Turkey-bound ships take militants to Iraq, Syria: Interpol

November 7, 2014 By administrator

Interpol says terrorists use cruise ships to get to countries including Turkey to join Takfiri groups in Syria and Iraq.

Foreign terrorists are increasingly going to Turkey through booking tickets on cruise ships to join Takfiri groups in neighboring Syria and Iraq, Interpol has warned.

“Because they know the airports are monitored more closely now, there’s a use of cruise ships to travel to those areas,” Pierre St. Hilaire, the director of counterterrorism at Interpol, said on Thursday.

He added that the international police body has evidence that “the individuals, especially in Europe, are traveling mostly to [the Turkish coastal town of] Izmit and other places to engage in this type of activity.”

Turkey has come under international criticism for allowing thousands of foreign terrorists to join Takfiri groups such as ISIL, which has captured large areas across Iraq and Syria.

“It’s a global threat — 15,000 fighters or more from 81 countries traveling to one specific conflict zone,” St. Hilaire said.

He noted that some 300 militants from China have joined terrorist groups fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Speaking at an Interpol meeting in Monaco this week, Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble confirmed that Turkey was a destination for the terrorists.

The outgoing Interpol chief also called on countries to step up screening at “airports and, more and more, cruise lines” to halt the flow of terrorists to the war-torn countries.

“Originally, our concern about people on cruise ships — dangerous people on cruise ships — really focused on the classic sort of rapist, burglar, or violent criminal,” Noble said.

Interpol has “realized that there are more and more reports that people are using cruise ships in order to get to launch pads, if you will — sort of closer to the conflict zones — of Syria and Iraq,” he noted.

Many European countries have called on Turkey to tighten its border to block the entry of recruits from European countries into Syria. They have expressed concern that home-grown terrorists will return home with skills to carry out terror attacks.

The Takfiri ISIL terrorists currently control parts of eastern Syria and Iraq’s northern and western regions. They have committed heinous crimes and threatened all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Izadi Kurds, during their advances in Iraq.

Kurds help ISIS with terrain, language in battle for Kobani

November 5, 2014 By administrator

Published November 04, 2014

Associated Press

BEIRUT – Ethnic Kurds are helping members of the Islamic State group in the battle for the key Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, sharing their knowledge of the local terrain and language with the extremists, according to Iraqi and Kurdish officials.

It is not clear how many Kurds are aiding the estimated 3,000 Islamic State militants in the Kobani area — and fighting against their own Kurdish brethren — but activists say they are playing a major role in the 7-week-old conflict near the Turkish border.

A top military commander for the extremists in the town is an Iraqi Kurd, known by the nom de guerre of Abu Khattab al-Kurdi, helping them in the battle against fellow Kurds.

Officials with the main Syrian Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, say they became aware of the Kurds among the mostly Sunni Muslim extremists early in the fighting.

As Kurdish fighters were defending the nearby Syrian village of Shiran in September, two Kurdish men with different accents and wearing YPG uniforms infiltrated their ranks, Kurdish officials said. Upon questioning, however, they were captured and admitted to fighting for the Islamic State group, the officials added.

Iraqi and Kurdish officials say many of the Kurdish fighters with the Islamic State group are from the northeastern Iraqi town of Halabja, which was bombed with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1988, killing some 5,000 people.

Shorsh Hassan, a YPG spokesman in Kobani, said although most of the Kurdish jihadi fighters come from Iraq, some are from Syrian regions such as Kobani, Afrin and Jazeera. He added that the number of Syrian Kurds is small compared with the dozens of Iraqis fighting with the IS group.

“The fighter who is from Kobani is not like someone who hails from Chechnya with no idea about tracks and roads,” Hassan said.

Thousands of militants from all over the world — including north Africans, Asians and some Westerners — have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the ranks of the Islamic State group. Turkish nationals are among them, but it is unknown if any are fighting in Kobani.

Hassan said many of the Iraqi fighters were from Halabja, including al-Kurdi. Websites affiliated with the Islamic State group recently published several photographs of the young, bearded man, including some of him wearing the traditional Kurdish garb of baggy pants, and others of him standing in front of Kurds killed in Kobani.

