Turkey's president said Kobani was "about to fall" after Islamic State fighters advanced into the south west of the Syrian Kurdish town, pressing home a three-week assault has cost a reported 400 lives.
The prospect that the town on the Turkish border could be captured by the militants has increased pressure on Turkey, with the strongest army in the region, to join an international coalition to fight against Islamic State.
Islamic State wants to take Kobani in order to strengthen its grip on the border area and consolidate the territorial gains it has made in Iraq and Syria in recent months. U.S.-led air strikes have so far failed to prevent its advance on Kobani.
The prospects, once the city is in the hands of ISIS, as Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the Atlantic, are for “A Terrible Slaughter.”
It is now too late to be prevented and the lesson, according to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan bombing would not be enough.
"The problem of ISIS (Islamic State) ... cannot be solved via air bombardment. Right now ... Kobani is about to fall," he said during a visit to a camp for Syrian refugees. "We had warned the West. We wanted three things. No-fly zone, a secure zone parallel to that, and the training of moderate Syrian rebels.”
And perhaps those will not be enough to prevent the next Kobani.
In the wake of the November 5, 2009 Fort Hood shootings, Steve Hayes and I wrote about the FBI’s and Defense Department’s many failures with respect to Major Nidal Malik Hasan. Part of the piece focused on Hasan’s emails to al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki, which had not been made public at the time. Awlaki was subsequently killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has released a martyrdom statement for Anwar al Awlaki, the al Qaeda cleric who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month. AQAP claims – like many critics of the strike – that slaying Awlaki violated American law because the U.S. government “did not prove any crime” and “never presented any proof against” Awlaki and Samir Khan, who was also killed in the strike. The argument goes that, as Americans, Awlaki and Khan were deprived of their right to due process.
The radical Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was killed in north Yemen today. Awlaki served as a key conduit for foreign fighters into Yemen and is believed to have directed several recent attacks against the United States.
Anwar al Awlaki has reportedly been killed in an airstrike in Yemen, bringing an end to the life of one of al Qaeda’s most effective recruiters. Awlaki had an especially strong appeal in the West, where an unknown (but surely significant) number of recruits joined al Qaeda’s jihad after viewing his sermons in English.
Catherine Herridge of Fox News reports that Anwar al-Awlaki might have a connection to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. At least, that is what the House Homeland Security Committee is currently investigating.
In August 2010, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the U.S. government on behalf of al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki. The two organizations questioned the government’s right to put Awlaki on a “kill list” and argued that the “government’s refusal to disclose the standard by which it determines to target U.S. citizens for death independently violates the Constitution.” The complaint continued:
When it comes to homeland security, President Obama’s first year in office was a nightmare. In September, Nidal Malik Hasan, a radicalized Army major, murdered 13 defense department employees at Ft. Hood, Texas.
“Don’t consult with anyone in fighting the Americans; fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance.”
So said Anwar al Awlaki in a video released online on Monday. Awlaki is, of course, the notorious al Qaeda cleric who openly claims Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan (aka the Fort Hood shooter) and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab (who tried to blow up Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009) as his “students.”
Cartoonist Molly Norris will no longer be publishing in the Seattle Weekly or in Seattle's City Arts magazine, according a report from the Seattle Weekly. Why? Because she's scared for her life after publishing this cartoon, as part of "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day":
Legal activist groups filed an extraordinary lawsuit yesterday to prevent the U.S. military and CIA from undertaking the "targeted killing" of persons suspected of posing a terrorist threat to the U.S.