Portside

The offensive launched by DAESH Jihadists against Syrian Kurds is said to be supported by the Turkish military. The town of Kobane and several Kurdish villages are besieged by Jihadists that have come from Turkey with the support of Ankara’s tanks.

Washington and its allies are so obsessed with the régime of Bachar Assad that they have eventually chosen to turn a blind eye to their Turkish ally’s dealings. According to sources of the Democratic Union Party (the Syrian Kurdish PYD), Ankara is suspected of supporting the DAESH Islamists who want to conquer the Syrian Kurdistan.

For the last few days (see l’Humanité dated September 16th) DAESH (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State) has launched an offensive against the Syrian Kurdistan defended by the PYD’s forces alone. The offensive is staged along three axes, to the east, to the west, and north of the Kobane Province (Ayn al-Arab in Arabic, 140,000 inhabitants).

As early as last Monday, PYD forces noted the presence of columns of heavily armed Jihadists across the Turkish border near Tell Abyad. This town was formerly under the Islamic Front’s control but fell into DAESH’s hands last January. “With the support of the Turkish military, the Jihadists have been heading for Kobane since Wednesday. Kobane seems to be the main objective of their offensive,” this Kurdish source maintains. This town is considered as a strategic “stopper” as it commands access to the north-eastern regions of the Syrian Kurdistan. Its fall would enable DAESH to establish a territorial continuity over a large part of the border between Syria and Turkey, part of whose territory serves DAESH as a fallback base.

Turkey ranks second among Nato forces

The Turkish forces themselves have been spotted in several places in the Syrian Kurdistan. First in Solipkaran, about five miles away from Tell Abyad, where Jihadists, supported by the Turkish military, met with a strong Peshmerga resistance. Last Wednesday night, a column of five Turkish tanks crossed the Syrian-Turkish border in its turn to lend a hand to the Islamist groups that besiege the village of Jimale-Almalik (about 13 miles away from Tell Abyad) still controlled by PYD fighter units. These same Turkish units take part in or supervise DAESH’s attacks against the village of Khan al-Jaradé. And on Thursday last, Jihadists fired three Grad missiles on the city centre of Kobane, without killing or wounding any, but very likely in order to strike fear among the inhabitants and incite them to leave the city, our source maintains. This Jihadist offensive is attested by Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Quoted by Agence France Press (AFP), he maintains that “DAESH uses heavy weaponry, its artillery and its tanks” against the city of Kobane and that DAESH is likely to have seized 18 Kurdish villages. The PYD itself claims to have inflicted heavy losses on the Jihadists. “Some 18 Islamists were killed and carried into Turkish territory where has field hospitals,” our interlocutor claims.

The involvement of Turkey, NATO’s second military force, by the side of the Syrian and foreign Jihadists is stale and unsurprising news. One part of the Turkish territory along Syria’s border has served for the last two years as fallback zone not only to DAESH Islamists but also to Al Nosra Front fighters (Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch) and Ahrar ash-Sham: strangely, these two organizations are not concerned by the strikes campaign Barak Obama is about to launch.

Up north, within a stone’s throw of the Turkish border and of zones that are under close surveillance by the Turkish army, reporters and NGO volunteers were abducted; some have been released in exchange for high ransoms, others were savagely murdered. Others still remain in the hands of various armed groups. It will be remembered that Jihadists from Europe, the Maghreb and Caucasus (notably Chechens and Georgians), Central Asia, Pakistan and India reach Syria via Turkey where Turkish policemen and border guards look on them indulgently.

It will be observed that neither Washington nor Paris have asked the Turkish authorities to stop helping the Jihadists and take efficient measures against the Jihadist recruits that transit through their territory. Let’s conclude on this point with the information that Turkey has decided to grant asylum to the Syrian and Egyptian Muslim Brothers who call for Jihad against President el-Sisi’s régime and who have been expelled from Doha (Qatar) under US pressure.