The women of Kobani fight ISIS alone and with constant obstruction of Turkey-NY Times Op-ed (If billionaire Mike Bloomberg chucked his billionaire pals in Turkey and helped Kobani's fighting women he might win the Nobel Prize he seeks).

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"“Turkey is a great example, and it can be translated to other countries,” Mr. Bloomberg told his breakfast companions. And who knows, he joked, his philanthropy may even win him a Nobel Prize."

10/28/14, "A Town Shouldn’t Fight the Islamic State Alone," NY Times Op-ed, by Meysa Abdooct, a Syrian Kurd woman commander

"Turkey's Obstruction of Kobani's Battle Against ISIS." 

"Since Sept. 15, we, the people of the Syrian town of Kobani, have been fighting, outnumbered and outgunned, against an all-out assault by the army of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Yet despite a campaign that has intensified in the past month, including the deployment of United States-made tanks and armored vehicles, the Islamic State has not been able to break the resistance of Kobani’s fighters.

We are defending a democratic, secular society of Kurds, Arabs, Muslims and Christians

who all face an imminent massacre.

Kobani’s resistance has mobilized our entire society, and many of its leaders, including myself, are women.Those of us on the front lines are well aware of the Islamic State’s treatment of women. We expect women around the world to help us, because we are fighting for the rights of women everywhere. We do not expect them to come to join our fight here (though we would be proud if any did). But we do ask women to promote our case and to raise awareness of our situation in their own countries, and to pressure their governments to help us.

We are thankful to the coalition for its intensified airstrikes against Islamic State positions, which have been instrumental in limiting the ability of our enemies to use tanks and heavy artillery. But we had been fighting without any logistical assistance from the outside world until the limited coalition airdrops of weapons and supplies on Oct. 20. Airdrops of supplies should continue, so that we do not run out of ammunition.

None of that changes the reality that our weapons still cannot match those of the Islamic State.

We will never give up. But we need more than merely rifles and grenades to carry out our own responsibilities and aid the coalition in its war against the jihadist forces. Currently, even when fighters from other Kurdish regions in Northern Syria try to supply us with some of their armored vehicles and antitank missiles, 

Turkey has not allowed them to do so.

Turkey, a NATO member, should have been an ally in this conflict. It could easily have helped us by allowing access between different Syrian Kurdish areas, so as to let fighters and supplies move back and forth through Turkish territory.

Instead, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has several times publicly equated our fighters, who are defending a diverse and democratic society, with the murderous Islamic State, evidently because of the controversy surrounding Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

Last week, following domestic and international criticism, Turkish leaders at last said they would open a corridor for a small group of Iraqi pesh merga fighters, and some Free Syrian Army brigades, to cross into Kobani. But they still will not allow other Syrian Kurds to cross Turkish territory to reach us. This has been decided without consulting us.

As a result, the Islamic State can bring in endless amounts of new supplies and ammunition, but we are still effectively blockaded on all sides — on three by the Islamic State’s forces, and on the fourth by Turkish tanks. There is evidence that Turkish forces have allowed the Islamic State’s men and equipment to move back and forth across the border. But Syrian Kurdish fighters cannot do the same.

The Turkish government is pursuing an anti-Kurdish policy against the Syrian Kurds, and their priority is to suppress the Kurdish freedom movement in Northern Syria. They want Kobani to fall.

We have never been hostile to Turkey. We want to see it as a partner, not an enemy, and we believe that it is in the Turkish government’s interest to have a border with the democratic administration of a western Kurdistan rather than one with the Islamic State.

Western governments should increase their pressure on Turkey to open a corridor for Syrian Kurdish forces and their heavy weapons to reach the defenders of Kobani through the border. We believe that such a corridor, and not only the limited transport of other fighters that Turkey has proposed, should be opened under the supervision of the United Nations.

We have proved ourselves to be one of the only effective forces battling the Islamic State in Syria. 

Whenever we meet them on equal terms, they are always defeated. If we had more weapons and could be joined by more of our fighters from elsewhere in Syria, we would be in a position to strike a deadly blow against the Islamic State, one that we believe would ultimately lead to its dissolution across the region as a whole.

The people of Kobani need the attention and help of the world."

"Meysa Abdo, who is also known by the nom de guerre Narin Afrin, is a commander of the resistance in Kobani. 

This article was translated from the Kurdish for the New York Times by Güney Yildiz.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 29, 2014, in The International New York Times."

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"Isis...boasts an arsenal of US weapons looted from the Iraqi army in Mosul." (last sentence in 10/14/14 IBTimes article)

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“Turkey is a great example, and it can be translated to other countries,” Mr. Bloomberg told his breakfast companions. And who knows, he joked, his philanthropy may even win him a Nobel Prize."...

8/23/14, "Michael Bloomberg’s Harder Sell," NY Times, Landon Thomas, Jr.

"On a sweltering Saturday in June in Istanbul’s old city, Michael R. Bloomberg, power-dressed in a dark blue suit, monogrammed white shirt and cuff links, sat down to a late-morning breakfast with local antismoking activists on a rooftop overlooking the glittering Sea of Marmara.

