Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, linked the two groups directly on Oct. 25, 2023, stating: “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.” President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made similar comparisons. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas killing families “brings to mind the worst of ISIS.”

There are plenty of reasons for Israel to want the world to think Hamas is ISIL – including the hope of marshaling the sort of overseas support that led to the 2014 creation of the 86-member Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL. In fighting between 2014 and 2019, the coalition reclaimed all the territory the Islamic State group had seized in Iraq and Syria.

And it is true that the Oct. 7 attack displayed tactics that are remarkably similar to those of the Islamic State group. But as a scholar of ISIL specifically, and Middle Eastern militants in general, I am inclined to agree with those who say the comparison between the two terrorist groups overlooks their underlying differences. The similarities are on the surface, in methods and tactics – but their goals and ideologies remain vastly different.

Fundamental differences

As various news articles have pointed out, the Islamic State is a Sunni group militantly opposed to the Shia branch of Islam and calls Shiites “rafida,” which means “rejecter of Allah.” While it is true that most Palestinians in Gaza are Sunni, Shia-led Iran is Hamas’ primary benefactor.

And Hamas and ISIL have even met in battle. Bloody clashes between ISIL and Hamas in 2015 resulted from efforts by Islamic State supporters to establish ISIL affiliates in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and the neighboring Sinai Peninsula.

In January 2018, leaders of the Islamic State group in the Sinai declared war on the “Hamas tyrants” via a lengthy online video that included the execution of a Hamas member.

The two groups’ differences also include their divergent goals. The Islamic State group aims to create a global theocracy based on the principles of fundamentalist Sunni Islam, with no national or territorial borders.

Hamas, by contrast, is narrowly focused on constructing a Palestinian national state by “armed resistance to the occupation” of the Palestinian territories by Israel.

So it’s pretty clear that Hamas is not ISIL. But it’s not that simple either.

Interconnections and exchanges

Despite their differences, there are several similarities, including the fact that both groups are on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. The two organizations have on occasion also shared common strategic, if not necessarily ideological, goals. And, as became obvious on Oct. 7, their tactics have become similar, though in service of different objectives.

The Times and the Sunday Times: “Hamas video shows intense battle as Israel suffers worst casualties”

My long study of Islamic State fighting tactics, including field research in Iraq, leads me to believe Hamas has recently undergone a radical ISIL-inspired transformation that has not yet gotten widespread public attention. Prior to its Oct. 7 blitz, Hamas’ actions were limited to lobbing imprecise rockets and digging tunnels into Israel to kidnap or kill small numbers of Israelis.

But as University of Miami professor and expert in the study of jihadism Nathan S. French has noted in El Pais, “Hamas operatives – like other Islamist and jihadist groups – borrow, steal and appropriate tactics and strategies from other similar political, guerrilla, or militant movements.” And it seems that Hamas has borrowed tactics from ISIL.

It’s likely that Hamas learned from the hundreds of Palestinians who joined both the core ISIL caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the ISIL affiliate in the Sinai.

And despite their differences, Hamas officials have in the past met directly with leaders of the Islamic State in the Sinai. Those meetings were likely linked to collaboration between the two groups for specific actions that benefited their respective goals, such as weapons smuggling, undermining Egyptian government influence in the Sinai and transporting injured Islamic State fighters to Gaza for medical treatment.

In October 2023, an article in the U.K. newspaper The Times cited an intelligence official who said, “It’s clear that the two movements have worked together close enough over the past few years to copy each other’s methods, learn tactics and train on weapons they have procured together.”

Tactical similarities

In many ways, Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack resembled ISIL attacks, such as a June 2014 blitz in which Islamic State group fighters burst out of secret desert bases to conquer much of northern Iraq, including the country’s second-largest city, Mosul.

Both groups’ attacks took their opponents by complete surprise, indicating a high degree of secrecy and advanced preparation. And both assaults utilized “technicals” – pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in their cargo beds and carrying squads of fighters. Both attacking forces used commercial drones to provide air support for their troop movements. And both organizations deployed suicide-attack fighters known as “inghimasi,” Arabic for “plungers into battle.”

On Oct. 7, Hamas fighters reportedly left black ISIL war banners at the scene of several attacks. There were also videos posted online that appeared to show Hamas fighters singing popular ISIL war songs as they stormed into Israel.

Made for the media

An additional notable similarity is that Hamas released ISIL-style videos of the horrific atrocities it inflicted on Israelis. The Islamic State group’s media approach involved disseminating videos of mutilation, rape, amputation, slavery, suicide warfare, torture and mass murder.

On and after Oct. 7, Hamas fighters similarly uploaded videos and images of their executions of cowering Israeli civilians and other atrocities to a Telegram channel. These visuals made their way to X – formerly known as Twitter – and TikTok and other platforms.

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari has specifically said those videos are part of why Israel has been equating Hamas with the Islamic State group.

The Times of Israel came to a similar conclusion, noting: “Looking at images of the Hamas assault, it is fair to assume that Hamas learned a lesson from the ISIS terror playbook.”

Rape as a weapon

Another tactic new to Hamas, but not to ISIL, was the alleged rape and mutilation of girls and women. Hamas has denied the allegations. Islamic State religious scholars have previously sanctioned violence against women and told fighters to rape non-Muslim women “to make them Muslim.”

Similarly, Israel Defense Forces officials have said the Hamas religious leaders gave their fighters ISIL-like religious texts based on extremist interpretations of traditional Islamic jurisprudence telling them captives were “the spoils of war.”

All these developments indicate that ISIL has had an influence on Hamas, even if their goals remain quite different – or in direct opposition.

Brian Glyn Williams, Professor of Islamic History, UMass Dartmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NB ISIL has been preferred to ISIS above in accordance with Informed Comment house style.

Aaron Rawley is Volunteer Personnel Coordinator at the Gore Place Historical Museum, Waltham Mass.

Dartmouth, MA (Special to Informed Comment) – At first glance Russia’s widely lambasted thrust from Belorussia down to the Ukrainian capital appears to have stalled due to logistic issues that have been compounded by unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian interdiction and ambush attacks since the beginning of the invasion. The Russian repulses from towns to the north, east, and west of Kyiv, such as Irpin, Makariv, Hostomel, Bucha and Lukyanivka, in the last week of March and early April have removed their Grad missile strike capacity from the heart of the capital. This has saved the city, for the time being at least, from the almost apocalyptic destruction the Russians have wreaked on the towns of Mariupol and Kharkiv.

In recognition of these stunning battlefield defeats by the outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainians, on March 29^th Russia announced it would significantly scale back operations near Ukraine’s capital. Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Moscow has decided to “fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv” to “increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations.” Retreating Russian forces left behind a tableau of destruction in the northern suburb of Bucha where reporters photographed the bodies of dozens of civilians on the streets who had been executed with shoots to their heads after having their hands-tied behind their backs. And, even as some of the Russian units that engaged in such war crimes retreat to Belarus, where the Pentagon says they are regrouping and being refitted for new combat, their forces continue to shell Kyiv suburbs in the southeast.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky captured the skepticism of many Ukrainians and their Western backers when he said he did not trust the word of the country that continues “fighting to destroy us.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested Russian offers of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to “deceive people and deflect attention.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby cautioned the U.S. has detected “small numbers” of Russian ground forces withdrawing from the Kyiv area, but it appeared to be a repositioning of forces, “not a real withdrawal.” As of April 4, there are still large numbers of Russian troops massed to the east of Kyiv and some analysts see the Russian withdrawal as part “operational pause” part troop rotation.

Tellingly, just before the announcement, Putin asked for reinforcements from his ally and fellow autocrat, Belorussian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

Ominously for the Ukrainians, a mass Russian conscription drive, which is expected to bring in reinforcements on April 1, will provide Russia with fresh, new forces to restart major offensives in the country. There are many reasons for the NATO and the Ukrainians not to trust the Russians who famously lied on January 27^th just before the invasion claiming “Russia has no plans to invade either Ukraine or any other country. It’s a bluff created not in Russia, but in those countries that are now spreading this hysterical message.”

The recent Russian troop withdrawal, while significant, in does not represent a decisive victory for Ukraine. It merely a new phase in the war where the Russians concentrate their efforts in the east. The Russians have been stymied, in part, by launching what are essentially four competing wars on different fronts (Kyiv, Kharhiv, Donbas and the south). This disjointed approach has led to a lack of coordination and a competition by commanders for scare resources. If the Russians do transfer their forces from Kyiv to the Donbas in the east and concentrate more of their resources (including tanks in this flat, prime tank zone), it could give them the unity of mission and troop advantage needed to launch an envelopment breakout in this strategic region.

In the south, the city of Mariupol, which has been bravely defended against tremendous odds by a small group of Marines, is likely to fall soon. If the Russians, who are currently focusing their efforts on breaking out of the eastern separatist-controlled Donbas region and on crushing the remarkable resistance in the rubbleized city of Mariupol, do manage to achieve victories on these two fronts, it could allow them to commence a pincer movement on the capital (for an updated April 4 map of the war’s progress see here).

Despite their recent withdrawal from the Kyiv region, the Russians have signaled their intent to continue their bloody war by calling up reservists. They have also begun to transfer thousands of highly experienced, combat-tested Wagner contract troops from Georgia and Syria to Ukraine. On April 2, The New York Times reported “Russian attacks continued elsewhere in the country, and military analysts said that Russia’s withdrawal from areas near Kyiv did not mean it was de-escalating its war effort.” And, even as Ukrainians celebrated the liberation of the entire Kyiv district, a celebration tainted by the killing of almost 300 Ukrainian civilians in Bucha who were buried in a mass grave, Russian troops seized Izium, a key city southeast of Kharkiv that has been under Russian attack for several week. The city could serve as a launching pad for Russian troops to try to link up with forces in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and envelope Ukrainian forces fighting in the northeast. The fate of Kyiv still could hang in the balance and depends upon the failure or success of Russian operations in the east and south.

