Utilizing tear-gas filled grenades and water cannons, the Turkish riot police are attempting to keep the Syrian and Kurdish refugees who are pressing against their border at bay. These refugees have no options left open to them. Their home, the city of Kobani, has been at the mercy of ISIS artillery for the past weeks and, on October 5, the enemy forces finally entered the southeastern corner of the city. The extremist forces vastly outnumber the Kurdish resistance fighters, who currently have little to no hope of outside help. Outside of the U.S. airstrikes against ISIS forces, the Kurds have received no aid in their fight from countries like Turkey. This lack of assistance comes despite Turkey’s recent promises to help in the war against the Islamic State.
Anwar Salim, president of the self-declared Kurdish autonomous zone just across the Turkish border claims that Turkey had given no support, either military or humanitarian, to the lightly armed People’s Protection Units (YPG). These men are the only defenders of the town. “If Turkey does not want Kobane to fall to ISIS, then it must take urgent action and help the YPG,” Salim states.
The city has been under siege for weeks by ISIS, and is significant to the group because they want to claim a stretch of land running from their self-declared capital of Raqqa, Syria, to the Turkish border –over 60 miles away.
Mehmet Yegin, a researcher at USAK Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, says that “[the Kurds] are not in good shape. They are not an experienced warfare group. They are a mountain-based guerilla group, they are not stable on the flat ground. So Syria is not a space that they can fight easily.”
Despite Turkey’s refusal to allow refugees to enter their country, it is a slightly different story regarding the Kurdish fighters, who say that the Turkish border gives them a way out of the fight. The Kurdish militiamen are illegally crossing the border repeatedly to bring supplies into Syria to aid the fight.
While the fighting going on in Kobani is desperate, the fighters still hold a cautious hope. There have been times in the past similar to this, with an inexperienced militia fending off an organized and well-armed superior force.
One of these instances, known as the Battle of Vukovar, happened during the Croatian War of Independence. This battle shares several similarities to the current conflict in Kobani, and although it was a loss to the city’s defenders, it is considered a pyrrhic victory for the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), the invading force. The siege occurred in 1991, when 1,800 lightly armed civilians and members of the Croatian National Guard fended off 36,000 members of the JNA and other Serbian paramilitary groups for 87 days. This is not only similar to Kobani in the fact that it was asymmetrical warfare, but also because of the brutality of the aggressing force in both scenarios. In the final days of the Battle of Vukovar, massacres and many war crimes were committed; as evidenced by graffiti left by some Serbians, roughly translating to “God forgives, Serbs don’t”. Following the fall of the town, its people were lined up and walked to detention areas –while local Serbian paramilitaries would pull people out of the lines at random and execute them.
These atrocities from two decades ago are not dissimilar to the actions of ISIS today. Mostafa Kader, a young father who fled his village in late September, speaks of his uncle who refused to abandon his town of eight decades, and was beheaded by ISIS forces: “he was 85 – he could not even lift a weapon.” And of his wife’s sister and eight-year old niece, who were found by the family when fleeing his wife’s village: “They had been raped, and their hearts were cut out of their chests and left on top of the bodies. I buried them with my own hands.”
Unless other countries give the Kurds aid in halting ISIS, these crimes will go unpunished, and the Islamic State will gain more and more territory until they become a force that the global community cannot ignore. The choice is this: destroy the Islamic State now, while they can still be stopped, or fight a much bloodier and more prolonged war in the future.
by Nathan Swanton
