State Dept: Syria given advance notice of strikes

The Hill reports: The Obama administration informed Syria’s government it intended to hit Islamic State in Iraq and Syria positions before launching airstrikes on Monday, but did not provide advance warning on a military level, a State Department spokeswoman said Tuesday.

State spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the adminsitration also warned Syria not to engage U.S. aircraft and that the U.S. did not request Syria’s permission for the strike.

Syria’s government was informed that the U.S. strikes were coming by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who spoke to Syria’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

Psaki said the U.S. did not “coordinate our actions with the Syrian government” and Secretary of State John Kerry “did not send a letter to the Syrian regime.”

Earlier this month, Kerry raised eyebrows when, in an interview with CBS News, he equivocated when asked if the U.S. would coordinate the airstrikes with Assad.

“No, we’re not going to coordinate with Syria,” Kerry said. “We will certainly want to deconflict to make certain that they’re not about to do something that they might regret even more seriously. But we’re not going to coordinate.”

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Map of U.S. airstrikes across Syria

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Obama refers to Khorasan threat for the first time

ABC News reports: Today is the first time President Obama has uttered the word “Khorasan” in public.

Indeed, we can find no example of any White House official ever mentioning this al Qaeda cell by name in public. The group has never even been mentioned in any of the White House background briefings on the terrorist threat emanating from Syria (and there have been several such briefings).

It’s quite extraordinary to see military action against a group the White House has never talked about.

There is one official outside the White House who did talk about Khorasan, briefly, last week. James Clapper had this to say Thursday at an intelligence conference in Washington: “In terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.”

Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, may have revealed more than the administration wanted to reveal. The White House was trying to keep this quiet to avoid tipping the group off that it might be targeted.

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Al Qaeda groups and ISIS both targeted in Syria by U.S. strikes

The Wall Street Journal reports: The first U.S. airstrikes inside Syria, announced by the Pentagon on Monday night, went beyond hitting the Islamic State militant group, also targeting a second extremist group that U.S. officials say represents a more direct threat to the U.S. homeland.

The U.S. targeted camps and other buildings in Syria used by the Khorasan group, whose members have plotted attacks against Western airliners, officials said.

The strikes appear to represent an expansion of the U.S. mission beyond the goals outlined by President Barack Obama earlier this month, when he said U.S. military action would be designed to roll back the territorial gains made by Islamic State militants.

U.S. officials have viewed Khorasan with growing alarm in recent weeks and some have said it would be irresponsible to strike in Syria and not take aim at an al Qaeda affiliate long considered to be dangerous to the U.S. and its allies.

Islamic State militants are seen as primarily focused on taking and holding territory in Iraq and Syria, with attacks on the U.S. representing a secondary goal. It severed its ties with al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

Khorasan, on the other hand, has followed the direction of al Qaeda leadership and made strikes on U.S. targets its prime focus. Khorasan’s plotting against airliners to target the U.S. prompted the U.S. to step up airline security over the summer, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it conducted eight strikes against the Khorasan group. Unlike overnight strikes conducted against Islamic State targets, which involved Arab countries, the operations against Khorasan were conducted only by U.S. forces. A Pentagon announcement said the Khorasan group was using Syria as a safe haven to develop “external attacks” construct improvised bombs and recruit westerners and was in the advanced stages of planning. [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: Fifty Al Qaida-linked Nusra Front fighters were killed in strikes over the course of the morning in the northwestern province of Syria. Eight civilians, including three children, were also among the fatalities in the strikes on Aleppo.

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The latest video from ISIS presented by John Cantlie

The actions of anyone held captive — especially someone being held by captors who have a habit of beheading their prisoners — are never acts of freewill. The “Lend me your ears” series of videos featuring the British journalist John Cantlie are no exception. Even so, I have my doubts about whether Cantlie is merely following a script.

The delivery of his message is a bit too natural, the language too fluent, and the message itself too plausible to simply view him as an instrument of ISIS propaganda. In the first video Cantlie said:

You’re thinking: “he’s only doing this because he’s a prisoner he’s got a gun at his head and he’s being forced to do this,” right? Well, it’s true.