While some in the Russian high command have recently shifted their official war aims from their earlier rhetoric of “de-Nazification” of the Ukrainian government, and now claim Russia’s war aims are strictly about military actions in the eastern separatist Donbas region, it is unlikely that Putin will accept the repulse of his troops. The Russian leader is a maximalist used to achieving victories on battlefields as far afield as Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea, Donbas, and Syria. He may yet push his depleted forces, which have already lost more than ten percent of their combat effectiveness, into a bloody attack on Kyiv if he has reinforcements and battlefield successes in the south and east.

The Russians’ chaotic February 24^th invasion of Ukraine—which I described as “Operation Shock and Awful” in a video history of the first two weeks of the campaign—has clearly failed in its coup attempt to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky’s democratically elected government in a lightning campaign. But the far more powerful Russian troops are far from finished and they are adapting and probing. Comparing the recent Russian siege preparations around Kyiv to Putin’s siege and tactical annihilation of Grozny, the capital of the breakaway Muslim republic of Chechnya, one analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute has written “I hate to use this term, but I think the ‘Grozny-fication’ of Kyiv has begun.” When asked if Putin could inflict the sort of mass destruction on Kyiv that he used to kill tens of thousands in Grozny and Aleppo, Russian military expert Michael Kofman replied “Yes, this is the guy who could level a city.” While these assessments might be overly pessimistic, especially considering the fact that the stubborn defense of smaller Ukrainian towns might persuade Putin not to storm the massive Ukrainian capital, a Grozny-style mass destruction assault on Kyiv is still possible.

If the stalled peace talks in Istanbul do not make progress on the larger issues of Russia’s “de-militarized status” demands for Ukraine (something that would be tantamount to suicide for Ukraine) and Putin’s “Special Military Operation” does transition to siege warfare in Kyiv this spring or summer, it could potentially lead to the most bloody and intense urban battle since the 1994 and 2000 Russian tactical destruction of Grozny. Considering the size of the Ukrainian capital, a Russian assault on it could easily surpass the Battles of Grozny in its intensity and could become the largest urban battle since World War II. The scale of warfare in Ukraine today of course pales in comparison to the clash of Nazi and Soviet tectonic plates at Stalingrad. But there are plenty of what the military calls “lessons learned” to take away from this titanic 1942-3 battle and the far less studied Battles of Grozny and Mosul, Iraq (2016-17).

Stalingrad is of course a byword for bloody urban warfare and serves as an obvious warning to the Russians who are now logistically over-extended invaders, not firmly-entrenched defenders. But, as will be shown, the remarkable defense of Chechnya’s capital of Grozny by a highly skilled force of Chechen highland fighters and the defense of Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul by a fanatically determined force of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) jihadists also provide cautionary tales for the Russians. The tales of these three cities’ epic defenses provide lessons for Putin on the dangers that await his troops should he send them plunging into a massive “urban forest” battle against a surprisingly resilient NATO-backed Ukrainian defense force (a force that a NATO intelligence source reports has already killed between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops.)

Stalingrad. History’s Deadliest Urban Battle.

While most students of history recognize, in general terms, that Stalingrad was a massive defeat for Adolf Hitler, many do not know the details of this battle that ground down the Nazis’ finest army in a maze of rubble on the banks of the Volga River. The Battle of Stalingrad, which pitted the German Wehrmacht’s elite 6^th Army (part of Army Group South A) against Red Army defenders of the 62^nd Army and other forces from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943, saw the highest intensity urban combat in history. The fast-moving Germans, who had already overrun vast swaths of Ukraine, Russia and Belorussia in Operation Barbarossa, began the offensive by turning much of Stalingrad into rubble. They did so by systematically fire-bombing the city in the second largest aerial bombardment of World War II. The Wehrmacht’s better armed troops then pushed back the Soviet defenders to a 9-mile thin corridor along the Volga River in the heart of the city.

Victory for the steamrolling Nazi forces seemed imminent. But, to their surprise, Stalingrad’s defenders proved to be remarkably resilient and were able to resupply troops and munitions from across the Volga and send in a seemingly endless wave of reinforcements to defend the city and their Rodina (Motherland). The Soviets buried tanks and machine pillboxes in the city’s rubble to surprise the attackers, saturated the streets with landmines, and killed thousands of Germans in the most deadly and sustained sniper campaign in history. One legendary Soviet sniper, Vasily Zaitsev, was said to have killed more than two hundred Germans.

To compound matters, the defenders also used the bombed-out building to hide their movements and “hugged” (fought in close quarters) with the Germans to prevent them from being supported by artillery and aircraft bombardments. By the summer of 1941, the previously confident Nazis had become stalled in an urban meat-grinder as their famed ability to maneuver in blitzkrieg fashion and utilize their superior firepower were negated by the city’s terrain and urban defenses. The Germans, whose armies were trained for mobile operations in fast moving open battles like the lightening conquest of France, Belgium and Holland in 1940, were not as adept at urban warfare. This worked to the Soviets’ advantage and they made the Germans fight on their terms in a city they knew well in a style of warfare that did not fit into the Wehrmacht’s playbook. This translated to fighting house by house and street by street to capture terrain above ground. Below the city’s streets, the subterranean resistance in cellars and sewers transformed the war into what the dismayed Germans called “rattenkrieg” (rat war). One Soviet defender left a rare eyewitness account of the result of a Red Army counterattack on the Germans which captured the brutality of the street warfare;

The earth was literally littered with corpses. We surrounded them tightly, and then our “Katyusha” [rockets] opened fire. God, it chopped them up! The Germans there had thousands of trucks, cars – mostly dumped into gullies, as they had neither the time nor the means to destroy them, thousands of guns.

As the Germans became bogged down and were repulsed over 700 times, the Soviets broke out, launched a bold counter offensive on their flanks outside the city, and wiped out or captured their support elements. In the end, the trapped Nazi army was shattered and between 850,000 and 1.5 million German and allied Italian, Hungarian and Romanian troops were killed in the costliest battle of the war. The astounding destruction of Hitler’s most powerful army served notice to the defeat of the once unstoppable German war-machine on the Eastern Front and created a template for the study of urban defensive warfare to this day.

While living in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1985/86, I (henceforth the lead author Williams) was given a tour of the Museum of the Soviet Army in Moscow and the emphasis there was on the unbreakable fighting spirit of the Red Army soldiers in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ defense of Stalingrad. There is much merit to this argument. In his history of the battle, Antony Beevor wrote, “The biggest mistake made by German commanders was to have underestimated Ivan, the ordinary Red Army soldier. They quickly found that surrounded or outnumbered Soviet soldiers went on fighting when their counterparts from western armies would have surrendered.” As will be shown, Putin’s biggest mistake seems to have been underestimating the Ukrainian Ivans and their remarkable sense of determination to defend their Ukrainian Rodina from his invading forces.

The Ukrainians certainly do not have the resources to throw hundreds of thousands of cannon fodder troops and thousands of tanks into a titanic battle the way the trans-continental Soviet Union did. Nor do they have Stalin’s ability to issue a “no step back” decree calling for anyone who retreats to be executed. And the sheer scale of the Battle of Stalingrad between two totalitarian juggernauts, in which more than a million Soviets died, dwarfs the impending battle for Kyiv, should it occur. But there are lessons to be learned from the epic route of the Nazis in Stalingrad. For example, the Red Army tactics of “hugging” a more heavily armed invader (to prevent them from calling in airstrikes or artillery that could kill their own troops) can prevent the Russian attackers of Kyiv from calling for mortar, missile, artillery and air support against their opponents in close street fights.

In other words, the Ukrainians gain an advantage if they can fight at close quarters with their enemies, instead of attacking them from afar where they can be targeted by Russian suppression fire. The Ukrainian Azov Battalion tactic seems to have kept the militarily superior Russians from seizing the town center of Mariupol for over a month as their troops have been forced to fight street by street, building by building, and room by room against a stubborn enemy in close proximity.

Kyiv also has an extensive subway, sewer and underground system and tunnels below ground which can be used by “rat” defenders the way Stalingrad’s defenders used their tunnel system. Kyiv’s underground was built in the height of the Cold War to double as a bomb shelter and was meant to survive air attacks. Its Arsenala Station is considered to be the deepest in the world. And Stalingrad-style sniping or launching mortars from pre-prepared positions on pre-vectored/pre-prepped attack routes can certainly help the Ukrainians turn Kyiv into a grinding urban street fight the Russian Federal forces want to avoid. Ominously for the Russians, among the Ukrainian defenders are a woman sniper who already has 10 confirmed kills in fighting with Russians in the breakaway Donbas region of the east. And in a sign of things that could come, a top Russian general was killed by a Ukrainian sniper in early March.

Another takeaway from the Battle of Stalingrad is the importance of keeping supply lines open. The Germans were never able to fully surround the besieged Russian city and its Soviet defenders were able to keep supplies flowing to their defenders over the Volga River at night. This lifeline kept their remarkable defense alive. To achieve their objective of “regime change” and the installation of a pro-Russian puppet government in Ukraine, the Russian Federal forces will have to defeat the defenders in Kyiv and gain control of the capital. That will mean cutting off its vital supply lines to the city’s defenders. The Russians today have not been able to deploy armies to encircle Kyiv from the south due to unexpectedly heavy resistance in towns like Mariupol, Mykolaiv, and elsewhere in the south. Thus far, only the northern half of the Russian pincer has closed in on Kyiv and it has been stalled for a month and now recently repulsed.

