Kurds

Three Americans volunteered for combat alongside Kurdish militia; repatriation was a complicated affair.
Americans don’t need a visa to enter Iraqi Kurdistan, but their passports are stamped there before they are driven into Syria through YPG-controlled border checkpoints. The volunteers don’t get Syrian government visas.

When fighters die in Syria, getting them home is a far more complex affair, and an expensive one. Representatives of the Rojava government paid $43,600 dollars for the cost to return the remains of all three men this time, according to Lucy Usoyan, a Washington-based representative of a Kurdish group that helped organize the return.

The Kurds should not be treated only as the brave allies to be thrown to the battle against ISIS, but also as the political allies, whose national demands should be part of any fundamental solution to the problems of Iraq and Syria.

Will all this, or even part of it, happen in the near future? Not really, and if that is the case, even the death of ‘’the Kurdish Angelina Jolie’’ will not lead to any salvation to the real Kurds. They will continue to fight, and continue to be betrayed.

He equated our backing of both the rebels and the Kurds as a major contributor to the “mess.” But we all know it goes deeper, further back and is more complex than that.

With the U.S. incapable of openly supporting anti-regime forces in Syria, and Europe facing a multitude of crises, the way is open for Putin in Syria.

Ankara views the YPG as a threat because of its close links to Kurdish militants waging a three-decade-old insurgency on its own soil. It has been alarmed by the YPG’s gains in northern Syria since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, fearing it could extend Kurdish control along Turkish borders and fuel the ambitions of Kurdish insurgents in Turkey.

A day after Turkish tanks crossed the border into northern Syria, most of a U.S.-backed largely Kurdish army has moved east of the Euphrates River on Thursday, according to a U.S. military spokesman. Turkey and Vice President Joe Biden had called on the Kurds to leave Arab lands in Syria and return east of the […]

The operation was targeting both Daesh and the Kurdish YPG militia, whose gains in northern Syria have alarmed Turkey.

A member of the Iraqi parliament stated on Thursday that Peshmerga forces will receive the same treatment as the Islamic State (IS) if they do not withdraw from liberated areas. Mohammed Saihoud an Iraqi MP from the State of Law bloc, led by the former Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki, said that “if Peshmerga forces do […]

Middlemen such as Serbia’s CPR Impex and Slovakia’s Eldon have played a critical role in supplying weapons and ammunition to the Middle East.

The director of the Pentagon agency devoted to stopping improvised bombings is in Baghdad this week meeting with Iraqi officials, but U.S. military officials caution that they will not be able to deliver quick solutions to suppress a string of suicide attacks there. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Shields, the director of the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat […]

The M2 is perfect for the Kurds; it’s a weapon America first employed in WW2 against an evil empire and it was utilized alongside tactics used about 100 years ago.

When the suicide bomber exploded in Taksim, they gave my name although I was a captive when the suicide bomber exploded in Taksim. The people in Kobanê allowed me to talk to my family back then.