Sunday, October 19, 2014

Who's fighting who in Kobani?

I don't know about you, but I'm a little confused by all the space the supposed ISIS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani has been getting in the news.

For the most part it's a story spun to champion the valorous Kurds and demonize Turkey, because Erdogan refuses to go along with the plan, very popular among beltway strategists at the moment, to supply the Kurds with US weapons.

ISIS already have plenty of US weapons, which at the moment are being targeted by US bombs.

We know that the Kurds are the good guys here, because they are fighting ISIS, although they were never fighting the evil Assad all that hard, and remain on the official US terror list.

The evil Assad, by the way, was not considered all that evil until very recently.
Evil Assad has chit-chat with John Kerry

Evil Assad meets her Maj

So now Assad is a bad guy, and the ISIS moderates we trained and armed have morphed into even badder guys, so we have to fly over Syria to bomb the Syrian petroleum infrastructure, which apparently hurts ISIS, who are really really bad because they do not respect the rights of women, whereas the Kurds are the good guys who although they are a culture that practices female genital mutilation, are otherwise all aboard for the equal rights of women.

Or something like that.

Meanwhile, even though this Kobani deal has been spun as the evil ISIS vs. the hard-pressed Kurds, today it emerges that while Kobani may have been a predominantly Kurdish city, it's not just Kurds fighting ISIS, but other Islamist groups fighting ISIS as well.

Like the al-Raqqa Brigades, who are sometimes linked to al Qaeda and sometimes not, and possibly the al-Nussra Front, who are also sometimes al Qaeda, and sometimes not and sometimes associated with ISIS... gosh, it's confusing!

It would probably be just as true to spin Kobani as an al-Qaeda attack on ISIS, with the Kurds throwing their lot in with Qaeda for the moment, and the US Air Force serving, at least for the moment, as the al-Qaeda Air Force.

At least there's one thing not confusing; every bomb and bullet flying in either direction was paid for directly or indirectly by the US taxpayer!

That's got to warm the hearts of the war profiteers.  






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