In Baghdad, an Iraqi security official said al-Kurdi was a member of Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni militant group with ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who was active in the early 2000s. Al-Kurdi later joined the Islamic State group, the official said.

The Iraqi official said al-Kurdi is also from Halabja and is wanted by Iraqi authorities. He refused to give the man’s real name when pressed by The Associated Press.

“Our latest information is that he is in Syria fighting in the Kobani area. He is an expert in mountainous areas,” the Iraqi official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

“He is commanding the Kurdish group within Daesh because he is a Kurd,” he added, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Halabja was known as a secular village and the home of Abdullah Goran, one of the best-known Kurdish poets in the 20th century and a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. But in the past three decades, Muslim preachers have become active and have turned it into one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s most religiously conservative areas.

Still, most of the Kurds are moderate and secular-leaning Muslims.

Many Kurds in Iraq were stunned when they learned that Kiwan Mohammed, the 25-year-old goalkeeper of Halabja’s soccer team, was killed last month in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State group in Kobani. Mohammed was identified by jihadi websites as Abu Walid al-Kurdi.

Dana Jalal, an Iraqi journalist who follows jihadi groups, said the Iraqi athlete left Syria in July 2013 and had not been heard of until his death.

Some 70 Iraqi Kurds, mostly from Halabja, went to fight in Syria with the Islamic State group, Jalal said. Most go through Turkey where they say they are going for tourism, but theu then they cross into Syria, and “some even take their wives with them,” Jalal added.

Nawaf Khalil, the Europe-based spokesman for Syria’s powerful Kurdish Democratic Union Party, said Kurdish fighters within the Islamic State group are invaluable in the Kobani battle because they know the geography, as well as the language and the mentality of fellow Kurds.

“A main part of their work is tapping (electronic surveillance) and intelligence-gathering. They might be also using some from the Kobani area to benefit from the geographical knowledge of the area,” he said.

Mustafa Bali, a Kurdish activist in Kobani, said that by having Kurdish fighters, Islamic State extremists are trying to win the hearts and minds of Syrian Kurds in the area.

“Daesh is trying to tell the people of Kobani that it does not consider them enemies and its fighters include Kurds,” Bali said.

Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ – UN

October 31, 2014 By administrator

UN report suggests decline of al-Qaida has yielded an explosion of jihadist enthusiasm for its even mightier successor organisations, chiefly Isis

An image grab taken from a video released by Islamic State group’s official Al-Raqqa site via YouTube. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets.

“Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 – and are growing,” says the report, produced by a security council committee that monitors al-Qaida.

Islamic State Murders Erdogan’s Dog! Turkish lie welcomed Jews fleeing the Holocaust,

October 29, 2014 By administrator

By KANI XULAM Rudaw

“Throw the dog a bone!”

Newly elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave that old expression new meaning when he “threw a dog bone” during his address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last month.

He said the new Islamic State had killed a Turkish dog — well, sort of — as part of the price Turkey paid for the release of 46 Turkish diplomats being held by Islamic State militants.

Mr. Erdogan denied that Turkey paid any ransom. He said, Ankara has “no monetary relationship” with the Islamic State, but quickly added, “You cannot expect us to divulge what the intelligence agencies do in their business.”

No — that might reveal the ransom paid!

Right after that suspicious denial, Mr. Erdogan “threw his dog bone” in this casual aside: “We lost a dog to them.”

For those who follow Mr. Erdogan, it came across as an enticing ploy calculated to curry favor with his audience: Americans love dogs and adopt them as house pets and often treat them like family members.

Muslims — and Mr. Erdogan considers himself a pious one — dislike dogs, consider them dirty, and think those who befriend or adopt them childish.

So that pooch killed by Islamic State militants must have been owned by a secular Turkish diplomat — whose numbers, incidentally, are dwindling as Turkey reorients itself towards Mecca.

Still, the Turkish president couldn’t resist using a “dirty” dog to “clean up” his image and that of his country’s for some hoped-for sympathy from the unsuspecting Americans.

But the shaggy dog story was peanuts — compared to Mr. Erdogan’s outlandish claim that “Turkey has never been a racist state.”

