Turkish Kurds Enter Syria to Fight ISIS

[Valin]

The Feed:

7/15/14

 

Almost a thousand armed Turkish Kurds have entered Syria to rescue the Syrian Kurdish city of Korbane from ISIS militants. The AFP reports:

 

 

“At least 800 Kurdish fighters crossed the Turkish-Syrian border to help their comrades in Ain al-Arab (Kobane in Kurdish), which is under total siege by Islamic State jihadists,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

 

A Kurdish Syrian activist said the flow of fighters came as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), blacklisted in Turkey as a terrorist organisation, gave orders for Kurdish fighters to move to protect Kobane.

 

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As a recent analysis in the Financial Times points out, any independent Kurdistan would be heavily dependent on Turkey, both to export its oil and to import the majority of its food. Ankara must see the advantages of this scenario, while the Kurds clearly view this situation as preferable to staying in a chaotic Iraq.

 

War, even more than politics, makes strange bedfellows. Turkey’s embrace of Kurdish independence seemed surprising as the mess in Iraq began to unfold. But taking these bits of news together, perhaps it should not have been: a friendly Kurdish buffer state to Turkey’s south is surely better than the alternatives.