I am a prisoner, that I cannot deny. But seeing as I’ve been abandoned by my government and my fate now lies in the hand of the Islamic State I have nothing to lose. Maybe I will live and maybe I will die, but I want to take this opportunity to convey some facts that you can verify, facts that if you contemplate might help in preserving lives.

Author? Co-author? Editor? To some extent we may never be able to determine, Cantlie seems to be using his own words — at least that’s my impression.

This is his latest video which includes quotes from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer that come from here and here.

The New York Times reports:

A freelance journalist who has worked for The Sunday Times of London and The Telegraph, Mr. Cantlie was traveling with James Foley, an American reporter, when they were kidnapped on a Syrian road just 25 miles from the Turkish border on Nov. 22, 2012.

They were the first of nearly two dozen foreign hostages abducted over the next 14 months who ended up in the same jail in Raqqa, Syria, the capital of the Islamic State. They included 19 men and four women, and starting in March, the Europeans were released for ransoms averaging two million euros, or about $2.6 million, per captive, according to one former hostage.

Britain, like the United States, is one of the only countries that has held to a strict, zero-concessions policy, and by June, the only prisoners left in the jail on the outskirts of an oil installation in Raqqa were three British and four American citizens.

The U.S. and Britain have argued that their refusal to make concessions makes Britons and Americans less attractive targets for kidnapping, but that’s an argument that’s hardly likely to resonate with the remaining prisoners who for obvious reasons must feel that they have indeed been abandoned by their governments.

This is a transcript of the latest video:

“Hello there, I’m John Cantlie the British citizen abandoned by my government and a long term prisoner of the Islamic State.

In this programme we’ll see how the Western governments are hastily marching to all out war in Iraq and Syria without any heed for the recent past and how they are using the persuasive approach to lure the public back into the conflict.

So, let’s get straight to the point with a quote from former CIA chief turned vigorous anti-intervention campaigner Michael Scheuer:

“President Obama does not have the slightest intention of defeating the Islamic State” he says “which would require the aerial slaughter and boots-on-the-ground demolishing of the mujahedin”.

Michael Scheuer, whose knowledge of the Muslim nations and the complexities of their society is considerable, adds “18 years into our war with the Islamists, the US has given no public signs that it has the slightest awareness of what its enemies are fighting for”.

Now, there are two solid points here. The Obama administration is so perplexed as they march back into Iraq but they’re tap dancing around the issue in a “we’re getting involved but we’re not really getting involved” kind of way. You know, air strikes only, no troops on the ground, limited operation time, no mission creep. All those pre-combat agreements that tend to get forgotten after the first six months of the nasty tough stuff.

The pre-9/11 Afghans are already back in control of large areas of Afghanistan, while the full might of the American war machine couldn’t destroy the Islamic State in Iraq before.

So, now the State is far stronger than ever it was – what is this latest ill-advised foray really supposed to achieve?

And Scheuer’s second point is aptly made. As ever, the entire reason as to why we’re at war with the Islamists and what they’re fighting for is brilliantly avoided by all.

Senior US politicians seem content to call the Islamic State nasty names: awful, vile, a cancer, and insult to our values. But such petty insults don’t really do much harm to the most powerful Jihadist movement seen in recent history.

That the Western governments were caught napping by the sheer speed of the Islamic State’s growth is now a given. “Intelligence officials failed to anticipate the emergence of the Islamic State”, says Tom Keen, a former new jersey governor. “We certainly didn’t anticipate them going across the border into Iraq and declaring themselves a Caliphate.”

Obama and his allies were well and truly caught by surprise.

The president once called George Bush’s Iraq conflict “a done war” and couldn’t wait to distance America from it when he came into power. Now he’s being inexorably drawn back in, but he’s at pains to point out that this is not the equivalent of the Iraq war. Indeed, it’s far more complicated and prone to failure.

There is a newly elected pro-American/Iranian regime in Iraq. They await eagerly for further American intervention to strengthen the Iranian crescent in the Middle East.