Trying to bolster his claim, “Our country embraced the Jews who were fleeing Hitler’s persecution,” he added with a deadpan expression.

The average New Yorker may not know whether Turkey is racist, or if it truly “welcomed” the persecuted Jews, but that roomful of highly educated Americans knew better — and should have challenged Mr. Erdogan’s blatant lie.

Alas, none did.

Let’s subject his claims to hard facts.

The majority Turkish population dictates to the minority Kurdish population what to do, including prohibiting us from calling ourselves Kurds.

Isn’t that racism, Mr. Erdogan?

As to his assertion that Turkey welcomed Jews fleeing the Holocaust, nothing in the historical record supports Mr. Erdogan’s far-fetched claim.

The Turkish president is too young to know this, but a ship called Struma gleams brightly as exhibit A to invalidate his contention.

On December 12, 1941, it sailed with nearly 800 Jews from the port of Constanta, Romania for Palestine.

Three days later, its engine failed in Turkish waters and the helpless ship was hauled to Sarayburnu harbor in Istanbul. But contrary to Mr. Erdogan’s claim, its passengers were not allowed to disembark –were even quarantined — as if they were all infected with the deadly Ebola virus!

Two months later, the engine-dead ship was tugged out of the harbor through Bosporus — and despite the frantic pleas of its passengers for help, and thousands of Turks helplessly watching — was coldly set adrift ten miles outside of Turkey on the Black Sea.

The next morning — February 24, 1942 — a Soviet submarine mistook the Struma for a cargo ship carrying war materials to the Nazis, and torpedoed it — plunging 782 Jews to the bottom of the sea.

Only one man survived: David Stoliar.

Until his passing on May 1, 2014, he was a living witness to how Turkey had really treated the fleeing Jews.

Today, another humanitarian crisis is staring Turkey in the face and Ankara is fudging yet again.

The Kurdish town of Kobane at the Turkish border has been mercilessly attacked by the militants of Islamic State for more than a month.

Yes, Turkey has opened its Mursitpinar border crossing to allow Kurdish civilians cross into its territory, but is only reluctantly – and recently — permitting military hardware and some Kurdish fighters in.

The story of the murdered pooch is also revealing relative to the ongoing empty talks that are taking place between the Kurdish politicians and their Turkish interlocutors on the island of Imrali and Ankara with ramifications for Americans.

While Turkey claims to be working for “peace” with the Kurds, early this month its parliament authorized Ankara to conduct cross-border military operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Islamic State.

Eleven days later, The Turkish air force conducted its first operations, not against the militants of Islamic State, as Washington wants Ankara to do, but the de facto allies of Coalition forces, the PKK.

America’s desperate search for a reliable ally in Ankara is a fool’s errand no different than the Kurdish pursuit of peace in the Turkish capital.

In other words, Mr. Erdogan likes Kurds and Americans as much as he likes the dogs

Oh what a lovely war! Remarkable video shows ISIS fighters strolling right up Turkish border checkpoint for a relaxing chat with guards

October 28, 2014 By administrator

By John Hall for MailOnline

Amateur footage shows militants casually wandering up to Turkish border
Pair display shocking bravado waving at camera while carrying large guns
Greeted at border by Turkish security officials who break into conversation
Group chat for a short time before fighters wander back towards Kobane
Militants heard chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and making jihadist hand gestures
Video raises new questions over Turkish border guards’ relations with ISIS

A remarkable video has emerged purporting to show Islamic State militants chatting casually with a group of Turkish border guards near the besieged Syrian city of Kobane.

The amateur footage, understood to have been filmed close to Zarova Hill in the outskirts of Kobane, raises serious questions about the apparently relaxed relationship between the terror group and officials from the Nato member state.

It appears to show two heavily armed militants wandering nonchalantly up to the Turkish border fence – displaying shocking bravado as they smile and wave at the camera.

They are met by what appears to be a military vehicle full of security officials who, despite carrying weapons themselves, do little more than break into conversation with the jihadis, who eventually wander off back into Syria while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.

