Tag Archives: Kobani

Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Syria, United States

Western support must include arming the Kurds. More from the West is needed…

ISLAMIC STATE

It was Respect MP, George Galloway, who said that the west must ‘strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting IS’. Mr Galloway gave that view during a House of Commons debate on Iraq last month.

It isn’t a contradiction to be anti-war and left-wing at the same time as being pro-Kurd and in favour of supporting and arming the Kurds. Many people have been long-standing opponents of western-led military interventions in the Muslim-majority world. All campaigns from Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011, have resulted in civilian bloodshed and terrorist blowback. Many are not pacifist, either. To somehow hide and pretend that the response to those who carry out beheadings of the self-styled Islamic State need not involve an element of brute military force is either ludicrously naïve or disgracefully disingenuous.

And so too is the lazy obsession with airstrikes. General David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, has repeatedly called for ‘boots on the ground’ and says that: ‘Wars, historically, have never been won by air power alone.’

Another foreign military occupation of Iraq – or, for that matter Syria – would be wholly disastrous. Further bloodshed would ensue, with yet more blowback. There are, however, secular and Sunni boots on the ground that the west should be backing against the jihadists of IS. There are Kurdish fighters not just in northern Iraq, where the peshmerga have fended off IS attempts to bring Erbil and Kirkuk under its terror-inspired caliphate, but also in northern Syria, where the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD) have been heroically holding off IS in the importantly strategic town of Kobani for more than a month now.

These Kurdish units, which include all-women militias, have to all intents and purposes become the last line of defence against the genocidal fanatics of IS. But, while, in Mr Galloway’s words, they are doing a ‘good job’, they can’t do it alone. IS are equipped with US-made tanks seized in Iraq following the desertion of whole units of the Iraqi army in the face of IS threats. Progressives in the west, which should also include those of the anti-war variety, need to get behind the Kurds. A loud public voice needs to be heard. We should do so because we owe them. Kurds constitute the biggest stateless minority in the world, with a population of some 30 million, divided mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They have been bombed in Turkey, executed in Iran, gassed in Iraq and besieged in Syria. Not to mention how they have been repeatedly betrayed by the west.

The Kurds are worth fighting for. Take northern Syria. Here the three autonomous and Kurdish-majority provinces of Rojava have avoided the worst excesses of the civil war. They have engaged in what can only be described as a remarkable democratic experiment, ceding power to popular assemblies and also to women’s and youth councils. Why would any progressive want to stand and watch the revolutionary Kurds of Kobani to fall to the murderous thugs of IS?

Another reason, too, is because of Turkey’s reluctance to do anything. The ghastly crisis unfolding in Islamic State could have been an opportunity for Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to build a new long-term alliance with his country’s embittered Kurdish minority against the brutal and barbarous extremism of IS. The PYD in Syria, however, is an offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been locked in a violent conflict with Ankara over Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Mr Erdogan took the decision to seal Turkey’s border with Syria, but this gave the green light to IS militants to seize Kobani and massacre its PKK-affiliated populace. It then bombed PKK positions in southern Turkey for the first time since the group agreed to participate in a peace process in March 2013.

At a briefing on 4 October, Mr Erdogan said that for Turkey the PKK was the equivalent of IS. Other than shamelessly echoing the mantra of Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that ‘Hamas is Isis, Isis is Hamas’, a clear irony emerges because if the PKK had been deemed the same as IS Turkey would have done a lot more to help. The Turkish-Syrian border hasn’t been closed to IS fighters, only to PKK fighters. On 20 October, Turkey finally agreed to allow Kurdish fighters to cross the border into Syria, but only Kurds from Iraq and not from Turkey – and not with heavy weaponry either, which has been the main request of the YBG fighters in Kobani.

It would seem that Turkey doesn’t care whether Kobani falls to the jihadists. The Turkish government insists it won’t be bullied by anyone and rejects world opinion as to how it should be acting to help. But to balance the argument it’s fair to say that western governments have never lifted a finger either to help Turkey’s Kurds – or, by extension, Syria’s. As is gaining evermore traction, these are the wrong sort of Kurds – the victims of a NATO ally, rather than a horde of jihadists. Look no further than the interpretation of the language: Kurds in Turkey are deemed ‘terrorists’, but Kurds in Iraq are associated as being ‘freedom fighters’. No one is quite yet sure about the present status of the Iranian Kurds.

Progressives, then, need to get behind the Kurds, especially those Kurds in Kobani. There is a danger, of course, that their struggle will be co-opted by western governments, particularly by those governments which often shape outcomes in the Middle East to suit their own interests. Progressives do not have an alternative stance to pursue given how squeezed the Kurds are between Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan and IS.

In the words of an old Kurdish proverb: ‘Freedom is never given but taken.’

