Oct 14 2019
Havrin Khalaf. Say Her Name ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES Donald Trump got her killed by giving Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a green light to tell his thugs to go and kill her, by reassuring him that the US troops won’t stand in the way. Dictators are, after all, brothers under the skin. And somewhere in the …
Oct 08 2019
Over the weekend, Donald Trump sowed more chaos when he announced that he was pulling US troops out of northeastern Syria abandoning the Kurdish forces who helped defeat ISIS giving the green light to Turkey to attack the Kurds, whom the Turks consider terrorists. The decision came after a Sunday phone call Trump had with …
Oct 22 2014
The Obama administration has decided to arm the Kurdish militants in Kobnani to fight ISIS. What could possibly go wrong?
Isis claims it has US airdrop of weapons intended for Kurds
· Pentagon investigating claims but admits one load missing and it would be embarrassing if it ended up in terror group’s hands
· Turkey criticises arms airdrops saying the strategy will never lead to desired results
A US airdrop of arms to besieged Kurds in Kobani appears to have missed its target and ended up in the hands of Islamic State (Isis) militants.
Video footage released by Isis shows what appears to be one of its fighters for in desert scrubland with a stack of boxes attached to a parachute. The boxes are opened to show an array of weapons, some rusty, some new. A canister is broken out to reveal a hand grenade.
The Pentagon said it was investigating the claim but admitted that one of its airdrops had gone missing. If confirmed, it would be an embarrassment for the US, given the advanced technology available to its air force.
The seemingly bungled airdrop comes against a steady stream of US-supplied weapons being lost to Isis forces, mainly from the dysfunctional Iraqi army. Isis is reported to have stolen seven American M1 Abrams tanks from three Iraqi army bases in Anbar province last week.
Earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would not act to prevent the Islamic State from seizing Kobani because the Syrian Kurdish town was not a “strategic objective.” But as news cameras on the Turkish-Syrian border showed Islamic State fighters assaulting a town in plain sight, the U.S.-led coalition responded with the most airstrikes of its Syria campaign. The U.S.-led coalition has also begun dropping air supplies of weapons and aid to the Syrian Kurds, a move it had resisted for weeks. Now Turkey says it will open its border with Syria to let Iraqi Kurdish fighters join the fight. The Turkish government had opposed aiding the Syrian Kurds in Kobani because of their links to Turkey’s longtime foe, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK. To help us sort out this complicated picture, we are joined by longtime international law professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, who has just returned from four months in Turkey.
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