But even if the Russian Federal forces do overcome the heroic resistance of Mariupol and move north, completing the encirclement and strangulation of the massive city of Kyiv will be a herculean task. Especially considering the Russians’ remarkable ineffectiveness in cutting off the supply lines to the besieged city of Kharkiv, despite having systematically destroyed much of Ukraine’s second largest city with indiscriminate bombardments.

As will be shown below, the Russians failed in the first Chechen War of 1994-96 to cut off the Grozny defenders’ supply lines to the mountains or to prevent infiltration by their skilled enemies. This played a major role in their defeat in that conflict against a small people of approximately a million which stunned and humiliated the Russians. Today, Putin’s invading force of approximately 150,000 does not appear to have the near the number of troops required to wage warfare on several fronts in the north, east, and south and effectively encircle and cut off supply lines to the massive Ukrainian capital. And the Ukrainians, who have blown up strategic bridges, opened dams to flood roads, and attacked and harassed the invaders’ congested supply lines from Belorussia, are making progress difficult for the stalled Russian units to the north of the capital.

And then there is the fighting will of the Ukrainian people. As the valley by valley defection of the Afghan National Army and nationwide collapse of the Afghan people’s fighting moral in the face of the Taliban advance in the late summer of 2021 demonstrates, a people lacking the will to fight cannot prevail. The Ukrainians, who have received far less training, hardware, and financial support than the Afghan forces (whose 20 years of training and equipment, including the creation of an air force, cost a staggering $83 billion), are not inclined to surrender their freedoms the way a critical mass of Afghans did to the Taliban in August 2021. The Ukrainians are up against a much more powerful enemy than the lightly-armed Taliban Pashtun tribal force of 80,000 who defeated an Afghan National Army of over 300,000 nominal troops. The Taliban lacked the sort of air force, tanks, navy (of the sort being used to launch missiles from the Black Sea and carry out amphibious operations), rockets, and artillery that Russia has deployed against the outmatched Ukrainians.

The fact that the Pashtun Taliban were able to exploit ties to fellow Pashtuns in the Afghan military to convince them to betray their government en masse and defect proved to be crucial to their surprising success in the summer of 2021 (which I predicted months earlier). But the Ukrainians, many of whom once had close ties to Russia (especially in the east along the Russian border) have been united like never before in opposition to Russia by Putin’s barbaric destruction of their towns (including towns like Kharkiv with large Russian populations).

The sense of unity and volunteerism in Ukraine is remarkable. This people, whose army of just 145,000 troops is vastly outnumbered by the Russian army of 900,000, are not only stubbornly standing their ground against larger, better armed forces, they have (by late March) gone on the counter-offensive around Kyiv, in the south around Kherson, and in the northeast around Kharkiv. In their greatest offensive since the war began, they also pushed the Russians on the east of the capital back from 12 miles to 34 miles and liberated the Russian-besieged suburbs of Hostomel and and Irpin.

The Ukrainians clearly share Grozny and Stalingrad defenders’ fighting mettle and resemble the vastly outgunned Finnish ski guerillas who ground down a massive Soviet invasion in the 1939-40 Russo-Finish “Winter War” (and created the first Molotov cocktails to be used against the Soviets to honor Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov). The Ukrainians’ will to fight also resembles that of the Afghans who tenaciously fought to repel the mechanized Soviet 40^th Limited Contingent invading force of 100,000 from 1979-89, despite losing over a million people (they were far more united against invading outsiders, like the Brits and Soviets, than against insiders like the local Taliban). One Afghan mujahideen rebel commander, Ahmed Khan, an Uzbek clan leader I interviewed in his northern desert bastion of Samangan, captured his people’s defiance. He did so in terms that certainly apply to the Ukrainians today who are beginning a struggle that could become transgenerational, stating;

When the Urus Kafirs [Russian infidels] invaded our lands, my father the khan led our people against them in jihad. When he was martyred, my uncle led the villagers against them. When he died in fighting the invaders, my oldest was made leader of the resistance. After he was slain in the jihad, I was made commander and am now training my son to continue the fight I am waging against the Taliban invaders from the south.

Ukrainian Anastasiia Lapatina captured her people’s determination to resist the Russians in Afghan fashion for The New York Times writing;

We are defiant. With every act of bravery and courage, Ukrainians show that we are ready to pay the highest price for democracy — ours and the world over. In this battle, we will not surrender and we will not capitulate. Because our freedom is immutable.

The 32-year-old mayor of the small Ukrainian town of Voznesensk similarly proclaimed “Everyone is united against the common enemy. We are defending our own land. We are at home.” In his comparison between the defenders of Stalingrad in 1942 and those in Kyiv today, Robert Fry wrote, “Both were and are animated by a passionate loathing for an invading army given to atrocity, an indefatigable patriotism forged by external aggression and a rare civil/military/political unity. Whether 21^st century Ukrainians have the same barely credible endurance and fortitude as the men and women defending Stalingrad remains to be seen.”

But the Ukrainians resistance outside of Kyiv does not remain to be seen and has already been vividly displayed on all fronts. A fighter in the town of Voznesensk’s defense unit that killed more than a 100 Russian troops, shot down an armor-plated Hind 24 helicopter gunship and destroyed 30 of their 43 tanks and armored personnel carriers proclaimed, “We didn’t have a single tank against them, just rocket-propelled grenades, Javelin missiles and the help of artillery. The Russians didn’t expect us to be so strong. It was a surprise for them. If they had taken Voznesensk, they would have cut off the whole south of Ukraine.” Former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, who has armed himself to fight with the troops on the frontlines, has vowed “Putin will meet hell and the Russian people and soldiers who come here to kill Ukrainians will pay the big price.”

The Ukrainians are currently making the Russians pay a high price for invading their lands, just as the Finns and Afghans did in the 1930s and 80s. They appear to have repulsed or blunted the first wave of Russian assaults in a month of fighting and even succeeded in killing six top Russian generals. But they are also paying a heavy price and, in a sign of things perhaps to come, much of northern Kyiv has already been rubbleized by massive Russian artillery and air bombardments. A Ukrainian living in the northern suburbs of Kyiv described the damage as follows;

Today, with the Russian military trying to establish a foothold there, those cities look like the hellscape of Stalingrad. The Ukrainian military is fighting until the bitter end to prevent Russians from advancing to surround the capital, with all bridges in the city suburbs destroyed

One analyst has written of the Russian transformation of these suburbs into rubble “It doesn’t even matter strategically (as opposed to humanly and morally) if the attacker destroys the city — rubble just creates better defenses.” Urban fighters in these northern districts have already used this rubbleized terrain to ambush Russian forces. Kyiv’s defenders find inspiration in the story of the “Hero City” of Stalingrad’s defense. One Kyivan captured his people’s will to fight and used Stalingrad as a warning defiantly stating “Look, Hitler managed to destroy numerous Soviet cities, laid siege to them but couldn’t not take them…What Putin doesn’t realize is that Kyiv and Kharkiv are his Stalingrads.”

Grozny “The Terrible.” Graveyard of the Russians.

As the Soviet Union unraveled in the early 1990s, the Chechens, a pre-Aryan highlander people living in the peaks of the north Caucasus flank for eons, defied Moscow and boldly reclaimed their ancient independence. In response, in November 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the invasion of their small breakaway mountain republic. The Kremlin thought the campaign would be a “small victorious war” that would help the president in the polls and remove the stigma of defeat from the Soviets’ humiliating defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In the fall of 1994, the Russian general Pavel Grachev confidentially invaded the micro republic with a massive mechanized fighting force of 60,000. His tank and artillery columns moved across the northern sub-Terek River plains to capture its capital of Grozny in the foothills of the mighty Caucasus Mountains. The goal was, like America’s subsequent 2003 “regime change” invasion of Iraq and Putin’s current “de-Nazification” plan in Ukraine, to swiftly overthrow the enemy’s government.

As with the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russians first bombed the civilian-packed city of 500,000 relentlessly (killing many Russian inhabitants, as they have done in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city with a large Russian population), in the heaviest bombardment in Europe since World War II. The Russian armor then penetrated the capital and spread out to take control of much of its center after the city had been “softened up” by the air force and artillery. The small defending force of no more than 6,000 massively outgunned Chechen boyeviks (fighters) appeared to be no match for the might of advancing Russian armor, artillery, helicopter gunships and bombers.

But this initial Russian victory, like the Nazi early advance in Stalingrad, was fleeting and misleading. For, as its transpired, the hardy Chechen fighters had merely regrouped to wage asymmetric urban guerilla warfare and were far from finished. As the Russian forces dispersed to occupy Grozny (whose name aptly means “The Terrible”), their tank and armored personnel carriers appeared to be unprotected by dismounted troops. When their large columns broke up into smaller units and advanced without troops to protect them, they were suddenly ambushed and destroyed by highly mobile Chechen hunter-killer teams who struck all over town.

The nimble Chechen units, based on clans or neighborhoods, used machine guns, sniper rifles, and armor-piercing RPG’s (Rocket Propelled Grenades) to wipe out vulnerable Russian armor columns. To compound matters, the Russian tank and armored personnel units were manned by troops who did not have the defenders’ intimate familiarity with the city or desire to fight to the death that the Chechens exhibited. The Russian troops often appeared to be dazed, lost in the city of Grozny, and poorly led. All qualities that the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine today, including several who surrendered for food, seem to share. Writing for the Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan reported an interview with a Ukrainian commander in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin;

He said Russian forces don’t know Irpin’s geography. At times, they make wrong turns or end up getting stuck on small streets in their tanks and armored vehicles. That has allowed Ukrainian fighters inside buildings to strike them. The Russians “are disoriented in the city.”…“They don’t have enough provisions, food, water,” he said, recounting reports from residents of Russian soldiers looting houses and stores. “They don’t have a lot of gasoline. They will get tired. And then we will go and drive them out.”

