YPG

“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, […]

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.

Three American citizens who traveled to Syria to fight alongside Kurdish forces battling the self-proclaimed Islamic State died in combat, two U.S. defense officials confirmed to the Daily Beast. At least one is believed to be U.S. military veteran, a defense official told The Daily Beast. According to one local report, the men were killed over […]

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.

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

A few years ago, relatively early on in the war against ISIS, I was smuggled into Northern Syria along a PKK re-supply route.  Taking a small inflatable boat across the river which acted as the border between Syria and Iraq, my first stop in the Kurdish held areas of Syria (known as Rojava) was a […]

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.

Sandwiched between ISIS held and Kurdish held Syria, lays a city under siege.  Manbij is a medium sized city south of Kobani and North West of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa.  While many civilians have already fled the city, thousands more are trapped inside.  With coalition airstrikes backing up the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces […]

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.

In this, the last episode of Inside the Team Room-Peshmerga, they discuss just how effective coalition air strikes are based on their first hand experience fighting with the YPG in Syria and the Peshmerga in Kurdistan. Find out more about the foreign volunteers showing up to fight ISIS and what motivates them to fight alongside the Peshmerga. […]