But the appointment of a new puppet is an important piece of the puzzle in America’s “Gulf War III” as it allows them to get involved quickly via a proxy. Iraq’s leaders should know that “the United States will stand should-to-shoulder with Iraqi’s as they implement their national plan” gushed John Kerry on 9 September. Meaning our national plan to tackle the Islamic State.

Everyone now is getting involved: Denmark and France have sent air power; Britain is arming the Kurds; Iran is sending troops; contractors are being sought in Iraq; and even Bashar al-Assad, until earlier this year the most hated in villainised tyrant in the Arab world, is being approached for permission to enter Syria.

“Can the Islamic State be defeated without addressing that part of their organisation that resides in Syria?” asks General Martin Dempsey. The answer is no.

It’s all quite a circus. Air strikes, the creation of last minute puppet governments, advisory teams on the ground, wooing previous enemies to join in, and trans-border incursions into a country that has been in a state of civil war for three years. All the while completely underestimating the strength and fighting zeal of the opponent. Not since Vietnam have we witnessed such a potential mess in the making.

Current estimates of 15,000 troops needed to fight the Islamic State are laughably low. The State has more mujahedin than this. And this is not some undisciplined outfit with a few kalashnikovs.

We started with Michael Scheuer, so let’s give him the final word for now:

“Think what you will of the Islamists and their brand of war-making”, he says, “but they been in the field fighting since 1979 and their movement has never been larger, more popular, or as well armed as it is today”.

Join me again for the next programme.”

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Peter Van Buren: Back to the future in Iraq

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money that the U.S. was pouring into it as symptoms of a societal disaster.  President Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program was being “broken and eviscerated,” King said from the pulpit of that church, “as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war… We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.  I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”  Twice more in that ringing speech he spoke of “the madness of Vietnam” and called for it to cease.

Don’t think of that as just a preacher’s metaphor.  There was a genuine madness on the loose — and not just in the “free-fire zones” of Vietnam but in policy circles here in the United States, in the frustration of top military and civilian officials who felt gripped by an eerie helplessness as they widened a terrible war on the ground and in the air.  They were, it seemed, incapable of imagining any other path than escalation in the face of disaster and possible defeat.  Even in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when there was a brief attempt to paint that lost war in a more heroic hue (“a noble cause,” the president called it), that sense of madness, or at least of resulting mental illness, lingered.  It remained embedded in a phrase then regularly applied to Americans who were less than willing to once again head aggressively into the world.  They were suffering from, it was said, “Vietnam syndrome.”

Today, almost 25 years into what someday might simply be called America’s Iraq War (whose third iteration we’ve recently entered), you can feel that a similar “madness” has Washington by the throat.  Just as King noted of the Vietnam era, since 9/11 American domestic programs and agencies have been starved while money poured into the coffers of the Pentagon and an increasingly bloated national security state.  The results have been obvious.  In the face of the spreading Ebola virus in West Africa, for instance, the president can no longer turn to civilian agencies or organizations for help, but has to call on the U.S. military in an “Ebola surge” — even our language has been militarized — although its forces are not known for their skills, successes, or spendthrift ways when it comes to civilian “humanitarian” or nation-building operations.

We’ve already entered the period when strategy, such as it is, falls away, and our leaders feel strangely helpless before the drip, drip, drip of failure and the unbearable urge for further escalation.  At this point, in fact, the hysteria in Washington over the Islamic State seems a pitch or two higher than anything experienced in the Vietnam years.  A fiercely sectarian force in the Middle East has captured the moment and riveted attention, even though its limits in a region full of potential enemies seem obvious and its “existential threat” to the U.S. consists of the possibility that some stray American jihadi might indeed try to harm a few of us.  Call it emotional escalation in a Washington that seems remarkably unhinged.

It took Osama bin Laden $400,000 to $500,000, 19 hijackers, and much planning to produce the fallen towers of 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria in this country that launched the disastrous, never-ending Global War on Terror.  It took the leaders of the Islamic State maybe a few hundred bucks and two grim videos, featuring three men on a featureless plain in Syria, to create utter, blind hysteria here.  Think of this as confirmation of Karl Marx’s famous comment that the first time is tragedy, but the second is farce.