Like the Ukrainian defenders of Irpin today, the elusive and highly mobile Chechens engaged in hit-and-run attacks on the Russians and disappeared before their more heavily armored foes could retaliate with their superior firepower. Military historian Lester Grau has pointed out that the Chechen defenders of Grozny, like the Soviets in Stalingrad, fought up close with the Russians (i.e. they “hugged” them) to negate the Russians’ ability to unleash superior firepower, which could inadvertently kill their own troops. According to this source;

Ambushes [on Russians] were common. Sometimes they actually had three tiers. Chechens would be underground, on the ground floor, and on the roof. The ambushers would concentrate fires against targets when possible. Multiple RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenade] rounds flying from different heights and directions limit a [Russian] vehicle commander’s ability to respond. [Chechen] Escape routes were always predetermined. The most common response by the Chechens to the increasingly powerful Russian indirect and aerial firepower was hugging the Russian unit. If the hugging tactics caused the Russians to cease artillery and air fires, it became a sergeant’s and platoon leaders war—the level of command at which the Russians are weakest.

The iconic weapon of Grozny’s skilled urban guerillas, the RPG 7 Rocket Propelled Grenade, became known as the “Chechen Atom Bomb.” Firing from the heights of four and five story buildings down on vulnerable columns of enemy tanks with RPGs, the elusive Chechen dukhy (Russian “ghosts”) killed hundreds of Russian troops, many of them disheartened conscript soldiers, in elaborate ambushes. In one Chechen ambush that killed over a 100 Russian troops, a reporter recorded that;

All the Russian vehicles were ablaze, surrounded by dead or wounded soldiers. The Russian armored column was trapped by rebel forces armed with machine guns and shoulder-held anti-tank rockets on the open expanse of the square. A three-hour battle ensued in which the Russians were soundly beaten for the first time in the current war. It appeared that the Russian troops had been sent to their deaths last night in unfamiliar territory where they were ambushed and trapped on the open expanse of the square by the Chechens who know every inch of their battered city.

Although the enraged Russians flattened much of Grozny with indiscriminate artillery barrages, SCUD ballistic missiles, cluster-bombs, and bunker busters in response, this simply transformed the shattered topography into the same sort of prime urban guerrilla terrain that Stalingrad had been for the Red Army. As in the rubble of Stalingrad, the Chechen “rats” stealthily moved through rubble and underground tunnels they knew well and emerged to attack Russians behind their lines. On numerous occasions, Chechen rebels, including prominent commander Shamil Basayev (arguably the greatest urban guerilla and mountain fighter in history), captured disheartened Russian troops.

The Chechens then filmed their prisoner of wars’ pleas to be freed and let their mothers travel to rebel bases in the mountains to retrieve them. Basayev asked one soldier, whose mother traveled to his remote mountain rebel redoubt to retrieve her son, “Do you understand what a heroic mother you have?” This is a disheartening propaganda tactic that the Ukrainians seem to be following as they capture demoralized Russian conscripts and film them sending messages to their mothers to shatter Putin’s propaganda of a victorious “war of liberation.”

Compared to the Russian troops in Grozny, who had poor morale and were not inspired to fight a war of conquest in another people’s lands, the Chechen defenders fought with a skill and ferocity to protect their families, homes, and freedom that stunned their enemies. A Chechen fighter who I interviewed told me, “I fought for my sister, to prevent her from being raped by the Russians. I also went to war to defend my neighbors who had nowhere to flee and to defend my nation. I had no choice but to fight.” It was this willingness to fight and die that enabled the Chechen David to take on the Russian Goliath. According to Grau,

Chechens weren’t afraid of tanks and BMPs [armored personnel carriers]. They assigned groups of RPG gunners to fire volleys at the lead and trail vehicles. Once they were destroyed, the others were picked off one-by-one.” By contrast, he writes of their often-demoralized opponents, “Russian conscript infantry simply refused to dismount [exit their vehicles to fight] and often died in their BMP without ever firing a shot.

I interviewed Chechen boyeviks who fought in the Battle of Grozny for my book Inferno in Chechnya and found these fierce highlander fighters, who went into battle against far larger forces with their ancient kinjal knives, to have an almost primordial fighting tradition that stood in stark contrast to the casualtyphobic Russian troops. One Chechen stated, “You could say the whole population here is involved in the defense. Every street has provided several groups of four or five volunteers.” While another said of this nation at arms, “They [the Russians] are not fighting for anything, we’re fighting for our homeland—we’re not afraid to die.”

By August 1996, the outnumbered Chechens infiltrated Grozny from the mountains and trapped the Russian occupation force of 12,000 stationed in the city by boldly surrounding their garrisons. The Russians’ inability to cut off Grozny to rebel infiltration and resupply proved their undoing, just as it had been for the Germans at Stalingrad. Pinned down and cut off from supplies, their garrison troops were forced to retreat from Chechnya to prevent a Tet Offensive-style citywide attack on their isolated forces. Astoundingly, the once-confident Russians sustained approximately 7,500 troops KIA (Killed in Action) in just two years of grueling fighting in the tiny Connecticut-sized land of Chechnya. This is roughly the number of troops the US lost fighting in California-sized Iraq and Texas-sized Afghanistan in 20 years of warfare and the minimum number of troops Putin has lost in Ukraine in just a month of fighting according to American intel sources (the Ukrainians put the number at 14,000).

But in 2000, as tensions spilled out over a Chechen incursion into the Russian Muslim province of Dagestan, ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin chose a new prime minister to confront the breakaway republic. The relatively unknown former KGB/FSB officer chosen by Yeltsin gained popularity after vowing “if we find them [Chechens] in the toilet, we’ll exterminate them in their outhouses.” His crude comments, which resonated with an increasingly nationalistic/xenophobic/Islamiphobic Russian population, came following a bombing spree officially blamed on Chechen terrorists (but most sources blame on the Russian FSB as a “wag the dog” false flag provocation to ignite war frenzy in Russia). In a mysterious case that caused widespread distrust in Russia, FSB agents were arrested by local police in the town of Ryazan on the eve of the war in 1991 while planting a bomb in an apartment filled with Hexagon (the same outdated World War II-era explosive used in several previous apartment bombings blamed by Putin on “Chechen terrorists.”)

Having created a false pretext for war on the Chechen nation, the new and completely unknown prime minister chosen by Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, then sent a much larger force of over 100,000 troops to wipe out Grozny and its small bands of defenders. He ordered an indiscriminate artillery and air bombardment with cluster bombs, thermobaric bombs/missiles (also known as Fuel Air Explosives for spreading flammable gases that sear the skin of humans hiding in bunkers or shelters), wildly imprecise SCUD and Tochka ballistic missiles, and Uragan (Hurricane) and Grad multiple rocket launchers that killed thousands of trapped civilians. These weapons pulverized the city into what became known as the “Caucasian Hiroshima.” Tens of thousands of Chechen civilians were killed and you could literally see Grozny burning from space for months on Google.earth in satellite photos at this time. It was described as “the most destroyed city on Earth.”

The small band of 3,000 massively outgunned Chechen rebel defenders trapped in the ruins of the city, however, fought back with great determination and held off the Russians for six months against all odds. They then stunned the encircling Russians by breaking out of the encircled city and fighting their way through a “ring of steel” consisting of armor and artillery. As Russian artillery pounded them, the small units of Chechens led by Shamil Basayev fought their way through Russian lines and across a minefield at night. Remarkably, they managed to escape to the safety of their mountains in the south. From their remote Caucasus mountain bases, they waged an insurgency for years to come. But ultimately, Chechnya was “pacified” and lost not only its bid for independence, but as many as 300,000 people from a pre-war population of just over a million in a war that was Putin’s first act of genocide (Aleppo was his second).

As I demonstrate in a previous article, Putin repeated the indiscriminate mass murder bombing tactics used to flatten Grozny and kill tens of thousands to support the genocidal Syrian dictator President Bashar al Assad in systematically destroying his country’s largest city, the Sunni rebel-held town of Aleppo. In this internationally condemned Guernica-style airborne slaughter, which involved intentionally “destroying hospitals and schools, choking off basic supplies, and killing aid workers and hundreds of civilians,” Putin deployed massive strategic bombers flying from the Caucasus and Iran. Russia’s Tupolev Backfire supersonic long-range bombers flew alongside Assad’s aircraft, which dropped chemical munitions and massive barrel bombs on hospitals, neighborhoods, and schools, to intentionally kill and displace tens of thousands of Sunni civilians. The fear in Ukraine today is that if Putin is defeated on the battlefield, he will use unconventional weapons, including chemical and biological weapons, to kill tens of thousands of civilians to punish the Ukrainians for repulsing his forces on the battlefield.

Putin’s waging of genocidal total air war in both Grozny and Aleppo shows that he does not feel bound by the Geneva Conventions and is indeed a war criminal, as President Joe Biden recently described him. The Russian leader considers the Dresdendesque destruction of civilian-packed cities to be a valid tactic in achieving his political and military objectives, not a war crime. Grozny and Aleppo were both annihilated and these beautiful cities turned to an ash-covered ruined landscape to defeat rebels operating in them. Putin has done the same thing to Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkov and to the southern town of Mariupol. Based on these four precedents of “citycide,” he will have no compunction about doing the same to the famed Ukrainian capital that has overlooked the Dnieper River for a millennium and a half should his forces make breakthroughs in the east and south.