As they reach the border fence, an armoured military vehicle belonging to Turkish border guards speeds up to meet them. Heavily armed officials jump out the back of the car and – after briefly talking on their radios, simply engage the men in conversation.

At one point the situation appears tense and a border guard scampers towards the militants with his gun briefly raised, but he stops seconds later and also begins talking to the men.

After several minutes chatting, the militants wander off, defiantly raising their index finger to the sky to represent jihadism while chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ – a phrase that translates as ‘God is the greatest’.

Assad’s warnings start to ring true in Turkey

October 27, 2014 By administrator

By Samia Nakhoul

BEIRUT (Reuters) – When Sunni rebels rose up against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Turkey reclassified its protégé as a pariah, expecting him to lose power within months and join the autocrats of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen on the scrap heap of the “Arab Spring”.

Assad, in contrast, shielded diplomatically by Russia and with military and financial support from Iran and its Shi’ite allies in Lebanon’s Hezbollah, warned that the fires of Syria’s sectarian war would burn its neighbors.

For Turkey, despite the confidence of Tayyip Erdogan, elected this summer to the presidency after 11 years as prime minister and three straight general election victories, Assad’s warning is starting to ring uncomfortably true.

Turkey’s foreign policy is in ruins. Its once shining image as a Muslim democracy and regional power in the NATO alliance and at the doors of the European Union is badly tarnished.

Amid a backlash against political Islam across the region Erdogan is still irritating his Arab neighbors by offering himself as a Sunni Islamist champion.

The world, meanwhile, is transfixed by the desperate siege of Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish town just over Turkey’s border, under attack by extremist Sunni fighters of the Islamic State (IS) who are threatening to massacre its defenders.

Erdogan has enraged Turkey’s own Kurdish minority – about a fifth of the population and half of all Kurds across the region – by seeming to prefer that IS jihadis extend their territorial gains in Syria and Iraq rather than that Kurdish insurgents consolidate local power.

The forces holding on in Kobani are part of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), closely allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a 30-year war against the Turkish state and is now holding peace talks with Ankara.

BIG RISKS

Meanwhile, Turkish tanks stood idly by as the unequal fight raged between the PYD and IS, while Erdogan said both groups were “terrorists” and Kobani would soon fall. It was a public relations disaster.

It drew criticism from NATO allies in the US-led coalition, which has bombed jihadi positions around the town in coordination with the PYD. It also prompted Kurdish riots across south-east Turkey resulting in more than 40 dead.

At the same time, Turkey’s air force bombed PKK positions near the Iraqi border for the first time in two years, calling into question the 2013 ceasefire declared by Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed PKK leader. PKK commanders warned that if Turkey let Kobani fall, they would go back to war.

Yet now that the United States has dropped arms to Kobani’s defenders, Erdogan has been forced to relent and open a Turkish corridor for Peshmerga fighters from Iraq to reinforce Kobani.

Turkish officials fear this will provoke reprisals in Turkey by IS, activating networks it built during the two years the Erdogan government allowed jihadi volunteers to cross its territory to fight in Syria. Almost anything Turkey does now comes with big risks.

POLARIZED NATION

The polarization within Turkey along sectarian and ethnic lines – which analysts say Erdogan has courted with his stridently Sunni tone as communal conflict between Sunni and Shi’ite rages to Turkey’s south – is easy to detect in the poor and deeply conservative district of Fatih in Istanbul.

“I prefer to have IS than PKK in control of Kobani,” says Sitki, a shopkeeper. “They are Muslims and we are Muslims. (But) we as Muslims should be ruled by the Koran under Sharia law.”

Another local shopkeeper, Nurullah, 35, broadly agreed:

“The only mistake the government has made is to open the door to Kurdish refugees. PYD and PKK are the same, both terrorists. How do (the Americans) have the nerve to ask us to help PYD?”

“Of course Islamic State has sympathizers here because they are wiping out the PKK,” Nurullah continued.

Nearby, a bearded Arabic-speaking man who declined to be named said it made sense that “Turkey as a Sunni nation supports IS over the crusaders”, a hostile reference to the US-led coalition against IS of which Turkey looks an unwilling party.