One clear sign of the farcical nature of our moment is the inability to use almost any common word or phrase in an uncontested way if you put “Iraq” or “Islamic State” or “Syria” in the same sentence.  Remember when the worst Washington could come up with in contested words was the meaning of “is” in Bill Clinton’s infamous statement about his relationship with a White House intern?  Linguistically speaking, those were the glory days, the utopian days of official Washington.

Just consider three commonplace terms of the moment: “war,” “boots on the ground,” and “combat.”  A single question links them all: Are we or aren’t we?  And to that, in each case, Washington has no acceptable answer.  On war, the secretary of state said no, we weren’t; the White House and Pentagon press offices announced that yes, we were; and the president fudged.  He called it “targeted action” and spoke of America’s “unique capability to mobilize against an organization like ISIL,” but God save us, what it wasn’t and wouldn’t be was a “ground war.”

Only with Congress did a certain clarity prevail.  Nothing it did really mattered.  Whatever Congress decided or refused to decide when it came to going to war would be fine and dandy, because the White House was going to do “it” anyway.  “It,” of course, was the Clintonesque “is” of present-day Middle Eastern policy.  Who knew what it was, but here was what it wasn’t and would never be: “boots on the ground.”  Admittedly, the president has already dispatched 1,600 booted troops to Iraq’s ground (with more to come), but they evidently didn’t qualify as boots on the ground because, whatever they were doing, they would not be going into “combat” (which is evidently the only place where military boots officially hit the ground).  The president has been utterly clear on this.  There would be no American “combat mission” in Iraq.  Unfortunately, “combat” turns out to be another of those dicey terms, since those non-boots had barely landed in Iraq when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey started to raise the possibility that some of them, armed, might one day be forward deployed with Iraqi troops as advisers and spotters for U.S. air power in future battles for Iraq’s northern cities.  This, the White House now seems intent on defining as not being a “combat mission.”

And we’re only weeks into an ongoing operation that could last years.  Imagine the pretzeling of the language by then.  Perhaps it might be easiest if everyone — Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and Washington’s pundits — simply agreed that the United States is at “war-ish” in Iraq, with boots on the ground-ish in potentially combat-ish situations.  Former State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren spent his own time in Iraq and wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People about it.  Now, he considers the mind-boggling strangeness of Washington doing it all over again, this time as the grimmest of farces. Tom Engelhardt

Apocalypse Now, Iraq edition
Fighting in Iraq until hell freezes over
By Peter Van Buren

I wanted to offer a wry chuckle before we headed into the heavy stuff about Iraq, so I tried to start this article with a suitably ironic formulation. You know, a déjà-vu-all-over-again kinda thing. I even thought about telling you how, in 2011, I contacted a noted author to blurb my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and he presciently declined, saying sardonically, “So you’re gonna be the one to write the last book on failure in Iraq?”

I couldn’t do any of that. As someone who cares deeply about this country, I find it beyond belief that Washington has again plunged into the swamp of the Sunni-Shia mess in Iraq. A young soldier now deployed as one of the 1,600 non-boots-on-the-ground there might have been eight years old when the 2003 invasion took place. He probably had to ask his dad about it.  After all, less than three years ago, when dad finally came home with his head “held high,” President Obama assured Americans that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” So what happened in the blink of an eye?

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Press freedom under assault in Turkey

Foreign Policy: “A militant in the guise of a journalist — a shameless woman. Know your place!” This is how three-term Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose to describe Amberin Zaman, the Economist’s longtime Turkey correspondent, during a campaign rally on Aug. 7, just three days before he won the country’s first-ever direct presidential election. Erdogan lashed out at Zaman for having allegedly “insulted” Muslims in an interview with opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu on the 24-hour TV news channel CNN Turk — and she was likewise vilified in the conservative press and aggressively harassed online by Erdogan supporters.

