Islamic State Closes in on Kurdish Area of Syria
The AP reports that militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are closing in on Kobani, the majority-Kurdish city on Syria’s border with Turkey – an advance the wire says is thus far “unhindered” by U.S.-led airstrikes.
ISIS fighters pounded Kobani “with mortars and artillery shells, advancing within three miles of the Kurdish frontier city, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Nawaf Khalil, a Kurdish official.
“The Islamic extremists intensified their shelling of the border region following U.S.-led strikes Saturday. The aerial assault appeared to have done little to thwart the militants, Kurdish officials and activists said, adding that if anything, the extremists seemed more determined to seize the area.”
“Instead of pushing them back, now every time they hear the planes, they shell more,” said Ahmad Sheikho, an activist on the border, said of ISIS.
Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Hassan Hassan writes that what strength the U.S. is taking from ISIS via its airstrikes, the group will gain in legitimacy among Syrian civilians.
“Air strikes against Isis were inevitable, as the group’s advances towards Baghdad, Erbil and northern Syria seemed irreversible by local forces. But the way the US-led coalition, which the U.K. has now joined, has conducted itself so far threatens to worsen the situation in favor of ISIS.
“Most importantly, by overlooking the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which caused the death of nearly 200,000 Syrians, the airstrikes create the perception that the international coalition is providing a lifeline to the regime. Despite repeated reassurance by Washington, such a perception is likely to become entrenched if the Assad regime begins to fill the vacuum left by the offensive against ISIS, especially that there has been no evidence yet that the opposition forces are part of the military strategy against ISIS.”
Syria Says It Backs International Fight Against ISIS
Reuters reports that Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem told the United Nations General Assembly that military action to tackle ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremists “should coincide with cutting off their flow of funds, weapons, fighters and training.”
“It is due time to pool all our efforts against this terrorism, since imminent danger is surrounding everyone and no country is immune to it,” he told the gathering, warning that any military action must respect a country’s sovereignty.
U.S. Struggles with Missteps in Assessment of ISIS Threat
The New York Times says that “by late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists in Syria … Just as worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale among troops next door in Iraq.
“But the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into Iraq. ‘Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it,’ said a senior American intelligence official. ‘They were preoccupied with other crises,’ the official added. ‘This just wasn’t a big priority.’
“The White House denies that, but the threat certainly has its attention now as American warplanes pound the extremist group calling itself the Islamic State in hopes of reversing its lightning-swift seizing of territory in Iraq and Syria. Still, even as bombs fall from the sky thousands of miles away, the question of how it failed to anticipate the rise of a militant force that in the space of a few months has redrawn the map of the Middle East resonates inside and outside the Obama administration.”