ZERO NEIGHBORS

The increasingly overt Sunni alignment of Erdogan’s Turkey is, paradoxically, contributing to its isolation, at a time when the United States has won the support of the Sunni Arab powers, led by Saudi Arabia, in the campaign against IS.

Partly, that is because Erdogan and his new prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who as foreign minister was the architect of Turkey’s eastward turn away from the EU, continue to champion the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood, ousted in Egypt last year and banned across the Gulf.

But it is also because of Ankara’s ambivalence towards IS, which some in Turkey’s government saw as a bulwark against its three main regional adversaries: the Assad regime, the Shi’ite-led government in Iraq, and the Kurds.

“Their policy is making Turkey look completely isolated”, says Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group.

Yet there is a wide consensus that Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) tried and failed to take a leadership role as the turmoil of the Arab Spring swept across the region and have ended up by infecting Turkey’s secular republic with the sectarianism plaguing the Levant.

“From a zero problems policy (with neighbors) to zero neighbors,” said a headline in the leftist Evrensel newspaper in reference to the AKP policy of entente with neighboring states.

IS FIGHTING TURKEY’S ENEMIES

Behlul Ozkan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Marmara University, says the Erdogan government has supported Islamist movements in the Middle East to establish a sphere of influence and play a leadership role.

“When the Arab Spring started, Davutoglu saw it as an opportunity for his imperial fantasy of establishing the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) belt from Tunisia to Gaza.

“They are obsessed with destroying the Assad regime. They see IS as an opportunity for Turkey since it is fighting its enemies on three fronts: against Baghdad’s Shi’ite-dominated leadership, against Assad, and the PYD, which is an affiliate of the PKK.”

Soli Ozel, a prominent academic and commentator, said the Erdogan government’s initial expectation was that the Muslim Brotherhood would come to power in Syria.

“Turkish officials believed a year and a half ago they could control the jihadis but they played with fire. This was a policy of sectarianism and they got into something … they couldn’t control, and that is why we are here”.

Other commentators and Turkish officials say Western and Arab powers that called for Assad to be toppled but refused to give mainstream Syrian rebels the weapons to do it are to blame for the rise of Jihadis in the resulting vacuum.

“They (Turkish officials) bet on Assad to fall and when they lost, instead of backing off they are doubling down,” says Hakan Altinay of the Brookings Institution. “They are not the only culprits. The international community is also a culprit in this affair”.

CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO FIRES

But uppermost among Ankara’s fears is the prospect that Syrian Kurds led by the PYD — newly legitimized by their alliance with the United States — will establish a new Kurdish entity on Turkey’s frontiers, which will incite Turkey’s Kurds to seek self government.

“In the realpolitik of all this, IS is fighting all the enemies of Turkey — the Assad regime, Iraqi Shi’ites and the Kurds — but the spillover effect is that it is now paying the price in terms of its vulnerability on the Kurdish question,” says Kadri Gursel, a prominent liberal columnist.

Cengiz Candar, veteran columnist and expert on the Kurdish issue adds: “If Syrian Kurds are successful and establish self-rule they will set a precedent and a model for Turkey’s Kurds, and more than 50 percent of Kurds in the world live here”.

Turkey is thus caught between two fires: the possibility of the PKK-led Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey reviving because of Ankara’s policy towards the Syrian Kurds; and the risk that a more robust policy against IS will provoke reprisal attacks that could be damage its economy and the tourist industry that provides Turkey with around a tenth of its income.

Internationally, one veteran Turkish diplomat fears, IS “is acting as a catalyst legitimizing support for an independent Kurdish state not just in Syria but in Turkey” at a time when leading powers have started to question Turkey’s ideological and security affiliations with the West.

ISIS sends Chechen Turks commander to Kobane

October 26, 2014 By administrator

Chechen Al-Shishani was appointed commander of ISIS’s northern operations last year and is widely considered one of their most powerful military leaders.

