitter disputes over power sharing, the canton’s “prime minister,” Anwar Muslim, has promised elections for later this year.

These would all seem positive developments. However, one clear reason international players have kept the PYD at arms length is its affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, an armed movement striving for Kurdish rights listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Turkey. Although the PYD itself claims to have only ideological links with the PKK, the latter’s leadership is undoubtedly influential across the border in Syrian Kurdish enclaves. However, Turkish fears of Kurdish militants coming down from “the mountains” to establish a base in Kobani for cross-border operations into Turkey has precious little to do with reality. Instead, the demonstrated priority for the PYD has been to build a decentralized secular democracy, while the armed forces of YPG have tried to protect the area and its people from outside attacks. Although the political experiment in Kobani is being watched carefully by the Kurdish movement in Turkey, the PYD’s agenda appears to be highly local.

Another reason for the absence of international support is that YPG has been reluctant to take on the remaining Assad regime enclaves in the Jazira region in Syria’s extreme northeast. While local Kurdish politicians claim they simply want to avoid regime retaliation – the regime has dropped deadly “barrel bombs” in attacks on other civilian areas – the de facto ceasefire has raised suspicions of a secret alliance between the Syrian Kurds and the regime. In fact, there have been numerous clashes between YPG and Syrian regime forces in Aleppo, Qamishli and Hasakah. The historical record gives strong support for the PYD’s insistence that it has tried to forge a “third way” in the prolonged Syrian civil war. In its contacts with both FSA and regime forces, the PYD has built truces when and where it’s been able to, and fought when and where it’s had to. Meanwhile, while the stated policy has been to only take over and defend its “own” regions, ethnically mixed areas have presented complications.

From the very start, the project for “democratic autonomy” was met with strong criticism from some rival Kurdish parties, which demanded that the PYD and YPG accept the authority of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), which is the main body of the “moderate” Syrian opposition and related to FSA. Turkey and the United States have made similar demands. Why are PYD and YPG then so unwilling to comply? Could they not simply join the “moderate” rebels in exchange for international support against the Islamic State and Assad? A closer look at the “moderates” might explain their reluctance.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the SNC has refused to recognize minority rights for the Kurds and other non-Arab minorities in a future state, which the SNC insists should continue to be called the Syrian Arab Republic. The SNC has also actively supported FSA factions fighting against the YPG on the side of jihadists. As recently as January, the SNC called for a “closing of ranks” against the YPG in Tel Hamis – at a time when the main groups in the area were IS, the al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra and the salafist group Ahrar al-Sham. The fight against the YPG has often taken priority even over the fight against the Syrian regime. Additionally, the SNC has referred to PYD as an “extremist” group that is “anti-revolution.”

Among local Kurds, FSA fighters are often more feared and hated even than the Syrian regime. “Their crimes are uncountable,” a 50-year old car dealer, Juma Chawish, told me. He fled to Kobani last summer after a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign was initiated in Tel Abyad, his hometown, by Jabhat al-Nusra, IS and various rebel groups affiliated with the FSA. Civilian Kurds like Juma were forced out without their belongings, while hundreds of others were taken hostage and threatened with execution. Several were killed or went missing, including Juma’s brother, who was unable to flee because of a recent surgery. Stories like this are rampant throughout northern Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Stateless democracy: How the Kurdish women’s movement liberated democracy from the state

Dilar Dirik is an activist of the Kurdish Women’s Movement and a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department of the University of Cambridge. She delivered her lecture at the 4th New World Summit in Brussels, September 19-21.

(Viewing tip: Vimeo often has insufficient bandwidth. If the video keeps stopping, hit pause, and come back later when the gray bar has advanced all the way to the right, then hit play. It can take quite a while!)

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ISIS officially admits to enslaving Yazidi women

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

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

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

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

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If Turkey fails to help Kurdish forces in Kobane, PKK will resume guerrilla war

The New York Times reports: As jihadist fighters of the Islamic State lay siege to the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, the implications of the battle have resonated deeply among residents in this part of the Qandil Mountains in northeastern Iraq, hundreds of miles and a country away.

In this region, beneath craggy peaks near the Iranian border, is the headquarters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkish state for three decades, a fight that has claimed more than 30,000 lives. Members of the group, along with fighters from an offshoot rebel army in Syria, have been at the heart of the Kurdish resistance in Kobani.