 

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Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, Turkey, United States

Turkey: why isn’t it doing anything to curb the advances of Islamic State?

THE LACK OF TURKISH ACTION

Almost 200,000 people have been forced to flee and abandon their homes, joining 1.5 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey.

Poorly equipped Kurdish fighters – men, women and children – have tried in vain with AK-47 assault rifles to hold back the maniacal hordes of Islamic State fighters. The terrorists are armed with modern, heavy-grade American weapons.

IS now has a clear grip on at least a third of the Syrian Kurdish stronghold of Kobani on the border with Turkey.

U.S. and Arab warplanes and drones have been targeting IS positions, but to little avail. U.S. General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepts the town could fall, leaving its remaining citizens facing rape, murder and torture at the hands of the barbarians besieging it.

All the while, just a few hundred yards over the border, Turkish troops look on. As IS fighters stalk the deserted streets of the town, Turkish tanks in clear sight of the calamity stand idle.

Turkey’s inaction as Kobani falls has provoked worldwide fury. Kurdish expats have taken to the streets throughout the country, and at least 19 people are known to have died in violent clashes against the government’s troops and police.

Washington has ‘voiced concern’ about Turkey’s reluctance to engage IS, even though it has its own parliament’s approval to do so.

Less diplomatically, a U.S. State Department official reportedly told the New York Times: ‘This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from its border.’

It does, indeed, seem outrageous that Turkey, the second-largest land power in NATO with 290,000 troops, and a candidate for EU membership, is doing nothing to prevent a massacre on its doorstep. Why does it view the prospect of IS’s dreaded black banner fluttering over a town near its border with such apparent equanimity?

The main reason – and it is a very simple one – is that Turkey abhors the 1.3million Syrian Kurds more than it hates IS.

Turkey is home to some 15million Kurds – about 20 per cent of its population – many of who are locked in a violent secessionist battle with the Turkish government.

What Turkey really fears is that the Syrian Kurds will establish their own state on the Turkey/Syria border, which could prove deeply destabilising in a country with such a large Kurdish population. Anything – even IS – that weakens the Syrian Kurds reduces that threat.

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Turkey has, for 30-years, fought a brutal war against the far-Left militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), until a fragile ceasefire was declared in 2013. In those blood-soaked decades, 40,000 people were killed in vicious fighting that involved suicide bombers on the terrorist PKK side, the flattening of Kurdish villages on the other – and widespread allegations of torture on both.

What makes Turkey particularly reluctant to defend the Syrian Kurds in Kobani is that they are allied to the PKK, and committed to Kurdish homeland. This explains why Turkish border guards have been stopping PKK militia and other Kurdish fighters from joining their Syrian kinsmen in Kobani to fight IS.

And why, in contrast, they turned a blind eye to foreign jihadis flying into Turkey to take the long bus journey over the border to Syria – not to mention the 3,000 Turks who have joined IS after being recruited in rundown provincial towns.

Turkey’s response to IS was certainly complicated by the terrorists’ seizure of 49 Turkish hostages in Syria. But rather than refuse to negotiate, the Turks exchanged them for 180 imprisoned IS sympathisers.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made it plain he sees no moral difference between the Kurds in Kobani and IS.

In a briefing, Mr Erdogan said: ‘It is wrong to view them differently; we need to deal with them jointly.’

One diplomat who is involved in attempting to build the anti-IS alliance says Erdogan hates the Syrian Kurds. What is more, the diplomat said, is that ‘he thinks they’re worse than IS.’

Elsewhere, the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, said: ‘The Syrian Kurds are a big concern for Erdogan because he is not done with the PKK.’

Both the EU and the U.S. has designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation. The irony is that the West is now implicitly relying on PKK fighters to relieve Kobani. And the fact is that, until IS came along, the Syrian Kurds were getting ever closer to their dreams of an autonomous state.

In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, they had declared their own statelet, calling it ‘Rojava’, which straddled Syria’s northern border with Turkey like a series of cantons.

An embattled President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, locked in a lethal war with IS, tolerated this arrangement, which put Kobani right in the centre of the statelet. Little wonder IS considers the town to be of such strategic significance.

The Syrian Kurds have taken their lead from Kurds in northern Iraq, who have established their own thriving and virtually autonomous regime in an oil-rich region now known as Iraqi Kurdistan.

The difference, however, is that Turkey does not see the Iraqi Kurds – who will have nothing to do with the PKK – as a threat. Ankara invested heavily in the region and has become increasingly dependent on Kurdistan’s oil and gas to fuel its own growth.

In contrast, Turkey fears that any concession to the Syrian Kurds will fuel demands from its own restive Kurdish population for autonomy.