QAMISHLI, Syria – The Islamic State leadership has ordered a prominent Chechen commander to Kobane, according to a Rudaw source inside ISIS-controlled territory. Report Rudaw

The source, in the town of Tepke in the Islamic State’s heartland of Syria’s Raqqa province, said Abu Omar al-Shishani, a known Chechen fighter, has been ordered to leave Shingal area in Iraq, where ISIS forces are currently laying siege to thousands of Yezidi civilians protected by Yezidi brigades and Kurds from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Al-Shishani was appointed commander of ISIS’s northern operations last year and is widely considered one of their most powerful military leaders.

The source said Abu Hamza Bormi would be his replacement in Shingal, where ISIS is seeking a victory to compensate for heavy casualties in defeats at Rabia and Zumar, both strategic towns situated along a highway connecting northern Syria to Mosul and the rest of Iraq.

He reported a large number of ISIS fighters have massed in Raqqa for deployment to Kobane—where the militants have laid siege to Syrian Kurdish fighters for over a month—as well as to various fronts in Iraq.

Referring to recent infighting within the organization, the source said foreign fighters, known as Muhajirin, were complaining that their Syrian counterparts were not bearing the brunt of the organization’s high-casualty attacks. Analysts note that foreign fighters are often used in suicide attacks in strategically important battles, such as the offensive against Mosul in June.

According to Rudaw’s source in Tepke, the ISIS leadership will send reinforcements to Idlib province, southeast of Aleppo, to try to dilute the concentration of US-led coalition airstrikes in Kobane.

Another shift in strategy would be to remove heavy weapons and artillery from near Kobane, in order to avoid airstrikes. At the same time ISIS planned to increase the number of car bomb and motorcycle suicide attacks in Kobane.

A Rudaw team on the Turkish border reported three rounds of coalition airstrikes in Kobane beginning Saturday between 10pm and 2 am. There was also fighting east and southeast of the city, giving way to relative calm on Sunday morning.

Fighting erupted again on Sunday between ISIS and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian Kurdish force defending the city, when coalition airplanes bombed an ISIS target at approximately 12:30pm.

ISIS forces launch multiple attacks on Kurdish territory in Iraq

October 21, 2014 By administrator

ISIS militants launched about 15 near-simultaneous attacks on Kurdish forces in northern Iraq on Monday in what Kurdish government officials and the news agency Rudaw said was a fierce and renewed push for territory, CNN reported.

ISIS also launched attacks against Mosul Dam, a strategic prize, and also renewed its offensive on the Sinjar mountain range in northern Iraq.

An ISIS-commandeered military truck loaded with explosives targeted a Peshmerga checkpoint along the security belt circling the dam, killing six security force members and injuring seven others critically, according to Peshmerga spokesman Said Mamazeen.

At almost the same time, ISIS militants launched an attack on the Nineveh Valley near the dam, which was repelled by Peshmerga forces using European and American weapons, the spokesman said.

Another Kurdish military official, who asked not to be named for protocol and security reasons, said that despite the attacks, it would be difficult for ISIS to gain control of the dam because of the large numbers of Peshmerga forces in the area.

Kurdish heroism versus ISIS barbarism

October 15, 2014 By administrator

By John Wight

On the Turkish frontier, in and around the town of Kobani in northern Syria, the world is witnessing the very best of humanity alongside the very worst.

The very best are, of course, the Kurdish defenders of the town, whose courage and heroism in resisting an onslaught by the forces of the Islamic State (IS) over the past few weeks is such that songs will be written about them in years to come.

Indeed, the sight of those men and women, many barely out of their teens, holding the line with light weapons against repeated assaults from three sides by militants from an organization whose brutality has shocked the entire world conjures up parallels with Barcelona, the Warsaw Ghetto, even Stalingrad in microcosm. And given the medieval ideology of IS, under which women are reduced to the status of slaves, the fact that women are playing such a key role in the town’s defense adds an extra dimension of defiance to the barbarism they are facing.

The Islamic State (IS, previously known as ISIL and ISIS) has emerged and erupted across northern Syria and Iraq as a direct consequence of the West’s disastrous policy of military intervention in the region, going back to 2003 with the war in Iraq. Moreover, in pursuit of its domination of this oil-rich part of the world, Washington and its allies have extended themselves in propping up a constellation of corrupt regimes across the region — specifically Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait – while at the same time failing to arbitrate a just settlement for the long suffering Palestinians.

