And, to the north, near the Turkish border, ISIS has taken over the town of Kobane.
The strong horse is in full gallop.“We, the Kurds of Kobane, urged the international community including Turkey to help our resistance against ISIS by sending us weapons, logistics and ammunitions,” Delila Azad, a commander of the Women’s Protection Units, part of the Kurdish militia force defending the city, told Newsweek."We pleaded for help because ISIS threatens not only the Kurds but also the entire Middle East and the rest of the world… However, our call for solidarity has since fell on deaf ears in the international community and in Turkey.”Analysts fear Turkey’s willingness to sit on the sidelines as the West’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’ moves in next door could badly damage a country that has been something of a bastion of stability in a troubled region.Watching the fate of Kobane with horror and anger were Turkey’s own 15 million-strong Kurdish minority—nearly 20 per cent of the country—whose long history of insurrection against the Turkish state appeared until recently to be drawing to a close.Many now fear the growing risk of blowback represented by the ISIS jihadist group, which thrives on instability and whose long term goal is to erect a Caliphate encompassing all the Muslim lands of the region.
The West is a whole lot bigger than this and many do not understand your insistence that our survival is at stake. What will somewhat threaten us is continued immersion where we do not belong.
ReplyDeleteSo they don't mean it when they say they want to kill us in all those videos? So there's nothing to the US intelligence community's acknowledgement that jihadists with passports are coming back here after they train? So there's no significance to the Pakistani Taliban vowing solidarity with IS?
ReplyDeleteSo even the air strikes are more than we should be doing? They're clearly not stopping IS from forming its caliphate.
ReplyDelete13 years of airstrikes in that region have been fruitless. An argument has been made at very high levels, supporting one made by some early on on the fighting that all we have done has only increased the enemy's resolve. The word enemy implies unanimity amongst some solid opposition but there is no single entity we a are warring against. That, of course, again has us running around in circles.
ReplyDeleteIraq was stable and secure in 2008. See my post on Dexter Filkins for example of someone who typically leans somewhat left saying the worst mistake we've made in Iraq in over a decade was the 2011 complete pullout. See also Leon Panetta's new book & recent interviews.
ReplyDeleteObama ran on pulling out and won. The biggest mistake was going in I'm the first place. Now your ilk thinks there got Americans where they want them, scared., again. Scared of a pathetic ragtag bunch of beheaders. Of course your ilk will say our biggest mistake was pulling out because your direction is always a gun ho going in.
ReplyDeleteThey're hardly pathetic and ragtag. They have at least 40,000 fighters in a disciplined and well-equipped army, plus a very sophisticated media presence, plus supporters all over the world. Look at a map of the area they control in Syria and Iraq.
ReplyDeleteWhether the MEC's pullout policy had much to do with his re-election or not is debatable, but we can now see it was a bad, bad idea.
And I'm still puzzled as to why you liked Saddam's regime so much, with its sponsorship of terrorism, its history or making and using WMDs, its torture chambers, and its gaming of the UN Oil-for-Food program.