The Terrorist IS Militia Stays on the Offensive

This Thursday, the siege of the north Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani will be exactly one month old. Every TV network takes us nightly to this battleground during its foreign news segment. Whichever network you watch, the pictures are the same and only the assessments differ. Still, a trend is discernible whereby the Kurdish defenders are being slowly but inexorably pushed back.

What exactly is happening—insofar as anyone can actually tell – isn’t apparent in the media reports. The monitoring centers for human rights in faraway Europe are nonetheless able to give us precise casualty figures. In the battle for Kobani, the German Press Agency reports at least 662 deaths.

The People’s Protection Units commonly known as the YPG have lost 258 soldiers compared to the Islamic State group’s 374 killed. Beyond that, 20 civilians—including 10 allies of the YPG—have been killed.

But the momentum probably belongs to the Islamist attackers who learned this week that they can continue to count on Turkey. Neither the U.N. general secretary nor Secretary of State John Kerry has been successful in convincing the Turkish president to send troops across the border into Syria to support the Kurds — assuming the Turkish president had even seriously tried to do so.

Anyone wondering how U.S. pilots attacking from above are able to tell which houses are occupied by militia troops and which by the Islamic State group now has an answer: It’s not always successful, but they have yet to admit that. A news report from Rudaw, an Iraqi-Kurdish Internet site, claims that a misdirected American air attack killed six YPG soldiers and one civilian female.

What the reporter then said sounds dramatic: Two-thirds of Kobani was already under YPG control, but medical and first aid materials were scarce. Idris Nassan reported that all important supplies such as bandages, antibiotics and anesthetics were running out and the injured were dying because they were receiving no treatment.

The militia has regained significant ground against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. special envoy retired General John Allen. From official U.S. sources, we hear only success stories which, because of their uniformity and lack of confirmation, raise the suspicion that they may have been written before the battles ever took place. That the air attacks are very expensive, cost many lives and are nonetheless politically motivated we learn only from people independent of the government such as General Allen whose report contrasted with the official Pentagon line that the jihadi had scored several successes.

That’s how determination is demonstrated on the international stage. When interviewed, France’s President François Hollande, U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Rienzi expressed their unified opposition to the Islamic State group according to a statement from the French leader.