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The Grand Turk
Turks vow to keep ISIS out of Kobani
2014-10-05
Turkey will do what it can to prevent the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani, near its border with Syria, falling to ISIS insurgents, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said late on Thursday, but stopped short of committing to military action.
Nonsense. Turkey has a modern military. It has NATO equipment and training. "What it can do"?? It can do a lot, and should. Turkish territory should be off-limits to all the Syrian factions from Assad to the ISIS.
Hours before Davutoglu's comments, parliament gave the government powers to order cross-border military incursions against ISIS, and to allow foreign coalition forces to launch similar operations from Turkish territory.

"We wouldn't want Kobani to fall. We'll do whatever we can to prevent this from happening," Davutoglu said in a discussion with journalists broadcast on the A Haber television station, in comments apparently meant to placate Turkey’s Kurdish critics. But later in the two-hour discussion programme, he appeared to pull back from any suggestion that this meant Turkey was planning a military incursion, saying such a move could drag Ankara into a wider conflict along its 900 km border.

"Some are saying 'Why aren't you protecting Kurds in Kobani?' If the Turkish armed forces enter Kobani and the Turkmens from Yayladag ask 'why aren't you saving us?', we would have to go there as well," he said, referring to another ethnic minority in Syria across from a Turkish border town.

"When the Arab citizens across from Reyhanli say 'why don't you save us as well', we’d have to go there too."
All excellent suggestions, by the way...
Defence Minister Ismet Yilmaz was also quoted as telling reporters that it would be wrong to expect imminent military action after the parliamentary motion passed.

ISIS fighters advanced to within a few kilometres of the centre of Kobani on three sides on Thursday, having taken control of hundreds of villages around the town in recent weeks.

More than 180,000 Syrian Kurds have now fled to Turkey to escape the insurgents’ assault, Davutoglu said. Their advance to within clear sight of Turkish military positions on the border has piled pressure on the NATO member to take a more robust stance against the Islamists.

But Ankara remains hesitant, fearing military intervention could deepen the insecurity on its border by strengthening Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and bolster Kurdish fighters linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state. Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan said on Wednesday that peace talks between his group and the Turkish state will come to an end if ISIS militants are allowed to carry out a massacre in Kobani.
If you guys were smarter you'd protect the Syrian Kurds, earn the benefits that come from that, and thus show your own Kurds that you're serious about treating them fairly.
Davutoglu said it was wrong to link the two issues.
Posted by:Steve White

#2  Figure their military should be as efficient as the Germans. Afterall their planes work, right?
Posted by: AlanC   2014-10-05 10:25  

#1  After all the military leadership purges by Yippy to cover his corruption, I wonder just how effective their military really is. Maliki did the same to Iraq and look where that got them
Posted by: Frank G   2014-10-05 08:49  

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