Trump gives Turkey green light to attack Kurds in Northern Syria

 (Photo Wikipedia)
 The White House has given the green light to a Turkish offensive into northern Syria, moving US forces out of the area in an abrupt foreign policy change that will in effect abandon the Kurds, Washington’s longtime military partner.
Kurdish forces have spearheaded the campaign against Islamic State in the region, but the policy swerve, after a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday, means Turkey would take custody of captured Isis fighters, the White House said.
It has also raised fears of fresh fighting between Turkey and Kurdish forces in Syria’s complex war now the US no longer acts as a buffer between the two sides.
Trump defended his decision, saying the Kurds were “paid massive amounts of money and equipment” to fight and that he was leaving the fight against Isis to others for the time being.
“We are 7,000 miles away,” he tweeted, while vowing to crush the extremist movement “if they come anywhere near us”.

Iraq launches offensive against Kirkuk

 Iraqi army verhicles in the oilfields of Kirkuk. (Reuters)

Iraqi forces have launched a major offensive over several fronts aimed at retaking the Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk, allegedly causing "lots of casualties" in fighting south of the city.
The federal army, backed by Shia militias, said theiy seized control of the city's international airport, in addition to an oil field, the strategic K1 military base and the Tuz Khurmatu district southeast of Kirkuk on Monday.
Kurdish forces known as the Peshmerga were digging in at the edge of the airport after withdrawing from their positions outside the northern city.
Hundreds of armed Kurdish residents were taking up positions inside the city anticipating an attack.
Residents of the multi-ethnic city, home to about a million Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians, stayed inside and reported hearing sporadic booms they said sounded like shelling and rocket fire.
The Kurdistan Region Security Council said in a statement that the Peshmerga destroyed at least five Humvee armoured vehicles being used by the state-sanctioned militias following the attack south of the city.

Jalal Talabani 1933 - 2017

Jalal Talabani, former Iraqi president and Kurdish politician, has died in Germany aged 84. He was Iraq's president from 2005 to 2014 and a key figure in Iraqi Kurdistan, where voters last week overwhelmingly backed independence in a controversial referendum. A family member said Talabani's health had taken a turn for the worse and he been transported to Germany, along with his wife and two children, before the referendum.
Talabani's death, following a decades-old struggle for Kurdish statehood, came after Iraq's Kurds voted 92.7 percent to split from Iraq in the September 25 referendum.
Talabani was an avuncular politician and a skilled negotiator, who spent years building bridges between the country's divided factions, despite his efforts for Kurdish independence.

HRW: Iraqi Kurds destroy Arab homes and even villages in areas retaken from IS

 Human Rights Watch (HRW) notes that Iraqi Kurdisch peshmerga forces destroyed houses belonging to Arabs in areas the retook from IS in North Iraq / Kurdistan. It ought not to surprise anybody, after Iraq under Saddam for so many years sent Arabs northward with the intention to ''arabize'' Kurdish regions. But it still is disappointing. And of course totally illegal.  
The 80-page HRW report, “Marked With An ‘X’: Iraqi Kurdish Forces’ Destruction of Villages, Homes in Conflict with ISIS,”looked at destruction of homes between September 2014 and May 2016 in disputed areas of Kirkuk and Nineveh governorates, areas nominally under Iraqi government jurisdiction but under Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) control. The destruction, which took place after KRG Peshmerga forces routed Islamic State (also known as ISIS) fighters, targeted Arab homes while leaving Kurdish homes intact. KRG leaders have maintained that these are historically Kurdish areas that they intend to incorporate into the Kurdistan region.

Turkey bombs positions of PKK

Smoke from bombardments rises above the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani. (Photo: Reuters) 

Turkish air force bombed Kurdish fighters of the PKK who were furious over Ankara's refusal to help protect their kin in Syria on Tuesday, Reuters reprioted. The PKK accused Ankara of violating a two-year-old cease-fire with the air strikes, on the eve of a deadline set by the group's jailed leader to salvage a peace process aimed at halting a three-decades-long insurgency.
The Hürriyet daily reported Tuesday that the PKK had been attacking a military outpost in the Dağlıca region. The air operation was the most comprehensive one since the government launched what it calls the settlement process aimed at solving the decades-old Kurdish issue, the daily said. It added that the air strikes caused "major damage" to the PKK.

Protests and demands for an investigation after murder of journalist Garmyani in Iraqi Kurdestan

Garmyani

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has written to the President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Massoud Barazani, to urge his government to carry out a thorough investigation into the murder of journalist Kawa Mohamed Ahmed Garmyani who was shot dead in the town of Kalar in east Kurdistan, Thursday 5 December.
According to IFJ affiliate, the Kurdistan journalists' Syndicate (KJS), its member Garmyani was gunned down at 9pm outside his house. Media reports say that a few days before his murder he had announced on his Facebook page that he had documents relating to a corruption case that he was planning to write about in the local ‘Rayal' magazine, of which he was editor in chief. Garmyani (32) was also a correspondent for the ‘Awene' newspaper. According to reports, Garmyani had been involved in disputes with local politicians because of his investigative reporting and he recently registered a complaint with Garmyan police against one of them.