P.K.K. commanders say their halting, nine-year-old peace process with the Turkish government and, indeed, the future of the region, will turn on the battle for Kobani and on Turkey’s response. If Turkey does not help the embattled Kurdish forces in Kobani, the commanders say, they will break off peace talks and resume their guerrilla war within Turkey, plunging yet another country in the region into armed conflict.

“Negotiations cannot go on in an environment where they want to create a massacre in Kobani,” Cemil Bayik, a founder and leader of the P.K.K., said in a recent interview in a secret location in this area of the Qandil range. “We cannot bargain for settlement on the blood of Kobani.”

“We will mobilize the guerrillas,” he vowed.

Despite increased pressure from the United States and pleas from outgunned Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Turkey has refused to deploy its military against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to open the border to allow reinforcements, weapons and supplies to reach the town.

In a shift, though, Turkey will allow American and coalition troops to use its bases, including a key installation within 100 miles of the Syrian border, for operations against the Islamic State, Defense Department officials said Sunday. On Sunday, Kurdish officials said their fighters in Kobani had been able to fend off a two-day assault by Islamic State fighters on the center of town. Coalition airstrikes had destroyed a convoy on its way to support the jihadist fighters, according to Idris Nassan, a spokesman for the Kobani resistance, who said the Kurds had been able to “manage” the latest assault. But without more extensive airstrikes and supplies of weapons and ammunition, he added, “Maybe tomorrow the situation will change again.” [Continue reading…]

Today’s Zaman reports in contradiction: Turkey and the US have no new agreement on the use of İncirlik airbase in southern Turkey, Turkish officials said on Monday, a day after US officials revealed that Ankara will let US and coalition forces use its bases, including İncirlik, for operations against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in Syria and Iraq.

Existing arrangements concerning the use of İncirlik are still in force between Turkey and the US and there is no new understanding in addition to them, Prime Ministry sources were quoted as saying by state news agency Anadolu.

Turkey and the US did reach a new agreement on the training of Syrian opposition forces, the same unnamed sources told the agency.

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Laura Gottesdiener: Adrift in oil country

Think of it as a Walrusgram written on the sand of a northwest Alaskan beach and sent to the planet.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic marine mammal aerial survey noticed them first, those 35,000 walruses that had come ashore in unheard of numbers because their usual sea ice has simply melted away.  The photos are dramatic.  You couldn’t ask for a clearer message from a species that normally doesn’t write out its thoughts on the subject of our changing, warming planet.

For those who prefer their science not from the walrus’s mouth (so to speak), there has been equally relevant news on the same subject lately from another species.  Think of them as scientists clambering ashore from a wounded world.  Only weeks ago, it was reported that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere had reached record levels in 2013 and, perhaps even more unsettlingly, that oceans and terrestrial plant life, both major “carbon sinks,” were absorbing less CO2 than in the past.  Now, we have news that the oceans have actually been warming significantly faster than anyone previously imagined.  The latest figures indicate that “the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought… [and that] the upper levels of the planet’s oceans — those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined — had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized.”

None of this is good news, of course, not if you have any sort of investment in future generations living on a planet anywhere near as hospitable as the one we’ve been on for so long.  But talk about dissociation.  While those walruses were climbing out of the water and the scientists were reporting their latest grim numbers, in the American heartland thousands of workers shaken loose from other worlds have been heading for boom times in North Dakota and elsewhere in our fracklands.  There, the exploitation of previously unrecoverable oil shale and natural gas deposits via hydro-fracking has pundits bragging about this country as “Saudi America” and the president aggressively planning to make “the oil weapon” a central feature in American foreign policy.

Between the two worlds, the one producing ever more fossil fuels amid a let-the-good-times-roll spirit of triumphalism and the one slowly melting down under the impact of what those fossil fuels release into the atmosphere, there sometimes seems no connection at all.  Clear as the link may be, each of these worlds often might as well be located on a different planet.

TomDispatch’s Laura Gottesdiener had the rare urge to land on that other planet, the one most of us never experience that produces fossil fuels with such exuberance, and see just what we’re all missing.  Here’s her vivid report from the front lines of American fossil-fuel extraction. Tom Engelhardt

A trip to Kuwait (on the prairie)
Life inside the boom
By Laura Gottesdiener

At 9 p.m. on that August night, when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress at Whispers, one of the two strip clubs in downtown Williston, I didn’t expect a 25-year-old man to get beaten to death outside the joint. Then again, I didn’t really expect most of the things I encountered reporting on the oil boom in western North Dakota this past summer.

