U.S. Airdrops Weapons to Questionable Kurdish Fighters
The move coincides with Turkey's reluctant decision to allow Kurdish military aid across its borders.
People watch the Syrian town of Kobani from a hill Monday near the Mursitpinar crossing in Turkey. The U.S. has dropped weapons, ammunition and medical supplies to Syrian Kurdish fighters around Kobani.
Syria's crumbling security situation has become a catastrophe so severe that the U.S. has been cornered into tactics previously considered off-limits as it tries to beat back the Islamic State group.
The U.S. has for the first time airdropped supplies and weapons to forces on the ground in Syria, hoping to bolster the Kurdish fighters defending the town of Kobani from an Islamic State group onslaught.
The move poses a risk: The militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is classified as a terrorist group by the U.S., the European Union and NATO, and is allied with the Kurds fighting the Islamic State group in Kobani. The PKK has a decades-long history of tension with the Turkish government, which initially refused to allow Iraqi Kurds to pass through the border to bolster their compatriots in neighboring Syria and opposed the U.S. arming Kurdish fighters there. Turkish officials relented Monday on the border issue as fighting in Kobani continues.
The PKK also has previously cooperated with President Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, prompting further concern as Assad’s forces continue their simultaneous and gruesome civil war with opposition fighters there.
[READ: Kobani May Fall as Turks Stand By]
“The enemy is in Kobani, so everything we can do to kill ISIL forces around Kobani, we’re going to do,” Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said Monday morning, using the U.S. government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State group, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. “The focus is on the enemy. The focus is on ISIL, so we will fight ISIL wherever they are.”
The U.S. previously had refused to overtly add weapons into the chaos in Syria, now well into its fourth year of civil war. President Barack Obama and his administration had placed the emphasis of the current U.S. effort largely on Iraq, where Islamic State group forces continue to advance on Baghdad and other areas. The U.S. has been involved in a protracted conflict in Iraq over the last decade, and is again seeking to restore order and governance to the oil-rich nation.
Military officials, including U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Lloyd Austin, in recent days have referenced the high concentration of Islamic State group targets in Kobani to justify a shifting emphasis from Iraq to Syria. Of the 533 total U.S. airstrikes since August, 135 have been on or around Kobani, predominantly in the last two weeks.
Over the weekend, the U.S. dropped 28 bundles of supplies, including medical equipment, light small-arms weapons and ammunition, per requests from the Kurdish fighters in Kobani. The U.S. coordinated the request through its presence in Irbil, the Kurdish capital of Iraq, and the supplies came from increasingly strained Kurdish supply centers in Iraq.
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Of the 28 bundles, 27 reportedly reached their intended targets, Warren said. One “drifted off course” and was destroyed by a U.S. airstrike. Warren would not comment on the contents of that bundle.
Warren also declined to speak to the limits of what the U.S. is willing to ship to Kurdish fighters in Syria. He did not say whether there were any legal restrictions on what the U.S. could transport, but said it is important to note that all supplies were Kurdish, not American. Kurdish forces on the ground in Syria have asked for heavy weapons to help offset their well-supplied and armed Islamic State foes.
“Clearly the emergency right now in Iraq is foremost in our thinking,” retired Marine Gen. John Allen said last week. The Obama administration tapped the former U.S. Central Command chief and Iraq veteran to coordinate the U.S.-led mission to defeat the extremist group.
Allen also added that the U.S. is not currently coordinating strikes with opposition forces on the ground in Syria. The rebels face two fronts in the Assad regime and the Islamic State invaders.
