Kobane almost cleared of ISIS

January 2015, The YPG and YPJ has been battling ISIS for Months now. At first Turkey was blocking Kurds from bringing in men and material to fight ISIS. ISIS never gained full control of the city. They are still in good defensive positions on Eastern Kobane. The American air strikes may have helped some but without the Kurdish forces on the ground Kobane would now be in ISIS hands and the nut cases would be killing civilians for minor crimes or smoking cigarettes? Daesh is the scum of the earth,

This was done without the #FSA (who are not one militia but many and ever changing groups)

Now even before the battle for #Kobane is over the Kurds in Iraq have started to advance on ISIS forces in Mosul.

Hopefully we can get "Syrian" some boots on the ground to dislodge ISIS from Raqqa. 

Will the blood of Kobani’s Kurds be on Turkey’s hands?

Turkey’s leaders seem more concerned to elicit a groveling American apology than assisting the Kurds fighting for their lives against an Islamic State attack right on its border.

What a catastrophe is shaping up at the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobani, which is under siege from the Islamic State. The Islamic State’sblack flag is now flying from atop nearby hills and from some buildings on the edge of a town that was once home to 45,000 people. Kobani is facing the kind of slaughter that the Islamic state has made its trademark. All the while Turkish tanks sit across the border, their guns silent.

This Haaretz column echoes an editorial issued late Monday by the New York Sun, which I edit. But the story strikes me as pressing. If Turkey allows Kobani to be put to the sword, it will be one of the great defaults by a NATO country. The inaction of the Turks calls to mind Warsaw in 1944, when tanks of the Red Army stood in their tracks on the east side of the Vistula, their guns silent, while the Free Polish Army rose up and fought the Nazis until the Nazis destroyed Free Poland’s hope. That’s how the Soviets came to seize what was left of Poland.

The scale of what is happening at Kobani is not, today, the same as that of Warsaw in 1944, when the Polish capital had more than a million people. But the strategic consequences of an Islamic State conquest of Kobani could nonetheless be enormous. American airstrikes have proven to be ineffectual against the Islamic State advance. A-10 “Warhogs,” a slower warplane that maneuvers at lower altitude, would be more useful, but Turkey won’t allow the use of American airbases in its territory (Incirlik airbase, the Sun notes, is fewer than 500 miles from Kobani).

The Turkish cynicism is just something to behold. On the one hand, according to CNN, Turkey was preventing Kurds from crossing into Turkey from Kobani. CNN described refugees pressing up against a border fence, chanting, “We want to go across.” On the other hand, Turkey was reportedly preventing Kurdish volunteers inside Turkey from crossing into Syria to help with the defense of Kobani.

Kobani is run and defended by the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Union Party, whose militia is affiliated with Turkey’s nemesis, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, known as the PKK and which, for 30 years until recently, had been levying war in southwestern Turkey. America, as well as Turkey, considers the PKK a terrorist group. But that doesn’t lessen the explosiveness of the situation. There are 30 million Kurds spread through Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria.

No doubt, the Sun noted, Turkey is hoping that the fall of Kobani would crush Kurdish aspirations. The paper predicted the opposite is more likely, noting that Kurds and their friends have been “fixated on the fight, regardless of their ideologies.” Stories of Kobani heroes are coursing through the Internet, where Arin Mirkan was transformed into a hero — a martyr — after she blew herself up rather than retreat Sunday from a mountain overlooking the city.

The “Kurdish Alamo” is how the Sun described Kobani’s fate if it falls to the Islamic State. If it falls, Kurdish restraint could be over. It is not hard to imagine the PKK’s ceasefire coming to an end and even moves beginning for an independent Kurdistan. This could lead to an unraveling of Iraq and the era of Sykes-Picot. Which is full of ironies, since ending the 1916 agreement is one of the announced goals of the Islamic State. That might be getting ahead of things, but it’s easy to see all this escalating.

Just for starters, imagine were an independent Kurdistan to be pressed by its people to absorb the Kurdish population of northeastern Syria and even reconquer Rojava. Or new life being put into the Kurdish secession movement in southeastern Turkey. “America’s strategy of airstrikes without infantry would quickly be exposed as ineffectual, precipitating Washington deeper into its own political crisis,” the Sun noted.

Vice President Joe Biden is in the midst of what the Wall Street Journal called his “apology tour.” Biden apologized to President Erdogan of Turkey for naming him and other allies as being the “largest problem in Syria,” along with the UAE, Saudia Arabia, and Qatar. The Turkish leader and the Arabs were furious, Biden was on the phone groveling.

“The jester speaks the darnedest truths,” the Journal quipped, noting that the Arab Gulf States and Turkey did help create the problem. It suggested Biden apologize to the Syrian and American people, given that the Obama administration “sat on its hands” for three years. That’s what Turkey is doing now as Kobani fights for its life. If Kobani falls, who will make the apologies to the Kurds?

Seth Lipsky is editor of The New York Sun www.nysun.com. He was a foreign editor and a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, founding editor of The Forward and editor from 1990 to 2000

FBI tracking 150 people who may have travelled to Syria 'to fight'

Number of Americans suspected of fighting for Islamic State in Syria much higher than previously thought

The US is tracking as many as 150 people who traveled from the United States toSyria in recent months, “a significant number of them to fight”, FBI director James Comey told reporters at a briefing in Boston on Tuesday.

The number was much higher than previously acknowledged figures for Americans thought to have joined Islamic State (Isis) fighters in Syria. Last month Comey told CBS News that the FBI knew of “a dozen or so” Americans fighting in Syria “on the side of the terrorists”.

Comey repeated that appraisal on Tuesday. “There we see somewhere in excess of a dozen [Americans who have joined Isis] that we have a pretty good handle on,” Comey said. “I don’t have high confidence that I see the entire universe,” he added.

That total number of travelers under surveillance is 10 times that, Comey said. “We have tracked coming up on close to 150 people who traveled from the United States to Syria, for all manner of motivations,” Comey said Tuesday. “A significant number of them to fight.”

“We are determined not to allow future lines to be drawn from a terrorist diaspora out of Syria to a future 9/11,” Comey said.

Comey declined to answer a question about whether fighters had returned to the United States from Syria. “That is something that we track very closely,” he said. “I don’t want them to know too much about what we know.”

Making Friends while in Iraq

This is from a Blog of a person who served our country and helped in Iraq. I recently went to his Blog to copy the picture and post it with this. But he has closed his blog after receiving hate EMails....

I wanna say I am disgusted, by the way people who are protected by these Brave Men, could do such a thing. They would be the first ones to scream where is a Cop or Military when someone pulls a gun out and starts shotting. Yet they do not want to admit they need protected. They walk around in a day dream that they may be forced to wake up from at any minute. Yet they don't want to think about the fact that there is bad people who wish to harm innocent people.

Here is the Blog Entry that I liked. But now I feel like finding and hunting down the cowards who have sent their views of hate to a good person who obviously cares about his job PROTECTING THE SHEEP. (by sheep I mean the average citizen of USA and elsewhere who does not have the capicity to defend themselves.)

"Almost everywhere I went, I had Iraqi children around me. They would walk with me and try and rub my tattoos off. They rub my arms and then look at their hands to see if any ink came off.... Funny."

"On this day I showed them the finger skills of sign california style....LOL..." Anon

In the picture (I wanted to post with this) the kids are all smiling and laughing making a california surfing sign.