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Egypt’s resurgent authoritarianism: It’s a way of life

Nathan J. Brown and Katie Bentivoglio write: Since assuming office in June 2014, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been making a series of slow but deliberate legal moves to restore and strengthen the authority of state institutions. In the absence of parliament, he has taken advantage of a constitutional vacuum to lay the groundwork for authorities to act with wide discretion and little public oversight. After the 2011 revolution, outside social and political actors were optimistic that they could build a more responsive state; today, however, they are poorly placed to counter Sisi’s efforts. His approach will also likely survive the election of a parliament when that long-promised step is finally taken—perhaps by the end of 2014.

Given Egypt’s long authoritarian tradition, many state institutions are already capable of evading the rule of law. But Sisi’s legislative agenda may give official bodies such extensive license as to make it less necessary in the future to resort to extraordinary measures (such as the much despised state of emergency) in order to exercise sweeping powers. The ultimate result may not govern Egypt well, and it is likely to be challenged from below and perhaps even from inside. However, the foundations being laid now may allow state institutions to weather such threats through normal institutional channels, enabling senior officials to act legally and unaccountably at the same time. [Continue reading…]

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Most of top 100 cybercriminal programmers based in Russian-speaking world says Europol

BBC News reports: There are only “around 100” cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol’s Cybercrime Centre.

Speaking to the BBC’s Tech Tent radio show, Troels Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the “rather limited group of good programmers”.

“We roughly know who they are. If we can take them out of the equation then the rest will fall down,” he said.

Although, he added, fighting cybercrime remained an uphill battle.

“This is not a static number, it will increase unfortunately,” he said.

“We can still cope but the criminals have more resources and they do not have obstacles. They are driven by greed and profit and they produce malware at a speed that we have difficulties catching up with.”

The biggest issue facing cybercrime fighters at the moment was the fact that it was borderless, he told the BBC.

“Criminals no longer come to our countries, they commit their crimes from a distance and because of this I cannot use the normal tools to catch them.

“I have to work with countries I am not used to working with and that scares me a bit,” he said.

The majority of the cybercrime “kingpins” were located in the Russian-speaking world, he said. [Continue reading…]

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Syria doesn’t matter to the United States

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

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

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

Here is CNN:

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

And here is the Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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Why Syria’s disaster threatens a war in Turkey

Hugh Pope writes: Turkey feels as if it’s reliving an old nightmare. Each morning television presenters and newspaper headlines glumly round up news from the Islamic State (Isis) siege of the Syrian Kurdish town Kobani, and its spillover into Turkey. Riots, tear gas, and live fire this week have killed more than 20 people in cities in Turkey’s Kurdish south-east. There have been multiple arson attacks on cars, buses and trucks, ethnic tensions, street corner nationalist gangs, curfews and armed troop deployments unseen since the miserable years of all-out Turkish Kurd insurgency in the 1990s.

At the same time politicians have begun shrilly pouring doubt on the vital, nine-year-old peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgents. This reached an apex of absurd conspiracy when both sides began labelling each other as being “the same” as Isis, a group which is actually their mutual enemy.

A tragedy has indeed engulfed Kobani, but little fundamental has changed just because, unusually, TV cameras lined up on the border are able to record first-hand one scene within the larger epic of the Syrian disaster.

The hard truth is that the Syrian Kurds and their main Democratic Union party (PYD) militia were always vulnerable and ultimately unable to defend Kobani alone, puncturing a moment of Kurdish hubris after a summer of impressive progress. Their isolation is partly because PYD and the PKK, with which it is umbilically linked, have insisted on a level of autonomy that is controversial, both in Turkey and with the Syrian mainstream opposition.

Nor is Turkey free to drive its tanks down the hill to save Kobani, as demanded by Turkish Kurd politicians. Breaking international law by crossing a border would weaken Turkey’s international position (as with Russia in Ukraine), set off angry regional reactions from backers of Damascus such as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and could lead to Syria itself firing missiles at Turkish cities. Turkey may be a member of Nato, but the airstrikes are not a Nato operation; Nato is supposed to be a defensive alliance, and is unlikely to back a unilateral Turkish move.

Turkish action around Kobani would also mean armed confrontation between Turkey and Isis. The Turkish armed forces are absolutely unprepared for any long-term foreign operation. With its porous, 570-mile long Syrian border, Turkey has everything to lose in such an open-ended conflict, and Turkish soldiers would certainly die on a mission that most Turks would not understand let alone support. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey torn between ISIS and the PKK

Mustafa Akyol writes: This has been a terrible week for Turkey. Riots hit dozens of cities, mostly in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, leading to more than 30 deaths. Most protestors were Kurdish nationalists mobilized by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a political party that acts as the unofficial arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist group.

