.
6/25/15,
"Turkey accused of allowing Islamic State fighters to cross its border in Kobane attack," UK Telegraph, Robert Spencer
"Kurdish witnesses say Isil jihadists slipped over Turkish border before
launching car bomb attack in Kobane."
"Turkey has been accused of allowing Islamic State jihadists to cross its border to attack the Kurdish town of Kobane.
Twin car bombs exploded close to the crossing point with the Turkish
town of Mursitpinar, and Kurdish activists and residents claimed they
had come across the border, despite its being heavily policed on the
Turkish side.
..................
Convoys of cars
carrying up to 40 Isil fighters - reportedly using the uniform of
Kurdish YPG militia as a guise - then attacked Kobane from three sides
in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Kobane became an important symbol in the battle against Isil after the group launched a bid to take it last year. Kurdish forces backed by US-led air strikes waged a four-month battle to repel the group, finally securing the town in January.
Months of fighting prompted a mass exodus of local residents, with some
200,000 fleeing across the border into Turkey. Some 35,000 Syrians
returned home a few months ago after Kobane's liberation.
The
Kurds and many of Turkey’s Middle Eastern neighbours have regularly
accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of sympathising with Isil, or at
least allowing it to use Turkish territory to gain access to the fighting in Syria.
"The clashes started at 4:30 am,” said Kali Maho, a local activist told
the Daily Telegraph. "A terrorist armed group entered the city, holding
explosive belts. They targeted the civilians."
Scores of
Kurdish fighters and civilians were said to have been killed in
subsequent fighting, which may have involved as few as 35-40 attackers.
Redur Xelil, the spokesman for the YPG, said: “So far, 15 of this group
were killed. Three of them managed to escape to Turkey. There are still
some elements hiding inside the city."
Isil were also accused of killing 20 civilians, including women and children, in the nearby village of Barkh Botan.
Saif Haj Omar, 53, said that two of his cousins were killed in their house on Kobane’s south-eastern outskirts.
“They entered their house and shot them and their families,” he said by
telephone. "According to the injured women, they entered the house and
shouted, you are kuffar (infidels) before they opened fire."
Mustafa Bali, a Kurdish activist who lives less than a mile from the
scene of the bombing, told the Daily Telegraph: “I could see the smoke
of the smoke and hear the sound of the attack." "Two cars blew up on the Syrian side. Most probably the cars came from the Turkish side.
“If they entered from the Syrian side, they would have first come up
many more important targets related to the YPG (the Kurdish militia),
such as the main headquarters building where there are tens of fighters
and leaders, or the local administration HQ.”
It seemed unlikely
they would pass these by and then go to the crossing to kill civilians,
he said. Syrian state media also said the attackers came from Turkey.
The Turkish deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, rejected the
allegation. "The claim that Daesh (Isil) militants passed through the
Turkish border is entirely a lie and part of a black propaganda," he
said.
The government claimed that the attackers came from the Isil-held town
of Jarablus to the west.
However, that did little to appease Turkey's
many critics, who claim that the area around Jarablus is the main point
of entry to Syria for large numbers of Isil's "foreign fighters".
The YPG - the main Syrian Kurdish militia - won worldwide fame last
autumn for its defence of Kobane against a concerted Isil siege.
Since then, they have pressed forward, uniting a long border territory
under its rule and coming within 30 miles of the jihadists’ de facto
capital, Raqqa.
However, Isil on Thursday showed how it was able to hit back
strongly, with a lightning strike on both Kobane and further to the
north-east, in the city of Hasakeh.
In Hasakeh, which is divided
between areas of Bashar al-Assad regime and Kurdish control, Isil
fighters striking from territory it holds to the south managed to seize
two government-held districts.
The attack was a new front in an existing tough battle for control
of a string of Kurdish- and Christian-occupied villages in the Syrian
north-east.
“This is classic ISIS strategy when under pressure -
launching diversionary attacks to distract adversaries from inflicting
further threats to ISIS' most valuable territories,” said Charles
Lister, of the Brookings Institution, a leading analyst of the Syrian
war.
Meanwhile, non-Isil rebel groups launched a concerted attempt in the
south of Syria to take remaining government-held districts of Dera’a,
the city where the uprising against the regime began in March 2011.
The Southern Front, a Free Syrian Army alliance of secular and
non-jihadist rebel groups,*** were at the forefront of the attack, said
Issam al-Reyyes, a spokesman.
Also joining the attack were the
leading members of the Jaish al-Fatah alliance dominant in parts of the
north, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and Ahrar
al-Sham, a Salafi Islamist group with ties to Qatar." map from bbc. via Free Rep.
