Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 254

On October 21 2014 14:22 xM(Z wrote:
so who pays for the weapons given to the kurds? 'cause there's no way they are getting freebees.
what's the money angle here?, what does the Coalition expects to get in return?.
(for kurds, to be able to pay anything (be it in favors/land/resources) they would need to own land and have some form of self-determination/authority/control over it)). who will be giving them that land and where?

On October 21 2014 15:56 zatic wrote:
As far as I know none of the arms deliveries to the Kurds were being payed for. At least the German shipments are "freebees", I would assume the French' as well.

In "return" the coalition gets bodies on the ground where they are unwilling to deploy their own.

On October 21 2014 16:53 xM(Z wrote:
that doesn't make sense. who gains what then?. are you saying this is just a +1 for democracy?. that's laughable.

On October 21 2014 17:05 Laserist wrote:


Kurds will pay with their lives in future for holy purposes of USA. They have nothing to offer but their lives.

On October 21 2014 17:15 zatic wrote:

Why doesn't it make sense? The Western countries are unwilling to deploy their own to this mess so they are arming local allies. It's one of the oldest plays in the book.

Whether it's a "+1 for democracy" is a different question. But at least I don't find the willingness to fight ISIS just because they are evil motherfuckers so out of this world.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has objected to arms transfers to a Syrian Kurdish group defending the border town of Kobani in the face of an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) onslaught, saying it is a terrorist group that is no different from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The Kurds, who formally achieved semi-autonomy in northern Iraq nearly a decade ago, have their share of problems, including recurring internal divisions. Still, their enclave has been the most peaceful and prosperous part of Iraq in recent years.

Kurdish fighters have resisted the advances of the Islamic State, and when the U.S. began bombing the extremist group, Kurdish forces swiftly moved into areas vacated by the group. The U.S. and the Kurds would like to replicate this model throughout northern Iraq.

Kurdish Forces Say They're Waiting For U.S. Weapons
Meanwhile, there are plenty of parallels in Syria, where the Kurds have been repressed for decades by the current president, Bashar Assad, and his father, the late Hafez Assad.

There's one key difference. The Kurdish militia in Syria, known as the YPG, is closely aligned with a militant Kurdish group in Turkey, the PKK, that has fought for Kurdish self-rule since the 1980s.

In that long battle, Turkey declared both PKK and YPG terrorist groups.

TV report about this USA parachute full with military aid to communists!!! had mistaken its destination to go to the bad guys

Iraqi forces backed by U.S. air strikes have surrounded ISIS fighters in the northern city of Tikrit in a bid to isolate and choke off the fighters in Saddam Hussein's birthplace, according to senior local officials.

"Iraqi security forces were able to secure and control the road from Tikrit to Baiji,” a Brigadier-General in Iraq’s defense ministry told NBC News late Sunday, referring to the nearby town which is adjacent to a key oil refinery. “These forces are around the city of Baiji now, in order to retake it, but ISIS fighters are fighting hard to defend their position inside the city.”

He added that government forces, which have been protecting the refinery since June, were preparing for a possible revenge attack by ISIS fighters if they lost control of Baiji, which has become a strategically important city for the extremist group. U.S. war planes have carried out air strikes around Tikrit on Saturday and Sunday, the general said. The action was a key reason for "the success of our forces," he said, adding that the city was now "completely surrounded" by Iraqi forces.

A Mosul University researcher who wished to remain anonymous tellsSciDev.Net that dozens of graduate students stopped their studies after the ISIS militants took control of the city. Many students were unable to continue with their experiments, he said, especially those that needed electricity and communication tools such as the internet to carry out their research.

To help students who can no longer attend classes avoid failing their degrees, the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research has decided to “consider the new school year [for undergraduate] students living in [the affected] provinces a no-fail year”, says Ghassan Hamid Abdel Majed, director-general of the ministry’s Research and Development Department.

Graduate students who have fled their home province because of the violence have also been allowed to complete their studies at a different university in their new province of residence, he adds, provided their specialist subjects are taught there.

But the transfer may not be that easy. Raed Al-Khashea, a graduate law student at the University of Tikrit, escaped the conflict but lost all his documents — so, he says, a potential new host university may simply refuse to accept him.

Money is also an issue, he adds, as moving to a university in Iraq’s capital Baghdad, for example, would sharply increase the cost of living. He also fears a change in professors, “because the research methodology differs from one university to another as well as from one professor to another”.

The state, however, intends to support the relocated students’ research with grants of at least 100 million Iraqi dinars (US$90,000).

“The ministry has supplies of scientific instruments which will be used to compensate universities at their alternative sites,” says Qassim Mohammed Al-Ataby, the ministry’s undersecretary.