The next day, Enis Berberoglu, editor in chief of Hurriyet, one of the country’s highest-circulating dailies, abruptly resigned. Because Hurriyet is owned by Dogan, the same media group that owns CNN Turk, many doubted that Berberoglu’s move was coincidental. Erdogan went on to win the election with 52 percent of the vote. By the time of his inauguration at the end of August, several journalists at other newspapers had also lost their jobs — for reasons widely regarded as political.

These events followed a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar in recent years. As Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has grown increasingly entrenched since it first came to power in 2002, the space for free expression has narrowed perceptibly. This trend has been particularly evident over the past 15 months, starting with the protests that began in Istanbul’s Gezi Park and which then swept the country in the summer of 2013, when dozens of journalists were fired or forced to resign after expressing critical viewpoints. Most recently, Turkey’s trouble with press freedom made headlines this weekend when Erdogan denounced the New York Times for, he said, implying that the Turkish state was connected with Islamic State (IS) militants.

In 2013, Turkey remained the world’s top jailer of journalists (followed by Iran and China) for the second year in a row. As of the end of the year there were 40 reporters behind bars — one of several factors that led Freedom House to downgrade the country from “partly free” to “not free” in its 2014 press freedom rankings. Turkey came in 134th out of 197 countries. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. and allies launch airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria

The New York Times reports: The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border.

American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from several Arab allies, struck a broad array of targets in territory controlled by the militants, known as the Islamic State. American defense officials said the targets included weapons supplies, depots, barracks and buildings the militants use for command and control. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from United States Navy ships in the region.

“I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, using an alternate name for the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey prevents PKK fighters from entering Syria to fight ISIS

The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of men from the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have tried to cross into Syria. “Turkey is preventing, not only PKK, but all Kurdish men from entering Syria,” said Redur Xelil, a spokesman for the People’s Protection Units (YGP), one of the Syrian Kurdish groups fighting the Islamic State. “But the men are entering illegally through some crossings.”

The Turkish government says it is illegal for fighters to enter Syria through its borders, but hundreds of foreign combatants have transited through Turkey in the past three years to join the war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who Turkey has said must go. That has led to accusations that Turkey has fostered the growth of the Islamic State. Turkey has denied this, but has a long history of conflict with the autonomy-seeking Kurds and has been battling its own Kurdish separatists for decades.

“The reality is that Turkey is siding with ISIS,” said Xelil, using the acronym for the group’s previous name, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Kurdish fighters managed to halt the militants’ advance Monday, but fierce fighting continued on several fronts. Kurdish Syrian forces say their weapons are no match for the militants’ arsenal, looted from fleeing Iraqi national troops in June. Kurdish leaders have been calling on the international community for support to defend the border against the militants, as well as for fighters from Turkey to join them and defend the Kurdish villages.

“Turkey does not have a problem with ISIS,” Xelil said. “Sometimes they facilitate the transit of their fighters and even open the hospitals for their injured, while they do not allow [our] injured to cross and use their hospitals.”

As Assad has battled to protect his regime in Damascus, the Syrian Kurds in the country’s north have taken the opportunity to increase their autonomy, much to the dislike of Turkey.

“The Turks are really happy seeing the Islamic State demolishing the political and administrative system, the self-governing system, that the Kurds were in the process of building in Kurdish areas in northern Syria,” said Hoshang Waziri, an Iraqi Kurdish analyst and writer who spent years in Syria. “Turkey much prefers an Islamic State neighbor over a semi-PKK-led Kurdish state.”

While Turkey is getting comfortable with the idea of an independent Iraqi Kurdish state — in part by building economic relations with the enclave — the Turks have seen autonomy for Syrian Kurds as a threat. Unlike the Iraqi Kurdish leadership, Syrian Kurds have a close relationship with the Turkish PKK Kurds who have been fighting Turkey for independence.