On top of all of this, you have the autocratic and self-determined nature of Erdogan who, in a move reminiscent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appointed himself president this summer after serving 12-years as prime minister.

No Turkish leader since the death in 1938 of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has invested himself with such power as Erdogan. But whereas Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from its religious heritage, turning it into a power player in modern Europe, Erdogan has very different ideas.

As part of his general conservative push, Erdogan has been trying to re-orientate the country away from the decadent West and towards the Arab world, which the Ottoman Turks ruled for centuries.

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With his ambition to revive Turkey’s once-great power status, Erdogan has allied the country not only with the conservative Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia, but with the Muslim Brotherhood regime of former President Morsi in Egypt, and with the Sunni militant Palestinian group Hamas.

In doing so, he destroyed Turkey’s good relations with Israel, a staunch ally of the Kurds.

Relations with the newly-elected military regime in Egypt are grim, too. Erdogan’s emotional pull towards Sunni Arabs means he is implacably opposed to Syria’s President Assad, who is an ally of Shia Iran, and explains why he is so keen to back Assad’s enemies, even if it means backing IS.

That is why he is telling the U.S. that only if America extends its intervention in Syria to toppling Assad will he then move to help the Kurds in Kobani.

Erdogan will drive a very hard bargain before he contemplates any military action, not least because the Turks realise that while Western intervention comes and goes in the Middle East, Turkish intervention in Syria could involve the country in an intractable war that lasts decades.

Yet, this is a NATO country which the West hopes will put men on the ground to repulse IS. Some hope that is. For as well as supporting the terrorists, Turkey has been allowing British jihadis to cross its borders, while simultaneously claiming its desire to join the anti-IS coalition.

At this terrifying moment and juncture when IS appears to be unstoppable, it’s tragic for the West that Turkey is the country that holds most of the cards.

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Britain, Iraq, Islamic State, NATO, Syria, United States

A bloodbath on Europe’s and NATO’s doorstep…

KOBANI

David Cameron’s vow that Britain and its allies would not allow Islamic State (IS) to form a caliphate on Europe’s doorstep is difficult for the besieged people of Kobani to accept.

Huge plumes of black smoke have billowed over the pivotal border town as jihadi fanatics – some of whom claim to be British – have launched a terrifying onslaught.

Kobani, which lies just inside Syria on the border with NATO member Turkey, has been described as the town the world “cannot afford to lose” to the terrorists.

If they succeed in taking it, IS will control an unbroken 125-mile stretch of frontier with our Turkish allies.

Kobani is barely more than 200 yards from Turkey, which wants to join the EU, and for the past two weeks it has been possible for observers to stand on a Turkish hillside and watch as the jihadis under their black-flag tighten their stranglehold on the Syrian town. A massacre beckons, and nobody seems capable of stopping it.

Inside Kobani, populated by Syrian Kurds, fires rage as artillery shells rein down and thump in to densely-packed neighbourhoods.

On Sunday, at least 25 mortar rounds rained down on a hopelessly outnumbered army of resistance, a Dad’s Army style force that has come to be symbolised by a band of gun-toting grandmothers intent on protecting what they have.

A picture of the women, brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, was retweeted around the world by those anxious to raise awareness of the plight of the people of Kobani.

Outgunned, they respond only with occasional rocket-propelled grenades and bursts of rifle fire. They have also converted tractors and other farm equipment into armoured vehicles fitted with ageing Soviet-era guns.

Stopping towns like this falling was the reason the US launched a campaign of airstrikes – backed by the RAF in Iraq.

Yet, they have failed to stem IS’s brutal advance and a bloodbath seems horribly likely.

Seven men and three women from Kobani have already been beheaded by the jihadis, with the women’s heads placed on a macabre display in Jarabulus, a nearby IS stronghold. A gruesome and graphic photograph uploaded to Twitter purported to show a grinning IS fighter clutching the decapitated head of a girl. And there are sickening reports of women and girls being raped.

Over the weekend, too, a British jihadi taunted the people of Kobani by posting another image showing his terror gang was within sight of their homes.

The siege has forced some 160,000 people to flee across the frontier. Some sit weeping on hilltops on the Turkey side of the border, watching helplessly while their homes go up in smoke.

Fleeing families have told of unspeakable horrors. One young father, Mostafa Kader, who fled almost two weeks ago, revealed how the body of his sister-in-law and eight-year-old niece were found in a pool of blood. Mr Kader said that they had been raped and that their hearts had been cut out. He buried them with his own hands.

Islamic State is using captured US-made tanks and other military hardware which had been left in the hands of the Iraqi army, whole regiments of which have simply fled from IS.

The RAF cannot intervene because it has no mandate to bomb in Syria, despite British Tornados flying right overhead to conduct bombing raids in neighbouring Iraq. American warplanes have been bombing around Kobani, and 16 IS militants have been declared dead from airstrikes and ground attacks since Monday. But there are tens of thousands of IS fighters. These terrorist fatalities will hardly be enough.