During this crisis the previously mentioned Gulf states, along with Washington’s NATO ally Turkey, have managed to navigate a pernicious policy of providing indirectly if not directly support to IS over the past couple of years, while maintaining the facade of fighting terrorism. Until recently, IS fighters moved freely across the Turkey-Syria border and large shipments of arms were allowed to enter Syria from Turkey, as witnessed and recorded by outraged Kurds.

It is no wonder that Kurdish exile communities are demonstrating throughout the world demanding an end to Turkey’s support for the Islamic State. In Turkey itself those demonstrations have resulted in fatalities, reminding us that Turkey’s history of denying its own Kurdish minority’s legitimate rights is a shameful one. In addition, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan remains determined to see the conflict in Syria continue until the Assad government is toppled, regardless of who and what replaces it, thus placing him on the side of barbarism.

As for the Saudis, the fact this vile regime retains the support of the West is an affront to decency – especially when we consider that the medieval and obscurantist creed of Wahhabism, near indistinguishable from the fundamentalist perversion of Islam which underpins the ideology of Al-Qaida and its offshoots such as the Islamic State, has no place in the 21st century.

It is inhuman and incompatible with human rights and yet it is the ruling orthodoxy taught to millions in the Kingdom.

So why is the West an ally of the very state which exists to promote a barbarous medieval ideology across the region and wider Muslim world? The answers are oil, a multi-billion dollar trade in arms, and strategic advantage. But even on those terms, the Frankenstein’s monster of IS demands a major reorientation of this policy and alliance.

In truth, if Washington and its European allies were serious about defeating IS in Syria and Iraq it would order air strikes not only against its forces on the outskirts of Kobani and in northern Iraq, but also against Erdogan’s government in Istanbul followed by air strikes to root out the Saudis in Riyadh. The world should not make the mistake of holding its breath waiting for this to happen, however, as currently in the White House resides not a president but a comedian masquerading as one.

Obama’s recent announcement that he was still formulating a strategy to deal with IS, weeks after the group’s eruption across the region, suggests a president who feels the need to consult his advisers and ponder the issue endlessly before he even takes a trip to the bathroom.

This is not a game. The Kurds defending Kobani, the Syrian people as a whole, the Iraqi people — the people of the Middle East in their entirety — demand an end to the double dealing, opportunism and hypocrisy that has defined the West and its allies’ role in creating the conditions for the carnage being visited upon them by this murder cult.

The plight of Kobani gives those who are currently fighting for their lives defending it the right to make a pact with the devil himself in order to defeat those who mean to torture, rape and behead them. As such, only the most callous would criticize recent US air strikes against the IS forces in and around the town — air strikes its defenders have been pleading for.

However, ultimately, it will only be when the West desists from its wrongheaded policy of treating President Assad of Syria as an enemy rather than a pillar of resistance to this poisonous ideology, and understands that a coalition which includes Turkey and the Saudis is no coalition at all, will the region finally begin to emerge from this disaster.

Sadly, anyone betting on such an eventuality is likely to lose their money. For as the man said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Source: RT.com

Turkey Wounded ISIS members treated in Urfa

October 14, 2014 By administrator

14.10.2014

It came out that Turkey which is denying wounded people from Kobanê permission to cross the Mürşitpınar border gate to receive treatment continues to allow the crossing of wounded members of the inhumane ISIS gangs into the Urfa province through the Akçakale border gate and to provide treatment at various hospitals in the city. report by firatajans.com

While 64 of the 261 Kobanê citizens who have been held hostage in Suruç for 9 days were taken to the Mürşitpınar border gate and deported, it has been learned that two ambulances carrying wounded ISIS members crossed the Akçakale border gate yesterday.

One of the wounded ISIS members, who were taken from Tal Abyad, is reported to be Abdullah Helef, while the identity of the other hasn’t been learned yet.

The two ISIS members were first taken to Akçakale State Hospital where they received immediate treatment before being referred to Urfa.

Abdullah Halef has reportedly been referred to the Mehmet Akif İnan Training and Research Hospital and the other to Balıklıgöl State Hospital in Urfa.