just to have little more understanding? As I write these words, Kurdish fighters are waging a heroic battle to keep the strategically important city of Kobanê on the Syrian-Turkish border from falling into the hands of ISIS. Kobanê has been under siege since mid-September, when ISIS forces launched a ferocious three-way assault on the city, terrorizing the local population and causing up to 160.000 civilians to flee to Turkey. On Friday, ISIS stood within a hundred meters of Kobanê’s suburbs, but local forces — though heavily outgunned — have so far managed to keep the extremists out. Kurdish commanders fear a massacre if the city falls. It is not clear how much longer their defensive lines can hold. Though shamelessly under-reported in the international media, the battle for Kobanê is of crucial importance for the fight against ISIS, the fate of the Kurds, and the future of the region more generally. As one of the few strongholds of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Kobanê is both a major thorn in the side of ISIS and the site of a thriving popular experiment in democratic autonomy. Yet the momentous struggle of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) is being blatantly ignored by the US-led coalition and cynically exploited by the Turkish state, both of which appear to be content to let ISIS slaughter the local population and decimate the Kurdish resistance. For almost three weeks now, the men and women of the YPG/YPJ — armed only with light machine guns and a few rocket-propelled grenades — have been battling the extremists in close quarters combat. ISIS has deployed heavy US-made weaponry, including at least 20 tanks and armored vehicles seized in the sack of Mosul, but since they advanced onto Kobanê in relatively open plains they were vulnerable to airstrikes. “Most civilians have left the city, and any minute ISIS will be inside Kobani,” Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Friday. “There are many questions as to why [the US-led coalition] don’t attack ISIS now as they are easy targets … Without their heavy vehicles, the Kurds would be able to defeat them.” Turkey, for its part, has been accused of colluding with ISIS in a dual attempt to oust its regional nemesis, the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, and at the same time undermine the Kurdish struggle for autonomy. It is a public secret that Turkey — an important US ally and the second biggest military force in NATO — has long kept its borders open to extremist militants trying to enter Syria to join the insurrection against Assad, even allowing ISIS fighters to cross back into Turkey to regroup, receive medical treatment, and sell Syrian and Iraqi oil on the black market. At the same time, it has prevented thousands of Turkish Kurds from crossing the border and joining their compatriots in the defense of Kobanê, even firing teargas at Kurdish refugees fleeing from Syria. roarmag.org/2014/10/kobani-isis-kurdish-resistance/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+roarmag+%28ROAR+Magazine%29
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 07:42:26 +0000