Assad kills journalists too

This post is now published at Left Foot Forward.

Abdul Raheem Kour Hassan was a journalist who worked for a radio station in Damascus. His family was informed in April 2013 that he had died while in regime custody, tortured to death in one of Assad's prisons.

Bilal Ahmed Bilal worked for Palestine Today and covered the early protests in Syria. His family was informed in April 2014 that he had died while in regime custody, also tortured to death in one Assad's prisons.....

The Kurds aren't invincible

The Obama administration this morning announced something that should have been announced quite a while ago: that it supports the Kurds. The French Foreign Minister (who has himself just returned from Kurdistan) is also vocally supporting the Kurds, entreating his European counterparts to do likewise.

When ISIS first began its foray in Iraq, there was a great exchange of finger-pointing (“this is Blair’s fault! – No, the fault lies with the non-interventionists, who allowed the Syrian jihadi movement to fester and spread”) but seemingly little talk on how to appropriately respond to the crisis. Why should the US, for example, expend more time and resources bolstering a government that many felt and still feel was largely responsible for creating the ideal environment for jihadi conquest?

The question of appropriate response remains under debate (even with the commencement of airstrikes last week) but concerning the Kurds there seemed – until now – to be a loose consensus: Let them do the fighting for us. When it came to northern Iraq, many commentators felt that the Kurds had it all under control. While ISIS ravaged northern Iraq, Kurds would move into areas that they had historically claimed to be theirs (namely Kirkuk and the surrounding areas) and settle into a tenuous unspoken truce with their new jihadist neighbours. So long as ISIS stayed in Iraq and out of Kurdistan, Kurdish rifles would remain lowered.

June proved to be something of a golden month for Iraqi Kurds. Kurdistan had grown by almost 40% – and all without firing a shot – and the nascent state was gaining long-coveted recognition, most notably from Israel when Netanyahu publicly declared his support for Kurdish statehood and celebrated the Kurds as a “warrior nation”.

Most observers, however, realised quite quickly that the precarious Kurdish-jihadist truce would, in time, become untenable to Kurd and jihadist alike. The uneasy peace eroded and finally shattered last week, and the peshmerga, frightful though its name may sound (‘peshmerga’ means ‘those who face death’ in Kurdish), has been having trouble fighting off the IS militants.

Since the end of World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish fortune has relied heavily on the caprices of global and regional big shots. Kurdish leaders (the most famous being Musafa Barzani, the Middle East's Che Guevara) have often switched allegiances, depending on which alliance would most benefit the nascent Kurdish state at that particular time. Unfortunately, what this has meant is that Kurdish history over the past century has been a long (and at times catastrophic) series of betrayals, culminating with the Saddam genocide in the final years of his war against Iran. 

There are strategic and moral arguments (both, in my mind, equally strong) for intervening to help the Kurds fight against IS and cement their claims of being a sovereign nation. As I wrote last month, after this crisis the Kurds will accept nothing less than de facto independence. The Kurds, as history shows, are not invincible – thank goodness they are finally receiving serious international support.