The Turks have promised to ‘do whatever we can’ – a stray mortar even landed a mile inside Turkey wounding five people in a house near the town of Suruc. Convoys of lorries carrying Turkish tanks have been driven south to the border.

On social media, tech-savvy IS has been crowing that no one can stop it fulfilling its dream of carving out a medieval caliphate, in which anyone not adhering to its arbitrary strictures is beheaded or crucified, or has limbs chopped off.

It has been reported that some British jihadists have found it too much. Up to 100 are believed to have defected and are stranded in Turkey because they fear imprisonment if they return to the UK. Yet an estimated dozen or so would-be holy warriors from Britain are still joining the warped cause every month.

Mr Cameron warned last month of the ‘poisonous’ threat of jihadis returning to the UK, and said the world had to deal with IS.

He said: ‘If it succeeds, we would be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member.’

But the ease with which British and other fanatics slip between Turkey and Syria, under the noses of border guards, makes a mockery of claims Turkey is cracking down on its label as a ‘gateway to jihad’.

People living in the frontier town of Akcakale say they never see the recruits – they cross at night and are smuggled illegally under a fence – but they do see their bags, which the smugglers transport separately. Every two or three days, some 50 or 60 Western rucksacks come through the official border crossing, and their luggage tags are easily identifiable – British Airways, Air France, Turkish Airlines.

What appears to be happening is that the smugglers arrange for their rucksacks to follow them. A Turkish porter might be used to carry them through the Turkish border gate and leave them in ‘no-mans-land’. A Syrian porter then comes from the other side and picks them up. It means the jihadists are reunited with all their belongings.

There are dozens of border towns strung along the 560-mile frontier where potential recruits can simply melt away until it is time to cross into Syria.

In the next few days, if Kobani does fall, Downing Street and the White House will face plenty of questions about whether their strategy to deal with Islamic State is working.

For the people of Kobani, it seems certain it will be too late.

Map of affected region:

Terrorist group Islamic State (IS) have launched attacks against the strategic Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, forcing thousands of civilians to flee north to Turkey.

Terrorist group Islamic State (IS) have launched attacks against the strategic Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, forcing thousands of civilians to flee north to Turkey.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for a ground offensive to prevent the Syrian border town of Kobani falling under the control of the Islamic State. Such a call implicitly highlights the limitations of the West’s reliance on air power alone to defeat a determined and resilient foe. While US warplanes have carried out several air attacks against IS positions in and around Kobani, IS fighters have nevertheless succeeded in flying their menacing black and white banner from the rooftops of captured buildings. IS’s continuing advance against Kurdish-held positions in Kobani has prompted Turkey to deploy large numbers of tanks to protect its side of the border.

But while Mr Erdogan, like General Lord Richards, a former head of the British Army, is right to argue that air strikes alone are unlikely to defeat IS, the use of ground forces – or ‘boots on the ground’ – remains contentious and deeply problematic. For example, any attempt by Turkey to move its forces into Syrian territory in support of those defending Kobani, would likely be firmly resisted by Damascus. Such a situation developing might even lead to a further escalation in hostilities. The prospect of Western troops being deployed against IS, on the other hand, remains only a remote possibility, as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic remain determined to avoid the use of their ground forces at all costs. The high cost of human sacrifice and enormous sums expended in two recent costly wars will be high on the minds of our politicians. That leaves, then, the poorly equipped Kurdish fighters and their allies to defend the town against the formidable might of IS forces.

Mr Erdogan’s attempts to persuade the West to adopt a more realistic approach to the conflict might carry more weight if Ankara was able to provide more clarity about its own objectives. Turkey’s long-standing refusal to tolerate Kurdish independence has led some to suspect that Ankara has turned a blind eye to IS fighters regularly crossing its open and porous border. Turkey’s recent hostage swap with IS, for instance, in which Ankara reportedly freed a number of IS fighters in return for the release of Turkish diplomats taken hostage during the summer, suggests Turkey’s approach is very different to that of its NATO allies, who refuse to negotiate with terrorists.

Rather than cutting deals with IS, Mr Erdogan would be better to concentrate his efforts on helping the beleaguered Kurds. The Kurds are in desperate need of arms and reinforcements, but these are being denied because Turkey refuses to open its border.

But in supporting the Kurds, the West also needs to raise its game in terms of supporting the Kurds’ ground effort. To date, all Britain has offered the Kurds is a paltry sum of £1.6 million in military aid – miniscule when compared to the vast resources at IS’s disposal. If the West really does want the Kurds to defeat IS, we must give them the proper means to do so.

 

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