This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/world/middleeast/isis-syria-coalition-strikes.html

The article has changed 17 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 11 Version 12
Syria Border Town, Kobani, Falling to ISIS, Leader of Turkey Says Turkish Inaction On ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S.
(about 5 hours later)
MURSITPINAR, Turkey — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said Tuesday that the Syrian border town of Kobani, under siege from Islamic State fighters, was about to fall to the militants despite United States-led airstrikes on the group. MURSITPINAR, Turkey — As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.
Asserting that aerial attacks alone may not be enough to stop the fighters’ advance, Mr. Erdogan called for more support for insurgents in Syria who are battling the Islamic State, and reiterated Turkey’s earlier call for a no-fly zone and a buffer zone along the border. Yet he stopped short of committing Turkey to any ground operation, something he has long said would require an international agreement and a no-fly zone. While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending bloodbath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.
His comments highlighted a key sticking point between Turkey and Washington: President Obama wants Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State, while Mr. Erdogan wants the American effort to focus more on ousting Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Turkey has long supported the armed opposition to Mr. Assad. But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.
“There has to be cooperation with those who are fighting on the ground,” Mr. Erdogan said, addressing Syrian refugees at a camp in Gaziantep, a border province west of Kobani. Mr. Erdogan has also resisted pleas to send his troops across the border in the absence of a no-fly zone to ward off the Syrian Air Force.
But to the Syrian and Turkish Kurds watching in increasing desperation from hilltops here on Tuesday, the ground force that needs immediate help is the Kurdish group fighting the Islamic State in the streets of Kobani, the People’s Protection Committees. They believe that given Turkey’s long history of tensions with its Kurdish population, Mr. Erdogan sees the group, known as the Y.P.G., as an enemy and an even greater threat than the Islamic State. Even as it stepped up airstrikes against the militants Tuesday, the Obama administration was frustrated by what it regards as Turkey’s excuses for not doing more militarily. Officials note, for example, that the American-led coalition, with its heavy rotation of flights and airstrikes, has effectively imposed a no-fly zone over northern Syria already, so Mr. Erdogan’s demand for such a zone rings hollow.
Such complications are part of the tangled mix of alliances and enmities that have challenged the American effort to battle the Islamic State without wading deeper into the Syrian conflict. “There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” a senior administration official said. “After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe.
Not long after Mr. Erdogan spoke, an airstrike hit less than a mile to the southwest of Kobani, also known as Ain al-Arab, sending a black plume skyward. Residents said the target appeared to be an Islamic State tank that had been shelling the city for two days. Two more strikes followed in the same area in less than an hour. “This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to avoid publicly criticizing an ally.
Several other airstrikes hit Islamic State positions overnight and Tuesday morning on the southern and eastern outskirts of the town, said Barwar Mohammad Ali, a coordinator with the Kurdish Y.P.G. force who was reached by telephone inside Kobani. Secretary of State John Kerry has had multiple phone calls in the last 72 hours with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to try to resolve the border crisis, American officials said.
“It is the first time that people have the impression that the airstrikes are effective,” Mr. Ali said, referring to Kurdish fighters on the front lines. “But they need more.” For Mr. Obama, a split with Turkey would jeopardize his efforts to hold together a coalition of Sunni Muslim countries to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. While Turkey is not the only country that might put the ouster of Mr. Assad ahead of defeating the radical Sunnis of the Islamic State, the White House has strongly argued that the immediate threat is from the militants.
He said street fighting had continued on Tuesday and that Y.P.G. fighters had killed numerous attackers and captured 20, including 10 foreigners. But if Turkey remains a holdout, it could cause other fissures in the coalition. It is not only a NATO ally but the main transit route for foreigners seeking to enlist in the ranks of the Islamic State.
The American military confirmed four new airstrikes on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL: one strike south of Kobani that destroyed three armed vehicles and damaged another; another strike to the southeast that hit antiaircraft artillery, and two to the southwest that damaged a tank and “destroyed an ISIL unit.” Ultimately, American officials said, the Islamic State cannot be pushed back without ground troops that are drawn from the ranks of the Syrian opposition. But until those troops are trained, equipped and put in the field, something that will take some time, officials said, Turkey can play a vital role.
But there was little joy among the crowds of Kurdish men watching the battle unfold just across the border fence, many of whom had only recently fled the town or had relatives there. “We have anticipated that it will be easier to protect population centers and to support offensives on the ground in Iraq, where we have partners” in the Kurdish pesh merga fighters and the Iraqi Army, said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “Clearly, in Syria, it will take more time to develop the type of partners on the ground with whom we can coordinate.”
One spectator, Mahmoud Nabo, 35, a Syrian Kurd who left his home in Kobani after Y.P.G. fighters urged civilians to evacuate on Monday, said airstrikes would have a limited effect since Islamic state militants move in small groups. They would work, he said, only if Kurdish fighters were given weapons and ammunition. For this reason, the official said, the military strategy in Syria so far has focused on “denying ISIL safe haven and degrading critical infrastructure — like command and control and mobile oil refineries — that they use to support their operations in Iraq.”
“Now I can see the shelling is getting closer to my neighborhood,” he said, pointing to the western side of the city. “We thought everything would stop after the first airstrike on ISIS, but now it is closer and more frequent.” Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, said he was confident that the president’s recently -appointed special envoy for Syria, retired Gen. John R. Allen, would be able to resolve some logistical issues regarding the Turkish military’s participation in the coalition. But he acknowledged that Turkey’s differing view of the need to oust Mr. Assad was likely to come up.
Another spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from the nearby Turkish town of Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids. While the diplomacy went ahead, the United States took pains to emphasize its support for the embattled Kurds in Kobani.