The Battle of Mosul. The Largest Urban Conflict Since Stalingrad.

The largest urban battle since Stalingrad, was the 2016-2017 battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city with a fluctuating population of between one and three million, from approximately 5,000 diehard ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) fighters. Prior the battle, the Islamic State defenders spent two years transforming their greatest prize into a defensive stronghold. They “terraformed” the earth with massive berms, dug hundreds of underground communication and supply tunnels, and blasted “mouse holes” though apartment buildings to facilitate the movement of their urban fighters. They also barricaded streets with piles of cars, T-wall concrete barriers, and rubble to prevent the penetration of the city by Iraqi security forces. In addition, ISIS fighters also tripwired houses and turned them into HBIED (house borne improvised explosive devices).

The Islamic State defenders also collected thousands of tires from cars to be used to burn and create smoke clouds to deny Coalition aircraft visibility and kept the city’s population as human shields in one of the largest hostage takings in history. But ISIS’s most deadly tactic was the mass deployment of VBIEDs (vehicle borne improvised explosive devices) armored cars and trucks. These resembled Mad Max war wagons and were used in the largest suicide campaign since the Japanese Empire’s deployment of kamikazes in World War II. The highly adaptive defenders also developed a fleet of “off the shelf” quad-rotor drones with GoPro cameras on them that tracked their terrified enemies and rained deadly IEDs down on them from above.

The much-anticipated Battle for Mosul began in mid-October 2016when predominantly Shiite Iraqi Army troops probed the city from the south. But these troops were repulsed by determined ISIS resistance in the rural outskirts of the city and it was left to the US-trained Iraqi Special Operations Forces’ (ISOF) legendary “Golden Division” to penetrate the heavily-defended city from the east. These elite forces, driving their signature black, armor-plated Humvees and armored bulldozers, an iconic weapon of the war, punched a peninsula-like breach through the heavily defended towns on the east of Mosul. When they stopped to rest, they urgently used bulldozers to construct earthen berms around their positions to protect themselves from the constant waves of suicide car bomb attacks.

Having taken the eastern suburbs, they then fought their way into the relatively modern east Mosul. But their progress was costly as fanatical ISIS car bombers surged out of side alleys and garages to ambush the Iraqi Special Forces and blow up their vehicles. The Islamic State defenders also used drones to monitor the Golden Division’s movements and guide mortar fire down on them. Weary Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, who I visited in their forward positions at Mosul dam in 2016, told me of the toll the constant hovering of lethal ISIS drones above them and steady blood drip of massive car bombs took on the morale of their soldiers. It is difficult to comprehend the fear that the entrenched, innovative, fanatic Islamic State enemy instilled in their enemies who were tasked with retaking the suicidally defended metropolis.

As in Grozny, in Mosul small Islamic State squads armed a machine-gun, sniper rifle, anti-tank guided missiles, and RPG gunner shadowed the Iraqi Security Force attackers’ movements and engaged them in constant harassing fire fights and ambushes. The fighting was hellacious and a Western journalist who embedded with the hard-fighting Iraqi Special Forces Golden Division as it determinedly fought street by street to retake Mosul, Michael Giglio, recorded in his harrowing account of the battle that many Iraqi Special Force battalions lost more than half of their members.

As the highly disciplined Iraqi Special Operations Forces fought their way deeper into eastern Mosul, the ISIS defenders’ sophisticated defense networks began to take a toll. Through the strategic use of underground tunnels and passages smashed between the walls of buildings, Islamic State fighters were able to move like ghosts, easily getting into position to ambush advancing troops, and then retreating to concealed fallback locations. Colonel Falah Al-Obaidi of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Forces explained how his troops, like the Germans in Stalingrad and Russians in Grozny, were fighting two wars in two cities, one above ground and one below. He stated “There’s the war on the streets and there is a whole city underground where they are hiding…Now it’s hard to consider an area liberated, because though we control the surface, ISIS will appear from under the ground, like rats.” One account of the battle for east Mosul captured the intensity of this harrowing urban warfare as follows:

The Salahudin Regiment’s column—comprising of vulnerable Humvees with just a couple of MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) among its 30-odd vehicles—was isolated. It came under sustained attack in narrow streets for more than 24 hours, losing all but three of its vehicles. Islamic State fighters targeted the front and rear of the trapped convoy, firing RPGs from rooftops and sending suicide bombers on motorbikes and in cars. In an effort to counter the threat of VBIEDs, military bulldozers hastily erected barricades of cars and other obstacles. The Islamic State fighters were an agile attacking force with intimate knowledge of the local environment, and they made up for numerical inferiority with complex attacks focused on areas where conventional forces struggled to reach.

An Iraqi commander grudgingly acknowledged the ISIS fighters’ tenacity and bravery stating, “these guys are not cowards. They kill as easy as they breathe.” The Islamic State also achieved an important goal for much of the Mosul battle, they forced the separation of enemy tanks and infantry in the street-to-street fighting. And most importantly, the jostling 100,000-man Kurdish, Iraqi Security Forces, Shiite militia force attacking Mosul was never able to completely isolate the city. This meant the city’s defenders were able to keep supply lines to towns like Tal Afar in the west open. This prolonged the siege by months and the defenders were able to resupply on fuel, food, and ammunition. In their analysis of the ISIS defense for West Point, William Knights and Alexander Mello write “it is difficult not to be impressed by the confident defense that the Islamic State has mounted in Mosul.”

But for all their determination to defend Mosul, ISIS’s main enemy, the famed Iraqi Special Operations Force fought with tremendous courage and determination, despite sustaining loses that would have crippled a less determined force. By January 2017 they had retaken east Mosul in brutal street fights that cost them thousands of their comrades’ lives. The battle then extended to the warren of old west Mosul where the fighting was even more costly. Suicidal ISIS fighters often had to be bulldozed into the houses they were trapped in and destroyed by close air strikes.

It was this last tactic of close air support that proved to be decisive in defeating the entrenched, fanatical Islamic State defenders who fought to the death in the rubbleized streets of Mosul to defend their “Caliphate’s” most prized possession. Almost instantaneous support airstrikes were delivered by F-18 Navy Super Hornets, Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier Jump Jets, Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, F-16 Fighting Falcons, F-22 Raptors, and larger B-1 Lancer and B-52 Stratofortress bombers. So called “dynamic strikes” were conducted at short notice by aircraft on overwatch missions flying near enough to answer frantic calls from Iraqi forces to strike threatening positions or “targets of opportunity” spotted by drones. Michael Giglio records in his frontline account seeing explosions on the flanks of his Iraqi convoy as American Special Forces ground spotters embedded with it called in airstrikes on fast-approaching ISIS car bombs or on insurgents targeting them.

By January 2017, after 100 days of grueling battle, US Central Command explained that the United States and its allies had assisted Iraqi forces in Mosul with 558 airstrikes which involved the deployment of 10,115 munitions against ISIS targets. Remarkably, these munitions destroyed at least 151 ISIS VBIED car bombs, most as they were spotted racing towards their Iraqi Security Forces targets. To defeat the ever-present threat from VBIEDs, ground troops often called in “terrain denial requests” to Coalition airpower, which would effectively strike an area and crater streets to inhibit the flow of ISIS car bombs in advance of Iraqi Security Forces thrusts. In the case of densely packed neighborhoods, where armored VBIEDs came surging at ISF columns from side alleys, garages, and covered driveways, advancing Iraqi forces began to “fortify-in-place,” block by block, as they proceeded.

The American Special Forces JTACs (Joint Terminal Attack Controllers) or ground spotter “combat controllers” worked in conjunction with Iraqi forces to support their advances with both aircraft and precision HIMAR satellite guided multiple launch rocket systems. When the Iraqi advances were halted by stiff ISIS resistance, they could always rely on instant support from laser and satellite-guided air or artillery munitions. This truly was a novel form of urban warfare as the Coalition, for the first time in history, provided almost instant, precision “air artillery” or satellite-guided precision artillery support (fired from a base forty miles south of Mosul at Qayyarah West) to facilitate the advance of a conventional army into a vast, civilian-packed urban theater of action.

It was this rapid reaction air support that helped mitigate ISIS’s equally novel VBIED tactics and saved countless members of the attacking ground force’s lives. In close-quarter urban combat, with the Iraqi forces working in conjunction alongside on-the-ground Special Forces forward air controller spotters, the results of such air and artillery support were decisive. Even though the ISIS militants themselves showed a remarkable ability to endure and adapt in the face of such formidable countermeasures, they were methodically defeated by an attacking force that had superior precision technology/munitions and a fighting determination that matched their own.

On July 8, 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi formally announced the city’s liberation after 266 days of the greatest high-intensity urban battle since World War II. But the jubilation in the victory was tempered by the fact that thousands of Iraqi servicemen had sacrificed their lives fighting in the streets of Mosul fighting and tens of thousands more were wounded. The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that Iraq’s Golden Division suffered 40 percent battle losses in the fight for the city. The U.N. would report that nearly 2,000 members of this elite force were killed in November 2017 alone and 10,000 Iraqi Security Forces died in the battle.

As I show here, however, the conquest of Mosul did not destroy ISIS any more than the Russian conquest of Grozny destroyed the resilient Chechen rebellion. After the capture of Mosul, Islamic State fighters scattered to remote hideouts in Iraq’s Hamrin Mountains and redoubts in the vast Syrian Desert and continue to wage a deadly terrorist insurgency to this day.