That could be changing as Turkey increasingly sees the threat posed by the expansionist Sunni militants of the Islamic State. Those leading the charge for this new caliphate have made it clear that the borders that now govern the Middle East are irrelevant for the caliph and the militants. [Continue reading…]

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200,000 flee in biggest displacement of Syrian conflict

CNN reports: The sudden, massive flood of refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is unlike any other displacement in the 3½-year Syrian conflict.

As many as 200,000 people have left the area surrounding the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, in just four days as ISIS advances into the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday. Most have gone into Turkey, the London-based monitoring group said.

Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency and the United Nations said 130,000 Syrian refugees have entered Turkey since Friday.

But the unprecedented surge that broke loose Friday has slowed, as Turkey reduced the number of open crossings from eight or nine to just two, said Ariane Rummery, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency. [Continue reading…]

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The fence around the White House needs to be raised — and removed

white-house-fence

Omar Gonzalez, who on Friday scaled a fence at the White House and sprinted across the lawn towards the Oval Office, is reported to have told a Secret Service agent that “he was concerned that the atmosphere was collapsing and needed to get the information to the president of the United States so that he could get the word out to the people.”

In New York City on Sunday, more than 300,000 people marched for similar reasons. Will their effort, unlike Gonzalez’s, have any tangible effect?

To describe the atmosphere as collapsing might be a technically inadequate description of climate change but it sounds like this is the issue that worried the army veteran. No doubt his fears had been compounded and distorted by traumas experienced while fighting in a war that served no purpose, along with the inadequate care that has been provided for soldiers returning from Iraq. His reasons to mistrust the way the government works certainly cut deeper than those that trouble the average American citizen.

Gonzalez’s action, not surprisingly, has provoked the wrong debate — a debate about whether the White House has adequate security.

But a reluctance to deal with a simple problem — replace a scalable six-foot fence with a much less scalable ten-foot fence — is itself a product of the desire to sustain an illusion: that American presidents have a keener desire to hear and respond to the voices of “ordinary folks” than pay heed to the White House’s regular and much more influential visitors.

We live in a world where the capacity of ordinary people to raise their voices has never been greater, yet with this has come an increasing sense that fewer and fewer people can make themselves heard.

If Gonzalez acted out in a delusional way, it sounds as though there was a kernel of sanity in his impulse.

The atmosphere is collapsing, the sky is falling, and this observation far from being emblematic of an hysterical unwarranted fear, is in fact a crude description of the precarious condition of our planet. The hysteria, in the few places where it is evident, is not an overreaction to the danger we all face, but is instead triggered by the lack of response from those invested with the powers to instigate global changes through the instruments of law and regulation.

Grassroots movements can shape and articulate popular will but that then has to be translated into actions taken by responsive governments — governments led by courageous leaders who do not hide behind unscalable fences.

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Kobane Kurds in Syria warn of ‘second Shingal’

Rudaw reports: Syrian Kurds in Kobane warned on Monday they are facing a “second Shingal” at the hands of the Islamic State (IS/ISIS) unless the international community intervenes within days.

As the jihadist fighters advanced towards the border city, Adham Basho of the Syrian Kurdish Azadi Party told Rudaw that IS was now within 10 kilometers of Kobane and the residents faced a “very difficult” situation.

He said they faced a similar fate to the Yezidis of Shingal in northern Iraq, who were marooned on mountain tops in their thousands in August before help came to the rescue.

Mahmoud Kalo, the head of the Kurdish National Council, an umbrella group of Syrian Kurdish political parties, told Rudaw from inside Kobane that the parties were holding a meeting in the town to discuss the situation.

He said Syrian Kurdish fighters, who have halted the IS advance to the east of the town, would only be able to hold their lines for two more days before they ran out of supplies.

“We want the international community to impose an exclusion zone in and around Kobane to protect it from the ISIS militants. The people of Kobane can only fight IISIS for two more days without the international community’s support,” said Kalo.

“If there is no immediate assistance from the international community there will be a second Sinjar (Shingal).”

A large number of young Kurds want to go to Kobane from the Kurdish region of Turkey but Turkish soldiers and police had blocked their way, he said. [Continue reading…]

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As Sunni tribes sit on sidelines, U.S. airstrikes don’t halt ISIS

The New York Times reports: After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on more than a quarter of the country, in part because many critical Sunni tribes remain on the sidelines.

