"The strategy will not destroy the Islamic State. It’s more containment-plus: Expel the Islamic State from Iraq, contain it in Syria. Because you can’t win from the air. In Iraq, we have potential ground allies. In Syria, we don’t."
I have enormous respect for Charles Krauthammer; however, here he is mistaken.
Syria's Kurds comprise some ten percent of the country's population, and long persecuted by the Assad regime, they would be natural American allies on the ground. However, so as not to annoy Turkey, which has been reluctant to join Obama's coalition of the unwilling, the Obama administration is doing almost nothing to assist Syria's Kurdish minority from the ISIS onslaught.
Currently, Syrian Kurds in the strategic town of Kobane on the Turkish border are desperately attempting to repel an ISIS attack. Support from the Obama coalition? There have been air strikes some twenty miles away, but they have done nothing to dislodge Islamic State forces which are besieging the town.
Ultimately, the Middle East's 30 million stateless Kurds, living in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, will have their own country. When will America wise up to this fact? Certainly no time soon, notwithstanding the longstanding friendly relationship between the Kurds in northern Iraq and the American military.
BBC America's Friday night news featured female Peshmerga forward fighters near Kobane.
ReplyDeleteFollowed by several US airstrikes west of Kobane by Saturday morning when the CNN bottom banner kept saying "Syrian Kurds need ammunition".
Of course, Turkey is the reason Syria's Kurds got no news coverage until now. Almost no one gave Syrian Kurds and the PKK credit for safely evacuating thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar.
When will the Turks be considered the racist occupiers
of Anatolia?
http://unpo.org/article/17455 is about the Sept. 29 conference in the Hague on Iranian Kurds. Let's see if they get ANY news coverage.