Valin Posted September 23, 2014 Share Posted September 23, 2014 The Guns of August: Jonathan Spyer 9/17/14 (Snip) The wounded fighters in Derik were exhausted. Still, they were happy to talk. “There is a British fighter here,” one of them tells me. “He will be here soon. You will talk to him.” I waited with interest in the little court – yard by the house for this British YPG fighter to make his appearance. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Foreign fighters on the Syrian battlefield are a phenomenon more usually associated with the Islamist forces than with the Kurds. Finally, he turned up and, with a smile, introduced himself. He was very obviously Kurdish, 32 years old, stockily built, with his arm in a sling, and speaking in a broad South Wales accent. He had immigrated to the UK with his family as a child and had grown up in Cardiff, where he now owned a restaurant with his brothers. So what led him from running a Kurdish restaurant in the Welsh capital to the YPG and the fight against the jihadis? “Well, I heard from my family what was happening,” he relates to me in his broad, musical accent. “My family’s from Diyarbakir, see. So I thought I had to do something. So I left my wife and kid, and came here to volunteer. My brothers are running the restaurant now. I trained for a couple of weeks, then straight into it.” And now, with a dislocated shoulder, he was contemplating his next step and remembering, with a deep and calm sadness in his voice, the details of the Jeza’a fight. “There must have been about 500 of them, about 90 of us. But they had no tactics, just kept coming forward. You should have seen when the trucks came to take away the bodies. Stacked up, they were. I killed three of them. One was only a kid of 16. They just keep coming forward, and either you shoot them or they shoot you. That’s all.” He had been injured, not by a bullet but by a fall when he had to leap over a wall after an IS fighter threw a grenade, so the wound wasn’t serious. He was due to see his family, which had come to Diyarbakir from Wales. After that, he would decide on his future steps. (Snip) H/T Michel J Totten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valin Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 Long but very good The Fight of Their LivesThe White House wants the Kurds to help save Iraq from ISIS. The Kurds may be more interested in breaking away.Dexter Filkins September 29, 2014 Issue On the evening of August 8th, Najat Ali Saleh, a former commander of the Kurdish army, was summoned to a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the President of the semiautonomous Kurdish region that occupies the northern part of Iraq. Barzani, a longtime guerrilla fighter, was alarmed. Twenty-four hours before, fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had made a huge incursion into the Kurds’ territory. They had overrun Kurdish forces in the western Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, and had surged as far as Gwer, fifteen miles from the capital city of Erbil. At the Mosul Dam, on the Tigris River, they had seized the controls, giving them the ability to inundate Baghdad with fifteen feet of water. The Kurdish army is known throughout the region for its ferocity—its fighters are called peshmerga, or “those who face death”—and the defeat had been a humiliation. “We were totally unprepared for what happened,” Saleh told me. Kurdish leaders were so incensed that they relieved five commanders of their posts and detained them for interrogation. “It would have been better for them if they had fought to the death,” he said. Saleh, a veteran of the Kurds’ wars against Saddam Hussein, was being called back into service. His orders were to retake Makhmour and keep going, pushing back ISIS fighters wherever he found them. Working quickly, he gathered several thousand soldiers, surrounded the city, and went in. By the next day, Makhmour was in Kurdish hands; in the following weeks, the Kurds forced ISIS fighters out of twenty surrounding villages. When I saw Saleh, on a recent visit, his men had just recaptured a village called Baqert. With mortars still thudding nearby, he exuded a heavy calm, cut by anger. I asked him if he’d taken any prisoners. “Only dead,” he said. The fighting between ISIS and the Kurds stretches along a six-hundred-and-fifty-mile front in northeastern Iraq—a jagged line that roughly traces one border of Iraqi Kurdistan, the territory that the Kurds have been fighting for decades to establish as an independent state. With as many as thirty million people spread across the Middle East, the Kurds claim to be the world’s largest ethnic group without a country. Iraqi Kurdistan, which contains about a quarter of that population, is a landlocked region surrounded almost entirely by neighbors—Turkey, Iran, and the government in Baghdad—that oppose its bid for statehood. The incursion of ISIS presents the Kurds with both opportunity and risk.........(Snip) _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Slideshow On the Kurdish Front Against ISISDexter Filkins September 23, 2014 Peshmerga forces near the city of Kirkuk, on the front between Kurdish and ISIS fighters. July 13, 2014.PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOISES SAMAN / MAGNUM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valin Posted September 25, 2014 Author Share Posted September 25, 2014 The Fight of Their Lives The White House wants the Kurds to help save Iraq from ISIS. The Kurds may be more interested in breaking away. Dexter Filkins September 29, 2014 Issue Hugh Hewitt show Dexter Filkins on the Kurds and ISIS 9/24/14 Audio Transcript: (Snip) HH: And on that point, Dexter Filkins, you’re a very wide open critic of the Bush war, the never ending war, your first book. But buried in this article, not buried but in the middle of it, is a conversation with Mohammed Ghafar, a 28 year old soldier who said the army never functioned as well as he had hoped, and it grew much worse after 2011. He had respected the professionalism of the Americans, the training they offered, but, “Everything changed after the Americans left. The commanders steal everything, they sell it in the local market. It is true the absentee rate soared, the rations went bad.” In other words, America leaving in 2011 may have been the worst strategic decision of many bad strategic decisions over the last ten years. * DF: It’s hard to conclude otherwise, you know, because that little, that quote from that deserter that I talked to in Kirkuk, I mean, you can almost say the same thing for all of Iraq. We left, the United States left in 2011. We went to zero, and we left. I mean, we packed up and left. So when you drive around Baghdad now, there is not a trace that the United States was ever there, and I mean apart from the American weapons, but in terms of like American presence and projects and guidance, gone. And I think that we spent almost a decade there. We paid with a lot of lives and a lot of blood, and building, essentially, rebuilding the Iraqi state that we destroyed. And I don’t think it was ready. I mean, it just wasn’t ready to function on its own. And it couldn’t function without us. And actually, Ambassador Crocker, who was on your show, had a really good description of it. He said you know, we build ourselves into the hard drive of the place, and so we, the United States, were the honest broker. We were the only people that could sort of bring all the Iraqi factions together, and then we left. You know, and so the thing doesn’t work without us. And you can see that in Iraq at a micro level, like when I talked to that deserter, who said as soon as the Americans left, the commanders started stealing all the money and everybody left, and everything fell apart. Or you can see it at the macro level. I mean, that’s what’s happened to the Iraqi state. (Snip) ____________________________________________________________________________________ * Memo to the Isolationists....Libertarians Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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