Although the airstrikes appear to have stopped the extremists’ march toward Baghdad, the Islamic State is still dealing humiliating blows to the Iraq government forces. On Monday, the government acknowledged that it had lost control of the northern town of Sijr and lost contact with several hundred of its soldiers who had been trapped for several days at a camp north of the Islamic State stronghold of Falluja, in Anbar Province.

By midday, there were reports that hundreds of soldiers had been killed in battle or mass executions. Ali Bedairi, a lawmaker from the governing alliance, said more than 300 soldiers had died after the loss of the base, Camp Saqlawiya, although his count could not be confirmed.

“They did not have any food and they were starving for four days,” a soldier who said he was one of 200 who managed to escape said in a videotaped statement that he circulated online. “We drank salty water, we could not even run.”

Behind the government’s struggles on the battlefield is the absence or resistance of many of the Sunni Muslim tribes that all sides say will play the decisive role in the course of the fight — presenting a slow start for the centerpiece of President Obama’s plan to drive out the militants. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS uses top video game Grand Theft Auto 5 to radicalise and recruit children

The Daily Mail reports: Isis is trying to swell its ranks and train fighters using hit video game Grand Theft Auto 5, claiming that what players do in the game resembles their battlefield operations.

They have posted a video to YouTube carrying their flag showing violent scenes from the game, including police officers being gunned down and trucks being blown up.

At the start of the video a message appears that reads: ‘Your games which are producing from you, we do the same actions in the battelfields (sic)!!’ [Continue reading…]

The Local reports: Children as young as 13 are travelling from Germany to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic jihadists, according to German intelligence agencies.

Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), told the Rheinische Post at the weekend that at least 24 children had headed to the Middle East from Germany. “The youngest was 13,” he said.

Of the 24 who have left, five children have returned with battle fighting experience, Maaßen said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS appears to have released Turkish hostages in swap

Today’s Zaman reports: The terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seemingly set free 46 Turkish hostages in exchange for the release by Turkey of some key figures of the radical Islamist organization.

“A couple of figures who are very, very important for ISIL were traded in the swap [for the hostages],” Abdülkadir Selvi, a columnist in the pro-government Yeni Şafak daily, said on Monday.

Selvi, who is a journalist particularly close to Erdoğan and the government, affirmed in his column that he reached such a conclusion after looking into what happened behind the scenes.

ISIL, which calls itself the “Islamic State,” captured 49 people, three of whom were reportedly Iraqis, from the Turkish Consulate General in Mosul when it seized the northern Iraqi city in June.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not deny, at a press meeting he held before leaving for the US on Sunday, that a swap might have been made to set free the Turkish hostages. [Continue reading…]

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Taylor and Appel: The subprime education scandal

We used to hear more often about those malignant institutions serving, or rather plaguing, the poor: the loan sharks who charged 100% or more per year in interest, the furniture or radios that ended up costing several times their value on the installment plan. Two or three decades ago, however, we didn’t think of an education as being part of the landscape of predation upon the poor. Now, as Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel explain, when it comes to a new crew of “for-profit” colleges, higher education has gone hyena and is tearing at the financial flesh of the poor.

Even mainstream institutions can be sketchy these days, if you look closely enough. Most liberal arts college programs give their students a vague, if exhilarating, sense that the best possible outcome of their vocation is practically an inevitability, and yet there are far from enough tenure-track jobs, top galleries, or niches on bestseller lists for all the people being educated.

Though people make it in all these fields, they are a tiny minority.  So many others pay their dues and get little for it, except whatever is inherently meaningful in their education, which won’t, of course, lighten their loan burden at all.

Once upon a time, it was different. The radicalism of the 1960s, for instance, should be chalked up in part to the great freedom of youth at a time when the fat of the land seemed inexhaustible and the safety net unbreakable. The two radicals I know who became wanted fugitives in the 1970s and then tenured faculty members (now retired with pensions) operated in a more forgiving era — and a more affluent one.