There are many lessons to be learned by the Ukrainians from the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul which took the lives of 10,000 attackers and from the larger war on ISIS (see my overview of the war here for HNN). With a small force of 5,000 dedicated fighters, ISIS defended an urban area of approximately 50-60 square miles against an encircling Kurdish, Iraqi Security Forces, Shiite militia army of approximately 100,000. But this suicidally determined, adaptive Islamic State fighting force was ultimately defeated by highly disciplined and effective Iraqi Special Operations Forces. The Golden Division was organized, equipped, and trained by US Special Forces to help rebuild the Iraqi military after the United States invaded the country in 2003. There is perhaps no force in the world with more urban warfare combat experience than the Iraqi Special Operations Force.

The legendary Iraqi Golden Division Special Forces fought with a level of skill and determination that the Russian army invading Ukraine, which suffers from collapsing morale, frostbite, and desertion, is clearly lacking thus far as they are stalled and even repulsed on two of their four fronts. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces’ skills are something that the Russians, who have not fought in sustained urban combat since the Battle of Grozny in 2000, appear to be lacking. Russia’s legendary Spetsnaz Special Forces and airborne troops famously failed to seize Kyiv’s strategic Antonov Airport in a surprise attack launched on February 24^th, the first night of the invasion. Their airborne forces, which were trying to create an air bridge for troop transports carrying tanks and troops, were repelled by Ukrainian Rapid Reaction Forces. This defeat was historic and crucial as it prevented the Russians from storming the Ukrainian capital in an early surprise attack and rapidly overthrowing the government. And Russian regular troops, pro-Putin Chechen mercenaries, and Special Forces have thus far not been able to capture Mariupol, a town of just 400,000, in a month of fighting against vastly outnumbered Azov Battalion Ukrainian Marines, despite the fact that this southern town is located near their bases in Russian-occupied Donetsk-Luhansk and Crimea.

Another distinction is that the Iraqi troops received constant close air support rendered by some of the 5,000 US troops made up of Special Forces air combat controllers or spotters, Marine artillery men, and Air Force personnel who acted as “accelerants” or “force multipliers” to their Iraqi allies. The American had honed the creation of synergy between local proxy forces ever since Green Beret Special Forces were inserted into the rebel-controlled Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan in October 2001. The techniques of calling precision airstrikes to support local Uzbek warlord General Dostum’s anti-Taliban horsemen, which he described to me as “lightning strikes” rendered by a “death ray,” had proven as decisive in that campaign as they were in the urban battle of Mosul.

The Russians, by contrast, have not been able to successfully integrate their air and land forces and have not been able to effectively use their air force to support their ground offensives or protect their columns from Ukrainian attacks. Part of this deficiency stems from the fact that the Russians do not have the same JTAC Special Forces ground-spotter precision targeting capacity to provide immediate suppression air support to their advancing forces that America has. Guy Plopsky, a defense analyst specializing in air power and Russian military affairs, has said of Russia’s inadequacy when it comes to close air support guided by combat controllers;

The Russians use FACs (forward air controllers). But their kit is heavy and leaves much to be desired (communications and target acquisition-wise)…Historically, coordination between Russian air and air defenses has been poor, especially with air defenses fielded by the Ground Forces. To this day, joint training between the VKS [Air Force] and Russian Ground Forces air defenses remains very limited.

The Russians also do not have the sort of total air supremacy that is required to provide the sort of close air support given to Iraqi forces in the Battle of Mosul. And in fact, it is the Ukrainians who seem to have had the most success in coordinating attacks between their drones and ground troops. This can be seen in this video where a drone filmed an ambush on Russian tanks by anti-tank missiles or this one where Ukrainians destroyed a tank in close fighting as a drone monitored the enemy’s movements for them. The Ukrainians seem to have also been most effective in using drones, especially the Turkish-built Bayraktar UAV that fires laser guided missiles.

This advanced 20 foot drone was filmed bombing and destroying Russian aircraft in the Russian-captured town of Kherson. The Ukrainians have also used small observation drones, to take a devastating toll on their enemies. Like the ISIS defenders of Mosul, the Ukrainians have skillfully used drones to direct ambushes and precisely direct mortar or artillery strikes by their surprisingly resilient and skilled ground forces. The Ukrainians have also shared video footage of their troops using small quadrotor drones to drop grenades on the Russians, much as ISIS did in Mosul.

It is also not clear if the Ukrainians have preemptively “worm-holed” their way through buildings in Kyiv to provide attack and escape routes for urban guerilla warriors. But they have certainly used such ISIS tactics as burning tires to cover their movements from Russian air observation and blocked streets with everything from buses, concrete barriers, and large World War II style spiked metal caltrops. To prevent an attack on their capital from the suburb of Irpin, previously seen as the potential main staging position for Russians north of the capital, the Ukrainians demolished the bridge over the Irpin River (which connected the town to Kyiv) and barricaded the road to the city every 100 yards with concrete blocks, tanker trucks, tires and sandbags

And, while the Ukrainians do not have the suicidal jihadi fanaticism of the Mosul defenders, who deployed hundreds of “up armored” VBIED suicide car bombs against their enemies, they have fought with a ferocity that has stunned the Russians who thought they could overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in a swift two day “small victorious war” operation. But the greatest battle, the struggle for the capital, which is the center of gravity in Ukraine, is perhaps still yet to come. If it does unfold, it will be decisive in deciding whether or not Ukraine becomes an autocratic pro-Russian puppet satellite like Belarus, or remains free.

Stalingrad on the Dnieper.

Kyiv, which was established in 482, is the cultural heart of Russia and was the capital of the first Russian state known as Kievan Rus from the 9^th to the 13^th centuries. Putin’s destruction of this cradle of Russian civilization, known for its Medieval gold-domed churches and vibrant culture, in the name of liberating Russia’s Ukrainian “little brothers” from “Nazi genocide,” while committing mass slaughter and culturecide, may be too much for many Russians. But the Russian people have been heavily propagandized to blindly support Putin’s “de-Nazification” invasion of their democratic neighbor and the Ukrainians have taken measures to protect some of their greatest architectural treasures from their Russian “liberators.” They proclaim they are prepared to defend their great city at all costs. But can they turn their capital into Fortress Kyiv and successfully defend it from Putin “The Destroyer of Cities?”

The Soviet defense of Stalingrad, the Chechen defense of Grozny, and the ISIS defense of Mosul certainly can provide some valuable lessons for Kyiv’s defenders. The Chechens, who had a population of roughly a million, were able to defeat the trans-continental Russian Federation in the 1994-96 Chechen War largely because they became a nation at arms. It was average Chechens, who streamed from their remote mountain auls (villages) and their plains towns into Grozny with their weapons to defend their ancient freedoms in 1994, that were able to humble the Russian giant. As mentioned in the first section, a similar mass, spontaneous mobilization is occurring in Ukraine today. Putin’s bloody invasion has mobilized tens of thousands of Ukrainian volunteers in an inadvertent recruitment drive for Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces. Tens of thousands of assault rifles have been given to these citizen fighters, breweries are now making Molotov cocktails, Chechen-style neighborhood militias have been formed to protect them from teams of Russian saboteurs, and there is a new sense of solidarity in this once-divided country (where millions had deep, but now often sundered, ties to Russia). A reporter for The Economist described the Ukrainians’ sense of unity in their defense preparations for the defense of Kyiv as follows;

Checkpoints constructed by the Territorial Defense (TD), Ukraine’s new second-line defense force, now stop traffic to check IDs along all major roads and intersections. With each day that Kyiv remains unconquered, TD checkpoints and barricades become more fortified. Trucks are moving around the city delivering concrete blocks to reinforce them. Firing positions are being built; trenches dug. At one barricade a wall of tires has been covered with piles of Soviet-era books, including v.v. Alyoshin’s “Vegetation of the USSR”, published in 1951. If and when the time comes, the books will act as kindling for the tires, and black smoke will rise to obscure the view of the attacking Russians.

A Ukrainian captured the way average citizens in his country, like the Soviets at Stalingrad or the Chechen teips (clans) in Grozny, have rallied to repulse the invaders;

Many citizens have gone a step further in their support and joined territorial defense units. As of Feb. 26, two days into Russia’s invasion, 37,000 Ukrainians were signed up. Now journalists, artists, musicians, TV hosts, comedians and thousands of others are patrolling the streets. Using conventional arms and Molotov cocktails — which have become something of a revered national weapon — they have apprehended saboteurs, shot down drones and stopped enemy tanks. In the defense of our country, they have been indispensable.

Due to the stubborn defenses across the country, the Ukrainian citizen fighters and military have had the time to fortify their capital and turn it into an urban fortress. A CNN war correspondent reported of the heavily defended city;

Trenches run deep into the woods that surround the highway leading in Kyiv from the south. Fortified fallback positions are ready for whatever comes next. Huge metal anti-tank barriers known here as “the hedgehogs” because of their spiky shape are placed at regular intervals along the road. And makeshift blockades made of sandbags and huge concrete blocks stand at every exit…The people of Kyiv are determined to defend their city.

The Ukrainians see Kyiv as the perfect asymmetric battlefield for taking on their more heavily armored opponents in a setting filled with perils for the Russian invaders who do not have mastery of the terrain or walls or underground tunnels to protect them. Andrew Kramer has reported after interviewing Ukrainians fighters, “For the Ukrainians the strategy will be to ‘draw the enemy into the city,’ where armored vehicles are channeled into streets, rather than spread out in fields.” A Reporter for The New York Times reported on the ongoing defense of Kyiv’s northern suburbs;

After three weeks of fighting in the suburbs, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers, who are operating in loosely organized small units and relying heavily on ambushes, are growing more confident in the city’s defense. Part of their strategy is to make the assault so costly for the Russian army in lives that it will exhaust or demoralize its troops before they reach the city center. “There’s no talk of capitulation for Kyiv,” said Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of an anti-tank missile unit operating on the outskirts of the city. “Everything is going far better than we thought.”

