Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 389

Two lawmakers say that the Iraqi parliament has approved a "reciprocity measure" after U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily banning citizens from Iraq and six other Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

On February 07 2017 16:48 xM(Z wrote:
you'd need legal grounds for that which means Iraq's approval in some way(Iraq Kurdistan is still a federal region within Iraq); sure one can say "US is backing/supporting/enforcing it" but then you think of US as Trump and all of a sudden things won't look that stable/reliable/economically trustworthy.
plus, Iraq and Kurdistan squabble over land/territory internally and any international recognition of <new territory> needs to have clear boundaries.

On February 07 2017 18:43 Acrofales wrote:

While I do mostly agree with you, Kosovo shows that Iraq doesn't have much say in the matter. If the international community recognizes Kurdistan as an independent state, it de facto is one, regardless of what the Iraqi federal government thinks of the matter.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday discussed strategy in fighting Islamic State and Kurdish PKK militants with visiting Iraqi Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, sources at Erdogan's office said.

They said Erdogan and Barzani also addressed necessary steps to shut down schools and institutions in Iraqi Kurdistan that are affiliated with Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Islamic cleric whom Turkey blames for last month's failed military coup.

On February 08 2017 02:48 Sermokala wrote:
No way in hell will turkey support an independent Kurdistan with the pkk still in business. It'll be the Ira all over again but without the pond to delay cash and arms transfers.

The pkk going with aid independent Kurdistan could work in a shared region but good luck getting the Russians to swallow pro us Muslims that close to baku.

On February 14 2017 22:26 lastpuritan wrote:


Iraqi Kurds hate Syrian Kurds and PKK.

Actually nobody loves PKK in that part of the world except romantic leftists in EU and imperial face of the US.

It's not hard to understand why.

On the morning of his first battle, Brace Belden was underdressed for the cold and shaky from a bout of traveler's diarrhea. His Kurdish militia unit was camped out on the front line with ISIS, 30 miles from Raqqa, in Syria. Fighters stood around campfires of gas-soaked trash, boiling water for tea, their only comfort besides tobacco. "I've never been so dirty in my life," Belden recalls. When the time came to roll out, he loaded a clip into his Kalashnikov and climbed into a makeshift battlewagon, a patchwork of tank and truck parts armored with scrap metal and poured concrete. Belden took a selfie inside its rusty cabin and posted it online with the caption "Wow this freakin taxi stinks."

The rest of the militia piled into an assortment of minivans, garbage trucks and bulldozers, and rode south into territory ISIS had held for more than three years. Belden was manning a swivel-mounted machine gun, the parched landscape barely visible through the rising dust, when he spotted a car packed with explosives revving across the desert toward the Kurdish column. Before he could shoot, an American fighter jet lacerated the sky and an explosion erupted where the car had been, shaking the earth for miles around.

It was November 6th, 2016. The Kurdish militia known as the YPG – a Kurmanji acronym for People's Protection Units – had commenced a major offensive to liberate the city that serves as the global headquarters for ISIS. The YPG was backed by U.S. air power and fighting alongside a coalition of Arab and Assyrian militias. Also within their ranks, though scantly reported, was a group of about 75 hardcore leftists, anarchists and communists from Europe and America, Belden among them, fighting to defend a socialist enclave roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Belden, who is 27, started tweeting photos of the front shortly after arriving in Syria in October. The first widely shared image showed him crouched in his YPG uniform, wearing thick Buddy Holly glasses, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, a stray puppy in one hand and a sniper rifle in the other. "To misquote Celine," the post read, "when you're in, you're in." He has since amassed 19,000 followers under the handle PissPigGranddad, puzzling the Internet with a combination of leftist invective and scurrilous bro humor. Tweets like "Heading to the Quandil Mountains to lecture the PKK about entitlement reform" are followed by "The dude with the lamb bailed so now we're fucked for dinner."