He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the Y.P.G. and listening to warplanes circling overhead. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said. The military’s Central Command confirmed on Tuesday that coalition aircraft had carried out five airstrikes against Islamic State positions in the Kobani area in the past two days, destroying or damaging armed vehicles, artillery, a tank and troop positions.
Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey for the delay in stronger American-led strikes. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.” The strikes brought the total number of airstrikes in and around Kobani to 18 — out of more than 100 in Syria altogether — since the air campaign was extended from Iraq to Syria.
Kobani is cut off from the east, west and south by the well-armed Islamic State fighters. To the north, refugees and fighters face the border fence with Turkey – a barrier to resupplying the Y.P.G. The Turkish authorities have refused to allow the group to receive supplies and weapons unless it meets a set of demands that are virtually impossible politically. But Kurdish fighters in Kobani said they were running out of ammunition and could not prevail without infusions of troops and arms from Turkey. Independent analysts and some influential members of Congress concurred, deriding the airstrikes in Kobani as too little, too late.
Turkey wants the group to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him, and to dismantle its semiautonomous zone inside Syria. But the Y.P.G. and its affiliated political party accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government. “This is yet another situation in which the Islamic State’s personnel and heavy weapons have been readily visible and vulnerable to U.S. airstrikes,” Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “Instead of decisive action, the ISIL advance was met with only a handful of airstrikes. This morning’s escalated efforts may be too late.”
Turkey also wants the party to distance itself from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which the Turkish government and the United States consider a terrorist group. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, issued an unusually strong call for the world to take “concrete action” to prevent Kobani from falling into control of the Islamic State.
That impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities when border crossings are closed. “The world, all of us, will regret deeply if ISIS is able to take over a city which has defended itself with courage but is close to not being able to do so. We need to act now,” he said.
Turkish soldiers have stood by and watched the fighting from their armored vehicles, and have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State. The fight along the sloping hills of Kobani, a Kurdish farming enclave, comes as neighboring Iraq is still groping to translate aerial bombardments against the Islamic State into momentum on the ground. It is further fragmenting Syria, cutting off Kurdish areas in the northeast.
Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, one of many instances in which Turkish security forces have used it against crowds of demonstrators, journalists, and would-be fighters and refugees. Kurdish men packed the streets of Suruc to protest Turkish policy. And it has left the Kurds feeling abandoned, even though they are the sort of vulnerable minority group that President Obama has made a priority of protecting — political moderates who have women fighting alongside men and have provided refuge for internally displaced Syrians of many ethnicities.
More than 180,000 people have already fled the fighting around Kobani, which in addition to its own population had hosted tens of thousands of displaced Syrians. Turkey is already hosting more than 1.5 million Syrians, shouldering an enormous economic and political burden. “Now I can see the shelling is getting closer to my neighborhood,” said Mahmoud Nabo, 35, a Syrian Kurd, pointing to the western side of town, which he fled Monday as Kurdish fighters urged civilians to evacuate. “We thought everything would stop after the first airstrike on ISIS, but now it is closer and more frequent.”
But on Monday, about 200 civilians who crossed into Turkey from Kobani were detained by Turkish authorities, according to one of the detainees, Mustafa Bali, reached by phone in a Turkish border village called Ali Kor. Buses took them from an official border crossing to a gymnasium, where they are still being detained, he said. Analysts say the Kurds of Kobani are being held hostage as Mr. Erdogan seeks to wrest concessions not only from Washington but also from Kurdish leaders, his longtime domestic foes.
Young men in the group, which also included women and children, were interrogated and asked about Y.P.G. leaders and their relations with them, he said. The aim, said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is to weaken Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in peace talks with the Turkish government.
“I was locked alone in a room for four hours,” said Mr. Bali, a Syrian Kurdish activist. “They checked my phone and text messages and asked me questions about specific names in the Y.P.G. in a very insulting way. They told us we will be released when they are done with our procedure, but I don’t know what kind of procedure a refugee receives.” Turkey also wants the Kurdish fighters to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him. But the fighters and local political leaders accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government. In some places they have fought alongside government troops.
Meanwhile, one person died and dozens were injured throughout Turkey after the police confronted crowds protesting the siege of Kobani on Tuesday. Local authorities issued a curfew for Mardin, a predominantly Kurdish town in the country’s east, to ensure public safety, CNN Turk news television reported. The impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities, who have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State.
In Istanbul, pro-Kurdish demonstrators gathered in the Bagcilar, Kadikoy, Esenyurt and Sarigazi districts to protest the advance of the Islamic State fighters, burning vehicles as barriers against the police, who used tear gas and water cannon to disperse the crowds. Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, as Kurdish men packed the streets of the town of Suruc to protest Turkish policy; demonstrations broke out in several cities across Turkey. In Diyarbakir, at least 10 people were killed and more than 20 were injured in clashes between sympathizers of a pro-Kurdish party and a group known for its Islamic affiliations, while the authorities ordered schools to close in several southeastern cities, the Haberturk news channel reported.
Turkey’s pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party called Tuesday for rallies across the country to demand that the governing Justice and Development Party open a humanitarian aid corridor between Turkey and Kobani to assist the thousands trapped in the Syrian border town. On one small stretch of the border near Kobani, a fleeing Syrian Kurd, Omar Alloush, said a Turkish soldier had looked on as an Islamic State fighter addressed Syrian Kurds across the border fence, telling them they were welcome to return as long as they abided by the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam.
Pro-government channels defined the protests as acts of provocation by Kurdish separatists against the government. “We will never trust those people,” Mr. Alloush, a member of a Kurdish political party in Kobani, said by telephone.
Yet another hillside spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids.
He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the People’s Protection Committees, a Kurdish group known as Y.P.G. that is battling the Islamic State in the town’s streets. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said.
Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.”