Syrian Kurds capture Islamist commander and plan to create temporary autonomous government

Syria's Kurds are planning to create a temporary autonomous government to administer Kurdish regions in the north of the war-torn country, Kurdish officials told French press agency AFP on Friday.
"We think that the crisis in Syria will not end anytime soon, so we need to create democratic self-rule in western Kurdistan," said Salih Muslim, head of Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
Western Kurdistan refers to Kurdish majority areas in northern Syria, including Hassakeh province in the northeast of the country and parts of Aleppo province.
"This has been our project since 2007," added Muslim, stressing nonetheless that the government would be temporary.
"This is provisional," he said. "Once there is a broad agreement on the future of Syria, we will put an end to this autonomy."
Shirzad Izidi, a spokesman for the People's Council of Western Kurdistan, another Syrian Kurdish group, confirmed the plans and said the Kurdish administration will take measures to organize elections in Kurdish areas.
“There is an idea also to write an interim constitution so that there will be no vacuum," Izidi told AFP.
Kurdish regions of northern Syria have been administered by local Kurdish councils since regime forces withdrew from the areas in the middle of 2012.
The redeployment was seen as a tactical move by the regime, encouraging the Kurds to avoid allying with the opposition in order to maintain their new-found autonomy.
Kurds represent about 15 percent of the Syrian population, and are mostly concentrated in the northern part of the country.
Earlier this week, Kurdish fighters expelled militants from the town of Ras al-Ain and the nearby border crossing with Turkey, and fighting between the groups was continuing elsewhere in Hassakeh province in north-east Syria.

Source: AFP The town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border was deserted on Sunday 21 July.  According to the London based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights fights around the town are still raging on after the Kurds on Saturday captured a military commander of the al-Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS), whose name is Abu Musab. Earlier the Kurds expelled the Islamists from the town of Ras al-Ayn in the Hasaka province. According to the Observatory at least 54 men were killed in five days of fighting, 35  from the Islamists and 19 militants from the Kurdish forces, mainly form the Popular Protection Units YPG.

Human Rights Watch: Attacks by Iran and Turkey on Kurdish insurgents in N-Iraq target also civilians

Inspecting the damage after a Turkish bombardment.

Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm on 2 September over attacks by Turkey and Iran on Kurdish rebels operating from North Iraq. Iran is targeting militants of the Party for a Free Life of Kurdistan PJAK, Turkey attacks the KurdistanWorkers Party PKK, which is associated with the PJAK.
Human Rights Watch asserted  that apart from the fighters of these groups who were killed, Iran en Turkey did not spare the civilian population of the border areas and may even have had in  mind to depopulate these areas. The organisation asserted that Iran and Turkey’s cross-border attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan have killed at least 10 civilians and displaced hundreds since mid-July 2011. And as HRW put it, 'some of the attacks may have been carried out without sufficient attempts to ensure minimal impact on civilians', .

The attacks are aimed along the northern and eastern borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. When Human Rights Watch visited those areas in August, Iraqi residents and officials said that many of the targeted areas are purely civilian and are not being used by the armed groups. Evidence suggests that the regular Iranian bombardments may be an attempt to force Iraqi civilians out of some areas near the Iranian border, according to HRW.


Iran started its cross-border attacks in northern Iraq in mid-June. Since mid-July, Iran’s operations against PJAK inside or near villages close to the Iranian border have led to the displacement of hundreds of families, caused the deaths of at least three villagers, and wounded an unknown number of people, according to international humanitarian aid organizations, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials, and media reports. Farmers from the border regions told Human Rights Watch in early August that the shelling had damaged their homes and that they saw Iranian soldiers cross the border into Iraq and kill farmers’ livestock. The attacks on civilians and their property that they described were similar to attacks documented by Human Rights Watch in June 2010.

Turkey started its operations on August 18.  On August 21, according to Iraqi officials, Turkish warplanes bombed a vehicle carrying civilians. The attack killed seven members of the same extended family according to relatives of those killed, local officials, and media workers. Turkey denied its planes were responsible.

The family group, which included four children, was driving on a highly travelled main roadway in a white 2011 Nissan pickup truck from the village of Bole to Rania to visit relatives. Shamal Hassan told Human Rights Watch on August 29 that the attack instantly killed his wife, Rezan, and his daughters, Solin, two months old, and Sonya, 18 months old. The attack also killed his wife’s parents and two other children.
An emotional Hassan told Human Rights Watch, “The attack was so destructive that we couldn’t recognize their bodies. I want the international community to hold Turkey accountable. They ruined my life.”
 While the Turkish military said that it has killed more than 145 suspected PKK militants with artillery fire and airstrikes in northern Iraq since August 17, it has denied that its warplanes killed the family, saying only that news footage of the destroyed vehicle was not consistent with damage caused by Turkish aerial bombardment. However, Turkish officials have stated that Turkish warplanes were bombing multiple military targets, such as anti-aircraft guns and ammunitions caches, in the area at the time.

Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said that cross-borders attacks in northern Iraq is a recurrent phenomenon in northern Iraq. “Year after year, civilians in northern Iraq have suffered from these cross-border attacks,' Stork said, 'but the situation right now is dire. Iran and Turkey should do all they can to protect civilians and their property from harm, no matter what the reason for their attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan.'