My parents believed that any kind of bachelor’s degree pretty much guaranteed your white-collar future, and that was a truth of their era. Thirty years ago, when I came along, it was already less of a reality; today, so much less than that. Still, the hangover from that conviction lingers. I went to California’s public universities as their golden age of nearly free and superb education was ending and got through college scrambling to the sound of doors shutting behind me. It was all part of the end of an egalitarian dream birthed and nurtured by the New Deal of the 1930s, the creation of social security in the 1940s, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s. It’s now popular to say that, as president, Richard Nixon was to the left of Barack Obama, but what that means is that our society was then closer to a social democracy (and that since we’re really bad at talking about it, we’d rather focus our attention on figureheads).

Maybe communism was good for us after all, at least — as David Graeber argues — in scaring the powers that be into offering their own limited versions of equality and opportunity. California’s Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, was the beginning of the end of that dream, arising as it did from the now-entrenched belief that what we have separately beats whatever we have together anytime. Taxes were portrayed as the nails that stuck every breadwinning Jesus to his own personal cross, rather than the way to keep roads and bridges and schools in shape, have safe drinking water and, like, a postal system and libraries (and also a giant military eating up more than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending). As the retreat into the private sphere began in earnest, people started forgetting how good, how secure life had been, while Republicans launched the mantra that future tax cuts would be a magical ointment capable of curing anything.

Part of the great work of Occupy Wall Street was to make some of the brutality of the current economy visible. People whose lives were being ravaged by housing, medical, and educational debt came out of the shame and the shadows to testify, while activists and homeowners took action against foreclosures and banks. From the beginning Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, was part of that movement and moment.  Her work there led to her involvement with Strike Debt and the fledgling Debt Collective. Now, she and Hannah Appel focus on the conditions that produced the perfect educational storm in the form of the private for-profit university/corporation. Rebecca Solnit

Education with a debt sentence
For-profit colleges as American dream crushers and factories of debt
By Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel

Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income single mothers as ideal customers. Imagine that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream — gainful employment, the chance for a middle class life. Imagine that the fine print on these tickets, once purchased, reveals them to be little more than debt contracts, profitable to the corporation’s investors, but disastrous for its customers. And imagine that these corporations receive tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to do this dirty work. Now, know that these corporations actually exist and are universities.

Over the last three decades, the price of a year of college has increased by more than 1,200%. In the past, American higher education has always been associated with upward mobility, but with student loan debt quadrupling between 2003 and 2013, it’s time to ask whether education alone can really move people up the class ladder. This is a question of obvious relevance for low-income students and students of color.

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We are more rational than those who nudge us

Steven Poole writes: Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors. We prefer winning to being right. At best, so the story goes, our faculty of reason is at constant war with an irrational darkness within. At worst, we should abandon the attempt to be rational altogether.

The present climate of distrust in our reasoning capacity draws much of its impetus from the field of behavioural economics, and particularly from work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1980s, summarised in Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). There, Kahneman divides the mind into two allegorical systems, the intuitive ‘System 1’, which often gives wrong answers, and the reflective reasoning of ‘System 2’. ‘The attentive System 2 is who we think we are,’ he writes; but it is the intuitive, biased, ‘irrational’ System 1 that is in charge most of the time.

Other versions of the message are expressed in more strongly negative terms. You Are Not So Smart (2011) is a bestselling book by David McRaney on cognitive bias. According to the study ‘Why Do Humans Reason?’ (2011) by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, our supposedly rational faculties evolved not to find ‘truth’ but merely to win arguments. And in The Righteous Mind (2012), the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is ‘our most noble attribute’ a mere ‘delusion’. The worship of reason, he adds, ‘is an example of faith in something that does not exist’. Your brain, runs the now-prevailing wisdom, is mainly a tangled, damp and contingently cobbled-together knot of cognitive biases and fear.

This is a scientised version of original sin. And its eager adoption by today’s governments threatens social consequences that many might find troubling. A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept. [Continue reading…]

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