They were angry at the government for not helping their brethren in the northern Syrian city of Kobane, who have been hopelessly resisting the ongoing onslaught of the so-called “Islamic State” of Iraq and Syria (ISIL). But the protesters’ anger, and their wanton violence, didn’t help much in convincing the Turkish public that Kurdish fighters in Kobane must indeed be supported.

For most Western observers, the stance of the Turkish government in all this mess is incomprehensible. Why, they wonder, is Turkey doing nothing to help the heroic defenders of Kobane against the brutal jihadist hordes. The answer often comes by concluding that the Turkish government must have some sympathy for ISIL, due to its Islamist sentiments and anti-Kurdish biases.

The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. There is plenty of evidence to conclude that Ankara does see ISIL as a threat, and does not want to see its dominance extend beyond its southern borders. However, Ankara has two other preoccupations that are not shared by Western capitals: First, the armed Kurds in Syria, which are ultimately an extension of the PKK. Second, the Bashar al-Assad regime, which Ankara still sees as the mother of all evil in Syria.

But are these considerations right? Well, yes and no. As for the Kurds, Turkey’s decades-old concern with the PKK cannot be trashed out overnight, especially in the face of a public which still sees the group as Turkey’s main enemy. Yet still, this is the same PKK with which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has been carrying out a much-hailed “peace process.” So, for the sake of both the process and Turkey’s domestic peace and stability, Ankara must be more amenable to the pro-PKK faction in Syria, which is now fighting for its survival.

As for al-Assad, it is true that his regime is evil, and deserves all sorts of condemnation, but Ankara must realize that now ISIL is an independent threat, with its own mania and bloodlust. Therefore the we-will-not-fight-ISIL-unless-al-Assad-is-also-fought mantra should be left aside, and ISIL must be confronted as a threat of its own, not as a mere “symptom” of the al-Assad disease. [Continue reading…]

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Beleaguered at home, Turkey loses friends abroad as ISIS threat grows

The Guardian reports: His government is less than two months old, but there has been no honeymoon period for the new Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Wednesday, in particular, was full of woe.

That was the day authorities rushed to impose a curfew in five largely Kurdish provinces. Angry demonstrations over the government’s refusal to relieve Kobani, the Syrian canton under siege from the brutal group calling itself Islamic State (Isis), led to a spate of deaths. That toll has since risen to more than 35. Wednesday was also the day the minister for the economy politely lowered expectations. The mid-term programme cut the growth projections for this year from 4% to 3.3% and for next year from 5% to a still optimistic 4% – and boldly promised to rein in public spending before next summer’s general election.

On Wednesday, too, the European Union released its annual report on Turkish accession, which, though couched in diplomatic language, did little to conceal that in a year in which Turkey had tried to ban Twitter and YouTube, in which the national broadcasting authority gave scant air time to opposition candidates during a presidential election, and where parliament had granted immunity to national intelligence to track citizens on the web, the country had backslid on fundamental rights and the rule of law.

All this is in stark contrast to “New Turkey” which the building-sized posters promised in the runup to last August’s presidential poll. That contest was won on the first round by Tayyip Erdogan, Davutoglu’s mentor and predecessor. Erdogan still runs the show and few doubt his great ambition is to secure a large enough parliamentary election next year to change the constitution to a Putin-style presidential system. [Continue reading…]

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Little sympathy in Istanbul for Kurds amid ISIS aggression

France 24 reports: On the streets of Istanbul Saturday, there was little sympathy for the few pro-Kurd protesters who turned out to demonstrate against Ankara’s reluctance to help the besieged Kurdish-Syrian city of Kobane.

In downtown Istanbul, the bars are full and the shopping district is teeming with young people. Meanwhile in front of the imposing gates of the Galatassaray High School, a riot-control tank engine idles noisily, surrounded by riot police carrying sticks and shields.

Every night for the last five days, scores of pro-Kurd demonstrators have answered the call of the Popular Democratic Party (HDP), the main (legally-recognised) Kurdish party, to demand greater support for the Syrian town of Kobane, whose Kurdish population is under siege by fighters belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group.

Looking on, 32-year-old Can is not impressed. “It’s absurd that they are protesting here,” he tells FRANCE 24. “What happens in the east should stay in the east.”

In other words: what happens to the Kurds – the ethnic group that dominates the east of the country – should stay with the Kurds. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish PKK fighters called back to Turkey after protests

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

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

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

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

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

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