Juan Cole - Can Leftist Kurdish Militia cut ISIL/ Daesh off from Turkish Supply Routes and Kill the Caliphate?

By Dilip -
The intrepid Liz Sly of the Washington Post gets the story of the attempt of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and their Arab allies, the Euphrates Volcano, to cut Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) off and kill it. Sly’s insightful report is buttressed by one from Ahmad al-Sakhani at the Dubai-based al-An TV.

Daesh holds Raqqah Province in Syria, up to the small town of Tel Abyad on the Syrian-Turkish border, through which it receives weapons, ammunition and volunteers smuggled through Turkey. On either side of Daesh territory in northern Raqqah Province are two cantons of the Kurdish belt known as Rojava. The two are Kobane and Jazira. Jazira is much bigger and abuts the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq. Altogether there are probably about 2.2 million Kurds in Syria (a country of 22 million), though it may be less since several hundred thousand were forced to flee to Turkey from Raqqah.

The YPG, the paramilitary of the far-left Democratic Union Party, and its Arab allies have taken 12 villages near to Tal Abyad away from Daesh in recent fighting. An important point: According to al-An TV, this advance has only been possible because of close coordination between the ground forces and the US Air Force, which is bombing Daesh targets once they are identified by the rebel fighters. In other words, this fight looks a little like the battle for Mt. Sinjar in Iraq, where Kurdish fighters got practical air support from the US and its coalition partners, which intensively bombed Daesh positions and equipment on their behalf. At Mt. Sinjar, YPG units played an important role, but the major push came from the Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Iraqi Kurdistan, who knew how to call in US air strikes.

Some 12,000 residents of the latter town have fled, expecting that a battle royale in the center of the town is in the offing between Daesh on the one hand and the YPG alongside the Free Syrian Army units calling themselves Euphrates Volcano on the other. Some 5,000 refugees are huddling along the border with Syria. If the Kurds can take the northern Raqqa corridor along the Turkish border, including Tel Abyad, they can link two of their scattered cantons and can cut Daesh off from resupply routes in Turkey.

Abu Isa, the leader of the 2,000 Arab fighters of the Arab side of the Euphrates Volcano joint operations room, called on villagers to remain in their homes, promising them they would be safe. His demi-brigade seems to be well armed, having medium and light weaponry, suggesting that the US is provisioning them. Al-An maintains that a lot of Daesh fighters have pulled back from the north to the capital city of Raqqah, and that the remaining fighters have warned local inhabitants to stay inside on threat of condign punishment.

There is a saying in the military that everyone wants to do strategy, but real men do logistics. That is, the supply train for the army is often more crucial than the big concept plan of battle. Liz Sly showed that she is the ‘real man’ of this somewhat sexist saying.

There has been a lot of back and forth between Daesh and the Kurds in the northeastern Jazira region, especially at the city of Hasaka. What is promising here is that the anti-Daesh forces appear to be getting good air support from the American-led coalition. It helps that Euphrates Volcano has not gone jihadi and is what is left of the Free Syrian Army.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/06/militia-turkish-caliphate.html

see also
Meredith Tax - The Revolution in Rojava - A liberated area in the Middle East led by socialist-feminists is fulfilling the dreams of Arab Spring

Saudi Arabia Fixated on Iran When Sunni Extremists Are Real Threat

Pres. Erdogan sees Syrian Kurds’ advance against ISIL as “danger” to Turkey

Next year in Mosul: Iraqi Kurds cut off ISIL/ Daesh Supply Lines

The Forgotten Costs of War in the Middle East

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more