Robert Ellis
The siege of Kobani from September 2014 until January 2015 and its heroic defense by Kurdish forces in northern Syria was the turning point in the war against the Islamic State. Now, with the fall of the Assad regime, Kobani will once again play a key role in preventing a resurgence of the infamous terrorist group.
At that time, it was a combination of coalition air strikes and U.S. air drops of weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies, together with reinforcements of Kurdish peshmerga from Iraq, that delivered the victory. This also led to the U.S. decision to arm and train Syrian opposition forces, which resulted in the formation of the Kurdish-led SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) and paved the way for the defeat of ISIS at Raqqa in October 2017.
At the height of the battle, French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy criticized Turkey for choosing the Islamic State over the Kurds and Turkish president Erdogan, “whose judgment has been clouded by his obsessional fear of seeing an embryonic Kurdish state created just outside his border.”
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