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***Comment: A "Free Syrian Army alliance of secular and
non-jihadist rebel groups" doesn't exist and is a dangerous myth per an American held hostage by them for 19 months (2012-2014). Believing FSA was "moderate" and would save him, a kidnapped American in Syria begged a local, “Take me to the Free Syrian Army right
away....This is an emergency.” FSA facilitated imprisonment and torture of the American for 19 months. In one of the American's escape attempts, a Syrian hip to the western FSA myth told him, "Don't worry, I'm FSA, you can relax, you're safe."...Ten minutes later the FSA "friend" returned with 15 terrorists with Kalashnikovs who re-imprisoned and beat the American:
10/29/2014, "My Captivity," NY Times Magazine, "Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria"
"The main opposition group, the Free Syrian Army, founded by former Assad
generals and considered moderate by many in the West, had taken over
the two most important border crossings north of Aleppo.
One afternoon in Antakya, I met three young Syrians. They seemed a bit
shifty, but not, as far as I could tell, more militantly Islamic than
anyone else. “Our job is to bring stuff from here to the Free Syrian
Army,” they told me. They offered to take me with them. Thinking I’d be
back in a few days, I told no one, not even my Tunisian roommate, where I
was going.
We slipped through a barbed-wire fence in the middle of an olive grove. I
looked back toward Turkey. So far, so good. My Syrian friends led me to
an abandoned house that I could use as a kind of field office. The next
morning, I helped the young men straighten up the place, cleaning the
floors and arranging pillows in an orderly row on a rubber mattress.
They sat me down in front of a video camera and asked me to interview
one of them, Abu Osama. When we were done, the cameraman smiled, walked
across the room and kicked me in the face. His friends held me down. Abu
Osama stomped on my chest, then called out for handcuffs. Someone else
bound my feet. The cameraman aimed a pistol at my head....
That
night, I slipped out of the handcuffs that attached me to one of the
sleeping men. In the soft sunlight of the Syrian dawn, I sprinted past
walls covered in graffiti, through a cemetery and over a median strip,
then stopped a passing minibus. “Take me to the Free Syrian Army right
away,” I said. “This is an emergency.”
When
I arrived at the F.S.A. headquarters, I appealed to the officers in the
most desperate terms. They argued a bit among themselves, then took me
to an Islamic court, where a judge questioned me and remanded me to a
cell that had been converted from a Turkish toilet. There were prisoners
in the cells on either side of me. I poked my head through a food
hatch. A 10-year-old boy did the same. “What did you do?” I said. He
withdrew, and a middle-aged man, his father, I presumed, poked his head
out.
“What did you do?” I repeated.
A helpless grin appeared on his face. “We’re Shia,” he said.
“I see,” I said.
Ten
minutes later, the F.S.A. officers returned, accompanied by my
kidnappers, and I was trundled into a car and taken to an F.S.A. safe
house. There I was placed in a hole in the ground. Was I six feet below
the surface? Only three? I didn’t know. Officers threw dirt on me,
laughing and shouting insults. Someone jumped down and landed on my
chest. Someone else beat me with the butt of his Kalashnikov. One
officer insisted that I reply to his questions by yelling out, “I am
filth, sir!”
A
few days later, the F.S.A. transferred me to a group of Islamists, and I
had my first lesson in how to distinguish Islamist fighters from the
Free Syrian Army: The fundamentalists think of themselves as the
vanguard of an emergent Islamic state. They torture you more slowly,
with purpose-specific instruments. You never address them as “sir,”
because this reminds everyone of the state’s secular military. When the
Islamists torture you, they prefer to be addressed by a title that
implies religious learning. For the younger fighters, “ya sheikhi!” (“o, my sheikh!”); for the older ones, “emir.”
The F.S.A., it turned out,
had given me to the Nusra Front, or Jebhat al Nusra, which was using
the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo as a headquarters and a prison....
One
morning, I ran into four Free Syrian Army soldiers. How lucky, I
thought. If I could get them to promise not to hurt me, if I could
persuade them to place me beyond the range of the Nusra Front machine
guns, I would be free....
The F.S.A. soldiers were heating up their tea. “Hey!” I said to them. “What’s your news? Peace be upon you.” They returned my salaams. One asked where I was from....
“From far away,” I replied. “How about you?” They were all from around Damascus.
“Have you come to Syria for the jihad?” someone asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m a civilian, a journalist.”
“How long have you been with Jebhat?” he asked.
“Almost two years,” I said.
The
four fighters stared at me. They mumbled among themselves, and then the
lieutenant in charge told me not to say anything else. He motioned to
me to follow him to a place where we could speak in private. When we
were out of his troops’ hearing, he fixed me with a serious stare.
“You are American?” he asked. Evidently a rumor had reached him. I nodded.
“During these two years,” he said, “you have been able to speak to your family?”