While it is an adage that tanks do not operate well in urban combat (especially now that they are so vulnerable to drone munitions), they can be effective, as shown in the tank-led US assault on the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in 2004. But the Russians, who are ostensibly a tank army led by a leader obsessed with tanks, have written the book on how not to deploy tanks in cities in their campaign in Grozny. Writing for the US Army on urban tank warfare, Kendall D. Gott states;

When properly employed, well-trained and well-supported units led by tanks are decisive in urban combat. The reverse is also true. Chechen rebels taught the Russian army and the world a brutal lesson in Grozny about what happens when armored units are poorly led, poorly trained, and cavalierly employed in a city.

Russia’s armor in Ukraine appears to be so poorly led that the country has been described as a “tank graveyard” for the Russians. Putin’s forces have lost more than 230 of their heavily armored tracked vehicles since they invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to Oryx Blog, a site that tracks military-equipment losses. The Ukrainians claim to have destroyed more than 400 Russian tanks and many more armored military vehicles. One American expert estimates Russia has lost 10 percent of its tanks in Ukraine. This represents the greatest loss of tanks in battle since World War II. In that war, it was other tanks that destroyed tanks, as in the famous Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history.

But in Ukraine today, it is not tanks that are doing the killing of Russian armor, it is man portable anti-tank missiles delivered by the US and it is NATO allies. Many of these Russian tanks have been destroyed by Ukrainian soldiers, like Tetiana Chornovol who drove her car to an ambush site and killed a tank, as described by war correspondent Andrew Kramer;

When the command came to open fire, she used a laser to lock in on the tank, pushed a button, then watched as the tank lit up in flames before she rushed back to her car to escape return fire. “I shoot at armor,” she said, when asked about the human toll. “If they climb inside, it’s their fault.”

There has never been a more robust, rapid, massive and effective transfer of asymmetric weapons to another country’s fighting force in history than that which is taking place in Ukraine today. The Biden administration’s delivery of billions of dollars in support and thousands of weapons far surpasses Ronald Reagan’s 1980s Operation Cyclone arming of the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen rebels in its scale. The US and NATO-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft and Javelin anti-tank weapons will help the Ukrainian military and citizen soldiers turn Kyiv into a hornet’s nest for the invading Russians should they attack it. There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these shoulder-fired infra-red or heat-seeking tank and aircraft killing weapons in Kyiv.

These hi-tech weapons will be the bane of any Russian Sukhoi/Mig/Hind pilot or T-72 or T-90 tank or BMP/BTR armored vehicle driver attempting to penetrate this deadly urban fortress. For pilots used to having air supremacy, of the sort Russian Aerospace pilots had as they remorselessly murdered Aleppo’s civilians, the Ukrainians’ lethal “man portable” anti-aircraft Stingers (which downed over 300 Soviet helicopters and more than 100 fighter jets in Afghanistan in the 1980s) are the ultimate nightmare.

They mean the Russians cannot fly low on bombing runs for precision support of ground operations the way US pilots did over Mosul as they will be easily shot down. Kyiv will be swarming with Ukrainians who will continue to film the destruction of massive Hind Helicopter gunships, as seen here, or Sukhoi fighter bombers, as seen here or tanks as seen here. It is the NATO-supplied equalizer weapons that will level the field in the Ukrainians’ uneven battle with the approximately 150,000 better equipped, but seemingly demoralized and poorly led, Russian troops. The US and its NATO allies have shipped thousands of American-made Javelin, British-manufactured NLAW and German Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons to the outgunned Ukrainians since the invasion began. These weapons have been skillfully used by Ukrainian defenders, who surprised both Western military analysts and the Russians with their remarkably organized, stiff and effective resistance.

The now iconic Javelin missile (dubbed “St. Javelin” by the Ukrainians) has already become essentially the “Ukrainian Atom Bomb.” While not as lightweight and portable as the Chechens’ legendary RPG-7 tank-killer, the far more advanced Javelin uses a thermal system to shoot a warhead that can penetrate any armor in the world. These weapons are created to come down on the tank’s turret where its armor is weakest. The internet is filled with images of burning Russian tanks destroyed by Javelins.

Another threat the Russian tankers should be concerned about is the Biden Administration’s recent decision to import small Switchblade 300 and 600 “loitering-ammunition” to the Ukrainians. The five-pound, tube-launched Switchblade 300 can be fitted into an urban fighter’s backpack and launched as a remote control drone with a camera in it to fly and hunt enemies. When the switchblade controller identifies a target on his handheld monitor, he then directs the so called kamikaze drone, which is laden with explosives, into it. The larger Switchblade 600 can destroy any tank with its payload. The prospect of being hunted by these futuristic Terminator movie-style smart weapons and killed remotely by urban guerillas cannot be appealing to Russians should they be given the unenviable task of storming the Ukrainian capital.

Should the Russian armor, which was so haplessly deployed in Grozny, attempt a US-style “thunder run” reconnaissance by force into the heart of massive Kyiv, the odds are high it will be decimated by urban defenders who will pick of tanks the way the Chechen boyeviks did in Grozny with an array of unprecedentedly advanced anti-tank weapons. The remarkable Ukrainian drone imagery of a Russian tank column being ambushed and attacked with anti-tank missiles in the village of Brovary on Kyiv’s eastern outskirts is reminiscent of the Chechen destruction of vulnerable Russian tank columns in Grozny in 1994/95. The Washington Post was to report of the extraordinary attack on Russian armor at Brovarny, that saw Russian tankers running for their lives into nearby woods;

The tanks and other military vehicles were crawling slowly on the open highway, making them an easy target. They also were bunched up close to each other, which allowed a single artillery shell to knock out multiple vehicles. What was also surprising, analysts said, is that some of the tanks were generations old and not well-equipped, including the T-72, a Soviet-era tank that first entered production more than 50 years ago. “It’s kind of bizarre seeing this,” said Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Kyiv is the decisive mission, the decisive objective, and yet they are sending in some very old units to take it.

Like the Russian tanks that were destroyed with armor-piercing RPGs in Chechnya, the outdated Russian tanks in Borvary seem not to have been protected by dismounted troops. This speaks to a failure of tactical planning, leadership, and potentially, courage. It does not bode well for Russians preparing to launch an attack on the Ukrainian capital, which will consist of hundreds of Brovarys. Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer has warned “In storming cities, the main thing is not just pounding them with bombs, you also need infantry to move in while the defenders are still in shock. If you don’t, you don’t get anywhere. Will the Russian infantry be good enough to the same? I don’t know.”

The Grozny template, where terrified Russian conscripts refused to leave the false safety of their BMP armored personnel carriers to fight Chechen attackers and were burnt alive in their hundreds in their “iron caskets,” seems to set a precedent that should be concerning to the Russians. This may explain why the Russians, who were staged in the west, east, and north of Kyiv in striking distance, did not launch any bold “thunder runs” (of the sort that small units of less than a hundred Abrams tanks and Stryker attack vehicles successfully launched into the heart of heavily defended Baghdad to seize it in April 2003). Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor at the King’s College Department of War Studies, in London, said in a recent blog post, “The lack of any serious movement into the major cities is notable, and it may be that the Russian high command is concerned about pushing reluctant troops into urban warfare for which the Ukrainians have made elaborate preparations.”

The Russian military should be concerned about pushing troops into Kyiv, considering the fact that, in five weeks of intense fighting in the Ukrainian towns of Kharkov and Mariupol, they have been unable to subdue either of these far smaller and far less heavily defended towns. In addition to the well-known perils of deploying armor in urban areas, another one of the main problems facing the Russians that bodes ill for an attack on Kyiv has been logistics. This problem is best demonstrated in the shocking standstill stall of their forty-mile column north of Kyiv that was unable to make the 100-mile push from the Belarus border down to the Ukrainian capital. In 2003, by contrast, the US Army’s Third Infantry Division in Iraq stormed over 400 miles through blinding shamal sandstorms, Fedayeen insurgent-filled towns, and vast deserts and into the Iraqi capital of Baghdad (population 8 million) and captured it…in just three weeks.

The stalled Russian column apparently ran out of fuel, a logistic problem that the blitzing Army and Marine columns in America’s “Shock and Awe” invasion overcame, despite the fact that they were operating far farther from their home than the Belorussia-based Russians. The epic, and widely discussed, transformation of the 40-mile Russian invasion column into what was essentially a stalled parking lot of easily targeted vehicles speaks to a shocking lack of logistic capacity for a force that was expected to storm into the capital and do a Baghdad-style regime change coup in just two days. As legendary World War I general John “Black Jack” Pershing once said, “soldiers win battles, logistics win wars.”

Based upon the Russians’ striking inability to supply their over-extended and retreating troops thus far, it seems improbable that they will be able to supply them farther to the south in Kyiv for a sustained meatgrinder battle that will demand vast resupply capacities. Their famously congested northern army appears to have already outstripped its supply lines without even beginning a resource-inhaling, high-intensity urban battle of sort the Iraqis fought in Mosul. The small number of 150,000 already depleted Russian troops involved in bogged down efforts to control the ten percent of Ukraine they currently occupy also points to real problems for conquering, never mind occupying and holding, Kyiv and its hinterland support towns.

