U.S. and Turkish Governments Clash Over What to Do About ISIS Threat to Syrian Town of Kobani

U.S. and Turkey at Odds as Islamic State Advances on Kobani

Ayla Albayrak, Nour Malas and Julian E. Barnes

Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2014

Islamic State have apparently taken position on Mistenur Hill, a strategic vantage point that looks over the city of Kobani. Violent protests erupt in Turkey. WSJ’s Mark Kelly reports.

Turkey and the U.S. warned that a major Syrian border city was in imminent danger of falling to Islamic State, with the two countries putting the onus on the other to halt the extremist group’s advance.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed the U.S.-led coalition on Tuesday to move ahead with plans to arm and train Syrian and Iraqi ground forces to battle Islamic State, saying airstrikes alone weren’t enough.

An American military official said the U.S. believes the situation in the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani is increasingly dire, and that the city is likely to fall shortly if Turkey doesn’t intervene.

The complications for Turkey stemming from the advance on Kobani were mounting rapidly. Beyond U.S. pressure to step in, protests by the country’s restive Kurds were spreading quickly. At least a dozen people were killed in clashes with security forces in several Kurdish-majority cities, local media reported. The demonstrations reached Istanbul.

Airstrikes Tuesday by the coalition fighting Islamic State hit positions near Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab. But Kurdish officials and Syrian opposition members said the militants were still advancing against Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Mr. Erdogan declared Kobani was “about to fall” while he was visiting a refugee camp in the border province of Gaziantep.

“You can’t end this terrorism just by airstrikes,” he said. “If you don’t support them on the ground by cooperating with those who take up a ground operation, the airstrikes won’t do it.”

The U.S. and its partners have conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State in recent weeks. But they have so far ruled out the deployment of their own ground forces, opting instead to train and support local forces.

U.S. defense officials reiterated Tuesday that they are not going to directly coordinate operations with any force on the ground in Syria until at least some of the vetted moderate rebels have been through upcoming military training and are ready to enter the fight.

“We are not there now. We need a core of trained fighters,” the U.S. military official said.

U.S. defense officials said while they remain deeply concerned about the city, there is little they can do to push back the Islamic State advance.

“We are applying pressure where we can,” said the military official. “The limitation of not having a partner on the ground has proved challenging.”

Another complication is the fight around Kobani is being led by a Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Aiding or cooperating with those local Syrian Kurds poses problems for Turkey and the U.S. which both designate the PKK a terrorist group.

The advance on Kobani, which has unfolded within view of Turkish border towns, has pitted Turkey against its Western allies. The U.S. would like to see Turkey play a larger role in the international coalition to combat Islamic State, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. The U.S. has pressed Turkey to step in in Kobani as well.

View SlideshowAgence-France Presse/Getty Images

But Turkey has refused to join the coalition. Ankara is demanding that the U.S. first commit to a broader strategy that includes combating what Turkey views as the other great threat at its doorstep: the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Turkey has reinforced its more than 500-mile-long border with Syria, positioning tanks pointed at Kobani hilltops. It is under increasing pressure to wade into a fight it has so far resisted joining.

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, the Obama administration’s special envoy in the fight against Islamic State, and Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of state, will visit Ankara this week to discuss Turkey’s military participation in the coalition.

Kobani represents a quandary for the U.S., which has tried to limit its military involvement in Syria. The U.S. goal in Syria is to cripple Islamic State’s ability tosupport its operations in Iraq. Based on that approach, the city isn’t strategically vital to the U.S. mission. Nonetheless, U.S. officials said they don’t want it to fall because of humanitarian considerations.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday evening and again on Tuesday morning about the situation in Kobani and the broader threat of Islamic State, Ms. Psaki said. (More: U.S. Apache Helicopters Join Battle Against Islamic State)

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Davutoglu discussed how it is “horrific for everyone to watch in real time what’s happening in Kobani,” Ms. Psaki said. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the administration is “very concerned” about the plight of civilians in Kobani.

Before the civil war, an estimated 400,000 people lived in the city and hundreds of surrounding villages, which are now mostly under Islamic State control and evacuated. An estimated 180,000 from the region fled to Turkey in recent weeks.

The battle for the city and its surroundings has vexed Turkey for weeks, creating chaos at the frontier with Syria at a time when officials are trying to double down on border security.

“Kobani is falling and the Turkish army is watching, but it’s not that simple,” said Marc Pierini, a former European Union ambassador to Turkey and visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, a think tank. “It could have been meaningfully acted upon two weeks ago or so, when Islamic State was kilometers away. Now it is almost too late.”

As the U.S. prepares to add Apache helicopters in the battle against ISIS, what other military options does the U.S. have? Col. Cedric Leighton and Simon Constable discuss. Photo: Getty

Amid fierce fighting against Kurdish militias defending Kobani, Islamic State fighters pushed into three of the city’s eastern neighborhoods for the first time on Monday and hoisted at least two of their black flags.

Fighting persisted in those districts Tuesday, particularly along an avenue leading to the city center, according to Sheikh Hasan, a senior Kurdish defense official in the Kobani district.

The U.S. has increased the tempo of its military operations around Kobani in the past several days. Since Sept. 27, the U.S. has conducted 18 strikes near Kobani, including 10 since Saturday, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command. The U.S. has conducted 104 strikes in Syria since Sept. 23.

If Kobani falls, the security of Kurdish-majority regions that have long enjoyed a de facto autonomy from Iraqi and Syrian governments could be in jeopardy. Kobani’s fate carries other important implications for Turkey, which hosts its own restive Kurdish population. The fighting is driving a wedge in a delicate domestic process to forge peace with Kurdish separatists in Turkey, who are now helping their brethren in Syria fight Islamic State.

Any Turkish intervention would be very divisive domestically. Turks largely oppose an intervention on behalf of the separatist Kurds from PKK, who fought a three-decade war with Turkey.

Kurds in Turkey accuse the government in Ankara of not doing enough to protect them and obstructing them from going to Syria to defend Kurds there. In towns along the Syrian and Iraqi borders, they staged protests Monday night against Turkey’s nonintervention, accusing the government of supporting Islamic State.

Protests spread to a number of Kurdish-majority cities late Tuesday, despite a curfew imposed by security forces. They also spread to large cities with Kurdish populations, including Istanbul, where clashes between riot police and demonstrators went on until late Tuesday night.

The relative autonomy that Syrian Kurds gained in the civil war and the military buildup by Kurdish units inside Syria at the Turkish border has rattled Turkey, which is in peace talks with the PKK and is now using the battle at Kobani to squeeze concessions from the group and its Syrian affiliate, said a Western diplomat and analysts.

Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said the PKK is a terrorist organization, just as Islamic State is.

“Today, one may be seen as less dangerous than the other, but at the end of the day, both are terrorists.”

Kurdish fighters, meanwhile, are angling for international military aid, and have criticized the international response to the Islamic State threat.

Asya Abdullah, co-chairwoman of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party, called for the coalition to arm Kurdish militants with antitank missiles, saying the Kurds were fighting a difficult and uneven battle. She said the Kurds won’t surrender to Islamic State.

“Today it has been 23 days that we have fought Islamic State on our own, and we are fighting their tanks with light weapons,” she said.