“Not
a word,” I said. He kept staring into my eyes and narrowing his own, as
if he was reviewing some painful fact or memory. Did he suspect me of
lying? Was he angry at the Nusra Front? I couldn’t tell.
“I
studied Arabic for two years in Damascus,” I said. “I love the Syrian
people.” He nodded. “And no,” I continued, “no talking to my family for a
very long time.” He nodded again, then knit his hands together behind
his back.
“May God open the way for you,” he mumbled and walked away.
I
returned to the F.S.A. troops. One told me that his unit had recently
traveled to Jordan to receive training from American forces in fighting
groups like the Nusra Front.
“Really?” I said. “The Americans? I hope it was good training.”
“Certainly, very,” he replied....After a few moments, I asked, “About this business of fighting Jebhat al Nusra?”
“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”...
What if they retired from military life, I asked, went
home and promised to obey the Islamic State in the future? Would the
group still wish to kill them?
“Of course,” they said.
“Really?” I asked. “But why?” “Because we are Jebhat al Nusra,” they replied....
“Your
(FSA) practice of Islam is exactly the same as ISIS — you admire the same
scholars and interpret the Quran just as they do?”
“Yes,” they agreed. “All of this is true.”
“And it’s true,” I said, “that when you joined Al Qaeda, in the early goings of the revolution, ISIS did not exist?”
“Yes, this is so,” the fighters agreed.
“And now they’re hoping to kill you?” I asked. They shrugged their shoulders. “Yes.”...
The
real issue between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was that their
commanders, former friends from Iraq, were unable to agree on how to
share the revenue from the oil fields in eastern Syria that the Nusra
Front had conquered....On
and on, from week to week, the blood flowed. I knew exactly why these
young men were dying: because the commanders said they must. In
addition, the fighters told me, both sides believe that 50,000 years
ago, Allah decreed that they should die in exactly this way, at exactly
this instant in history.
For
the moment, however, the Islamic State seemed to have the edge in the
recruitment battle. Many of the Nusra Front soldiers told me that over
the previous months, their siblings and cousins had been fighting for
the Islamic State. The pay was better. And the Islamic State, a stronger
army, had won victories across eastern Syria and Iraq....
By the time we reached the outskirts of Damascus...it was clear...that our voyage...was nothing less than an abandonment
of the oil fields, the military bases, the prisons and everything else
the Nusra Front had worked to control for some two and a half years. We
had made a dash for our lives....
One morning in August, when the fighters guarding me were asleep... I tiptoed out....
By
this point, I knew better than to seek refuge among the “moderates” of
the Free Syrian Army. I asked a passing motorcyclist to take me to a
hospital. At the hospital, a dour-looking man greeted me.
“I am a
journalist,” I said. “From Ireland. Please, you must help me. I love the
Syrian people.”
“Don’t
worry,” he said. “I am the F.S.A.” He admitted me to an inner room. “No
one comes in here without my leave,” he said. “You can relax. You are
safe.” I asked if I could contact my family. “Of course,” he said. The
easiest way, he said, was for me to send an email. But the man with the
computer’s password was away. It would take just a few minutes for him
to get to the hospital. Did I need tea? Medical attention?
The
F.S.A. soldier stepped out. Ten minutes later, he returned, beckoning
me with the index finger of his right hand. He seemed to do it in slow
motion, as a jailer might summon an innocent prisoner to his execution.
In
the front hallway of the hospital stood a group of about 15 Nusra Front
fighters, Kalashnikovs dangling from their right hands. No one spoke. A
few seconds passed, and then someone said in a barely audible voice,
“Come, American.”
They
drove me back to the villa. They hit me a bit in the car, and then, on
arriving in the living room where the guards had been dozing an hour
before, they flung me onto the carpet. The Man of Learning sat
cross-legged on a sofa. “Who has handcuffs?” he asked. Someone cuffed my
hands. The Man of Learning grinned. “You are a Nazarene liar and a
sneak, Bitar,” he said. “This afternoon, I will execute you by my own
hand.”
I spent much
of the following weeks locked inside a bedroom in the villa....
Assad
was bound to slink away into the undergrowth. The battle against his
forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which
the believers would prevail against the unbelievers....
Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised
when Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by
saying, “He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The
children participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they
wore large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently
suicide belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America”
anthems in the hallways. It would be a mistake to assume that only
Syrians are educating their children in this manner. The Nusra Front
higher-ups were inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much
because they needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they
want to teach the Westerners to take the struggle into every
neighborhood and subway station back home. They want these Westerners to
train their 8-year-olds to do the same. Over time, they said, the
jihadists would carve mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western
countries, as the Islamic State had done in Syria and Iraq. There,
Western Muslims would at last live with dignity, under a true Quranic
dispensation."...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/magazine/theo-padnos-american-journalist-on-being-kidnapped-tortured-and-released-in-syria.html?_r=0
