For many Kurds in Syria, the U.S.-led air strikes against ISIS couldn’t come soon enough, as the radical Islamists slowly creep north in their advance toward the Turkish border.
Kurdish sources in the town. and another monitoring group, said on Wednesday that nine Kurdish fighters who were captured were all beheaded. These included three women, whose heads were placed on concrete blocks in the ISIS-held city of Jarablous.
According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the nine Kurds were captured during fighting over the northern Syrian town of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab.
Meanwhile, a Syrian official confirmed that 17 people, including 10 children, were killed in twin explosions near a school in the central city of Homs.
The Associated Press released the pictures of the three women’s heads on the concrete blocks but as yet the images have not been verified.
Parwer Mohammed Ali, a translator with the PYD Kurdish group, told Reuters by telephone from Kobani, “Today, American jets hit a village that is 4-5 km (2-3 miles) southeast of Kobani and we heard they destroyed one (Islamic State) tank.”
Saleh Muslim, the head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has close links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, said that his calls for arms from America had so far been unsuccessful.
He told Reuters , “We are asking everybody who can help us to provide weapons to the people fighting against tanks and artillery, but nobody is doing anything. There will be many who are martyred. We have sent messages to the Europeans and the United States, but I think there are obstacles… Turkey and other countries are preventing this because they don’t want the Kurds to be able to defend themselves.”
With many recent reports suggesting that U.S-led air strikes against ISIS are, on the whole, ineffective, it does seem that the best course of action for the Obama administration, short of sending ground troops to Syria itself, is to heavily arm the Kurdish fighters, and other groups, so they can put a stop to the spread of ISIS in the region once and for all.