Belden had no military experience before joining the YPG. He lived in San Francisco, where he arranged flowers for a living. Before that, he was a self-described lumpenproletariat, a lowlife punk and petty criminal with a heroin habit who started reading Marx and Lenin seriously in rehab. Once sober, he got involved in leftist causes, marching for tenants' rights, blocking evictions, protesting police brutality. As he prepared for the Middle East, his girlfriend thought he was going to do humanitarian work. She was "not stoked," Belden says, to learn that he planned to fight alongside the YPG.

The first phase of the Raqqa offensive was a mission to take Tal Saman, a satellite village of 10,000 people 17 miles north of Raqqa proper. "We pushed up to Tal Saman till we had it surrounded on a half circle," Belden says, "then we just bombarded the shit out of it." Refugees poured out of the village, seeking protection behind Kurdish lines. "Hundreds of civilians coming across for days in a row," Belden says. At night, his unit stayed in whatever building they'd just taken, camped out on rooftops in the excruciating cold. "The first week we were out it was awful," Belden says. The stepmother of a fellow volunteer from the U.S. had gotten Belden's number. She kept texting to make sure they were eating enough.

The march on Raqqa slowed to a halt after two weeks, as the YPG consolidated its hold over a string of liberated villages. The YPG controls a region of 4 million people in northern Syria known as Rojava. Its tens of thousands of motivated fighters have been battling ISIS for five years. American as well as French warplanes have been covering their maneuvers with airstrikes for the past two, forcing ISIS off the roads and highways and open desert, and back into the urban strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa. Now, the Kurds are kicking the door down in both cities.

But the YPG is not your typical ethnic or sectarian faction. Its fighters are loyal to an imprisoned guerrilla leader who was once a communist but now espouses the same kind of secular, feminist, anarcho-libertarianism as Noam Chomsky or the activists of Occupy Wall Street. The Kurds are implementing these ideals in Rojava, and that has attracted a ragtag legion of leftist internationals, like Belden, who have come from nearly every continent to help the YPG beat ISIS and establish an anarchist collective amid the rubble of the war – a "stateless democracy" equally opposed to Islamic fundamentalism and capitalist modernity. They call it the Rojava Revolution, and they want you.

On February 14 2017 22:47 Acrofales wrote:

[citation needed]

Unless you think the kurds fighting against Assad in Syria are PKK.

Days after expanding the fight for of Mosul, Iraq's security forces are pushing further into the strategic city's western portion, focusing on its airport. Thousands of ISIS fighters are believed to be in Mosul, the extremist group's biggest stronghold in Iraq.

From Erbil, Iraq, NPR's Alice Fordham reports for our Newscast unit:

"The fight to take back Mosul has been going on since October, but the push for the western half of the city is just four days old. Federal police and the army have pushed through rural villages to the outskirts of the city, and the Iraqi special forces have now joined them as they face fierce ISIS resistance around the airport.

"Around 450 members of the U.S.-led coalition are advising the Iraqi troops. Inside western Mosul, a resident tells NPR that ISIS has forced residents to knock holes in their houses to create tunnels for the militants to use in the coming fight there."

According to Iraqi News, ISIS leaders have disseminated a list of nearly 150 members who are wanted for arrest, because they fled in the face of fighting in Mosul.

Government forces entered the airport on the southern edge of the city for the first time since the Islamic State group overran the region in 2014, Iraqi News reports, citing state TV.

So far, government forces have been able to recapture the eastern half of the city that's divided by the Tigris River. The recent progress comes two years after a senior U.S. military official said Iraq's military was preparing to launch an offensive to take the city back.

When it was overrun by ISIS fighters in the summer of 2014, Mosul's population was around 2 million.

Announcing the new offensive Sunday, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said, "Our forces are beginning the liberation of the citizens from the terror of Daesh."

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has admitted defeat in Iraq and ordered militants to either flee or kill themselves in suicide attacks, it has been claimed.

The terror mastermind is said to have issued a statement called 'farewell speech' which was distributed among ISIS preachers and clerics in parts of Iraq it still controls.

According to local media, he urged supporters to run and hide and told 'non-Arab fighters' to either return home or blow themselves up with the promise of '72 women in heaven'.