June 2014, Bloomberg, Istanbul

The group, which included Turkish doctors and public health officials, had gathered to celebrate the surprising success of a campaign to persuade Turks, notorious for their love of tobacco, to smoke fewer cigarettes. It was a campaign formulated and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable foundation of Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

Mr. Bloomberg was in an expansive mood, holding forth on Istanbul’s antiquities and dropping the names of Turkish big shots he has known: Muhtar Kent, the chief executive of Coca-Cola, and Ahmet Ertegun, the late rock ‘n’ roll magnate. But what Mr. Bloomberg really wanted to talk about was the success of his antismoking program in Turkey, an effort that has drawn the passionate support of his newest Turkish pal, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former prime minister and the country’s just-elected president.

“Turkey is a great example, and it can be translated to other countries,” Mr. Bloomberg told his breakfast companions. And who knows, he joked, his philanthropy may even win him a Nobel Prize. There were some cautious titters from the audience. Was Mr. Bloomberg kidding — or was he issuing a statement of intent?...

Now the man who flirted with a presidential run has one last aspiration: mayor of the world.

Mr. Bloomberg, 72, has vowed to give away his $32.8 billion fortune before he dies. In doing so, he hopes to sharply reduce high smoking rates in Turkey, Indonesia and other countries;...

His vehicle to achieve all of this is Bloomberg Philanthropies, a foundation that he started in 2006 and that now employs about 30 people with programs in 95 countries....

'You Can Effect Change'

After his breakfast with the anti-tobacco activists, Mr. Bloomberg kicked back on a huge two-story yacht procured by staff members to take him from his hotel on the Bosporus to the next event on his schedule: commencement remarks to be delivered at Koc University, an elite institution founded by the billionaire Rahmi Koc, his friend and fellow alumnus from Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Bloomberg had removed his jacket, revealing his still-slim waistline. As he explained how he hoped to make a difference by getting people to eat and smoke less, he tilted his already quite tan face in the direction of the hot Turkish sun.

Life is good, he had to admit. “I mean if I am not happy, I should see a shrink,” he said with a short laugh.

(Life is even better when you can donate millions of dollars to tackle Istanbul’s traffic woes and then dodge these same maladies by commuting to most of your meetings by boat.)...

Mr. Bloomberg, who owns an 88 percent stake in Bloomberg L.P. did not neglect its corporate imperatives during his two-day visit to Istanbul. Turkey, with its profitable banks and growing capital markets, is one of the company’s more dynamic growth areas. Sales of Bloomberg terminals — which present a mix of news and data to financiers — have doubled there since 2009.

So he headlined a company conference that pushed Istanbul as a regional financial center — hosting a lunch for top clients, local billionaires and Turkey’s finance minister . He also sat for an interview on Bloomberg TV.

The future belongs to cities, Mr. Bloomberg said to a packed hall of Turkish bankers as he described his efforts to attack societal ills like smoking, obesity and traffic deaths.

Of course, Mr. Bloomberg pushing Bloomberg on Bloomberg TV at a Bloomberg conference, with Bloomberg terminals everywhere, represents the very essence of the Bloomberg model.

It is a model that has made him one of the richest men in the world, but not one likely to win him the Nobel. And that is why his bid to change habits around the world is such an important component of his global game plan.

 

A Thinner Cloud of Smoke

During his visit to Turkey, Mr. Bloomberg took his private jet to visit Mr. Erdogan’s ancestral home on the Black Sea coast. The two men spent an hour hashing out antismoking strategies and chewing  

over developments in the Middle East."... 

Image: "Visiting Istanbul, Mr. Bloomberg took a walking tour with officials including the city’s mayor, Kadir Topbas, right. Credit Ivor Prickett for The New York Times"

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10/27/14, "The Ties That Bind Michael Bloomberg, Qatar and Radical Islam," Noisyroom.net, by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton and William Michael

"Bloomberg partnered with the Turkish AKP, an Islamist party hostile to Israel and secular Turks, to seriously curtail smoking in that country, just as he did in New York City:

Crowing about the success of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ anti-smoking campaign in Turkey recently, he said that “Turkey is a great example, and it can be translated to other countries....

Speaking to a group of anti-smoking activists in Turkey earlier this summer, Bloomberg joked that his philanthropy 

may win him a Nobel prize.

Yes, because an award dripping in blood is a prized possession and all that....

BP has been working with the Turkish government since 2009, when its nationwide public smoking ban first went into effect....

In Turkey, where terrorism reigns and encroaching and aggressive Sharia law continues to oppose basic human rights,  Bloomberg is fighting a war on smoking.

For instance, Turkey leads the world in imprisoned journalists. Ironic, since Bloomberg fancies himself the ultimate journalist and businessman. This is a country at the forefront of a rising Caliphate — one in which Christians and Jews are especially persecuted for their religious views. Bloomberg Philanthropies have spent over $600 million on tobacco control advocacy and research since 2007....

Michael Bloomberg has said of his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. 

I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”... 

It is comforting that he seems to “know the mind of God.”"...
 

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