Friday, June 26, 2015

Don't forget their home base


There's understandable focus in the news today on what look like ISIS-inspired attacks in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait.

But the death toll from those combined attacks is swamped by the toll from a single ISIS attack on the previously "liberated" Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani (145 dead). The scale of the assault appears partly due to the Kurdish militias having become overstretched during a successful southward assault towards Raqqa.

Among the bizarre things about the current "debate" over what to do about ISIS is that direct ground intervention against them, or their symbiotic Assad regime counterparts, is off the table. Meanwhile, communities and countries that already have a lot on their plates are left to grieve and cope with the consequences.

Photo: a grieving Kurdish family on the Turkish side of the border. REUTERS/Murad Sezer.

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