As I show in my history of US operations in Iraq in my book Counter Jihad, it took 168,000 US surge troops, working in close conjunction with 100,000 pro-US Sunni Anbar tribesmen and over 200,000 Iraqi Security Forces, to subdue the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad and its Sunni suburban “belts” in 2007. In contrast to the Russian army, the American military is a professional all volunteer fighting force with far superior leadership, weaponry, training, intel, and discipline than the corruption-riddled Russian military that has many untried 18 year old conscripts in its ranks. But it still took new American weapons (such as massive MRAP Mine Resistance Ambush Protected armored vehicles) and tactics (such as Joint Special Operation Forces night raids), and inventive leadership by generals such General David Petraeus (who invented the COIN Counter-Insurgency Strategy) to win the Battle of Baghdad.

It is improbable that the rigidly doctrinaire Russians, who have little autonomy of decision in the lower non-commissioned officer ranks, will creatively adapt the way the flexible American soldiers of all ranks did to the insurgency in Baghdad and the Triangle of Death in 2007. But even if the Russians do somehow overcome their crippling logistic issues and tank vulnerability and A. indiscriminately pound Kyiv into rubble with the so called “God of War” artillery. B. storm it in a bloody urban assault. C. decapitate the Ukrainian government and D. place an unpopular puppet government in power, this would only commence a new round of conflict. The Russian occupiers would then have to keep their puppet regime in power and occupy the city and surrounding lands in an indefinite forever war (the democratically elected Ukrainian government would most likely flee to the west Ukrainian town of Lvov to continue the resistance).

As US Central Command learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom—after George W. Bush famously declared an end to military operations in Iraq” under a banner that announced “Mission Accomplished” in April 2003—Phase IV or occupation is far harder than Phases II and III involving conquest. Soon after Bush’s hubristic announcement on an aircraft carrier of the coast of San Diego, Iraq broke out into a full-scale insurgency that cost thousands of American troops their lives and came perilously close to succeeding. General Eric Shinseki famously warned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who sent in a far too small a “transformational” army to occupy Iraq, that he needed up to 400,000 troops for the task (Rumsfeld deployed just 130,000 troops). The long established US military doctrine, which Rumsfeld famously rejected to the detriment of US forces who did not have the number of troops needed to occupy a hostile country of over 30 million, called for one US soldier for every 40 citizens in an occupied land.

In US-occupied post-World War II Germany this translated to an occupation force of some 400,000 in the American zone—or one U.S. soldier for every 40 Germans. When NATO forces occupied Kosovo in 1999, they followed the same proven formula: 50,000 troops for a population of 2 million, or one soldier for every 40 inhabitants. Following this tried and true formula, to effectively occupy Texas-sized Ukraine, the largest country fully in Europe, which has a population of somewhere between 37 and 42 million, the Russians need an occupation force of approximately 400,000. Their current, already drained, troop level is at 150,000, or less than half the number required. The occupation of Kyiv, which currently has population of around 2 million, will consume many of those troops in draining urban guerilla combat. If the highly mobilized Ukrainians continue their stiff resistance, and the US and its NATO allies continue to support them with weapons and funds on a historically unprecedented scale, both of which seem likely, they could turn Kyiv into an urban occupation quagmire on a scale that dwarfs the US counter-insurgency imbroglio in Operation Iraqi Freedom. That war in Iraq, which was promised to be a swift in-and-out regime change operation by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ended up costing the US almost 4,500 US troops’ lives and costing taxpayers over two trillion dollars during a time of recession.

While the Russian military doctrine is not as concerned with losing soldiers’ lives as that of NATO countries, Russia’s collapsing economy (which is suffering from the most severe and devastating sanctions ever imposed in world history) cannot afford an exorbitant Operation Iraq Freedom-style investment of trillions of dollars. It should be recalled that the Soviet Union never recovered from the financial strain of its costly nine year “regime change” quagmire in Afghanistan, which incidentally cost it roughly the number of troops Russia is estimated by some US government sources to have lost in the month-long war in Ukraine (approximately 15,000). All of the above history of costly urban meatgrinders in Stalingrad, Grozny and Mosul should provide ample incentive for Putin to consider an end to his campaign in Ukraine and to accept an off-ramp peace treaty. Based upon these stark precedents where the Wehrmacht, Russian Federation Army, and Iraqi Security forces were decimated in urban warfare, he should accept a treaty that allows him to save face, and Russian soldiers’ lives, by annexing the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk (which are already de facto Russia) while accepting an offer of neutrality from Ukraine (which would mean Ukraine not joining NATO, but having security guarantees from the West).

But the recent history of Putin’s military adventurism in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea, and the Donbass makes one thing clear, he only knows how to escalate, he does not have a reverse gear. And this means that any forthcoming temporary ceasefire agreement or talk of withdrawing troops from the Kyiv region will most likely be nothing more than a ruse. The major problem with the idea of Putin accepting “lessons learned” from his defeats thus far in taking towns like Kharkiv and Mariupol is that he has personalized his war on Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and this makes him reckless. In this sense, he is following the footsteps of Adolf Hitler. The Nazi Fuehrer famously overrode his generals—who warned him to bypass Stalingrad and aim for the vital oil fields in the Caucasus—and ordered an attack on the strategically un-crucial city to humiliate the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, for whom it was named. This personalization of the war cost him his nation’s greatest defeat and hundreds of thousands of German lives.

Putin is similarly hellbent on capturing the prize of Kyiv and toppling his nemesis, Zelensky’s “genocidal Nazi” government and eradicating a country he does not believe technically exists. This obsession continues, despite the devastating toll his war is taking on his troops and people (Russia’s economy is facing a collapse under US-led sanctions and has fallen from the 11^th largest economy to the 22^nd). The whole point of his shambolic “de-Nazification” decapitation invasion was to capture Kyiv and quickly put his anti-democratic puppet regime in power before the West could react and impose sanctions. Anything short of the overthrow of Ukraine’s government represents an obvious-to-all defeat for an arrogant autocrat who has shown himself as incapable of accepting the humiliating proposition of a negotiated retreat as Hitler was. It will be hard for the Russian propaganda machine to spin the invasion as a great victory over “Nazism” (as he proclaimed it would be to an ecstatic crowd at a recent Nazi Nuremberg-style war rally in Moscow) if he does not overthrow the hated pro-Western democracy in Kyiv

But the Ukrainians may yet force Putin to the negotiating table with their remarkably ferocious defense of towns like Mariupol and villages like Voznesensk. The defiance the defenders of these much smaller locales have displayed against overwhelmingly superior enemy numbers may yet dissuade Putin from trying to storm the much larger and far better defended Ukrainian capital. If he does back down from an assault on Kyiv, it would be the ultimate testament to the Ukrainians’ courage and a total humiliation for Putin who has risked so much on his backfiring gamble of NATO disunity and Ukrainian weakness. If Putin backs down, the “Hero City” Mariupol and its brave band of defenders will have saved Kyiv from an assault with their example stiff resistance for over a month against much larger enemy forces But that hopeful outcome seems elusive for now as Russia is requesting support troops from Belorussia and the Assad regime in Syria and sending in more reinforcements from across the country, Georgia, and Syria to restart its stalled and repulsed invasion.

There is strong possibility that Putin will double down on his remorseless war of attrition despite the March 29^th offer to withdraw forces from the Kyiv region. The Ukrainian capital may yet join the list of storied cities that have undergone bloody sieges over the centuries, from ancient Tyre’s epic thirteen-year siege by the Assyrian Empire to the Serbs’ bloody, four-year siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Kyiv has had barbarians at the gate before and was sacked by the Mongols in 1241 and attacked by the Nazis in the largest encirclement by enemy troops in history. While first living in the city as a Russian language student in 1986, I was shown relics of these previous wars against foreign invaders by my Ukrainian hosts. Among them were remnants of the mighty city walls that for centuries repulsed nomad steppe attackers like the dreaded Crimean Tatars.

Another was an epic metal statue known as the Mat Rodina (Mother of the Homeland), built as a memorial the Ukrainian defense of the homeland in World War II, that majestically towered over the city with a sword in her hand. One day the Kyivans will doubtless build a monument to the repulse of the Russians, perhaps one featuring a destroyed Russian tank like the remarkable memorial I found in the Afghan city of Herat to commemorate their defeat of the Soviet invaders. Ukrainian history is full of epic stories of battles against invaders, and I admired the Kyivans I befriended in Soviet Ukraine who spoke to me even then of shaking off Moscow’s rule and achieving independence. One of my Ukrainian friends recently told me of her eighty-one year-old father’s decision to join the Territorial Defense Forces instead of evacuating in the face of the second attack on Kyiv in his life time.

There is something unexpectedly resilient in the Ukrainians that is quickly placing them in the ranks of the greatest defenders in history, such as the equally outnumbered, but heroic, Spartans, Scottish highlanders, Masai, Finns, Gurkhas, Zulus, Apaches, and Chechens. A pantheon of national icons is being created in the war, including one Vitaly Skakun Volodymyrvich, who was charged with slowing a Russian advance across a bridge so outgunned Ukrainian troops could withdraw. The bridge was mined, but the Ukrainian military did not have time to detonate it remotely with Russian forces advancing. Volodymyrovych contacted his retreating troops by radio and told them he would do it himself manually. He then sacrificed his life for his comrades and nation by blowing up the bridge. Another of the nation’s heroes is its young and untried president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who, when asked by the US if he needed evacuation from the capital, gave the most famous quote of the war “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.”

This is a message of determination to fight, not flee by helicopter as the Afghan president did in August 2021, that the defenders of Kyiv share. They are going nowhere and are prepared to fight for their country’s capital to preserve their cherished democracy for themselves and for new generations to come. In light of the ferocious Ukrainian defense of their families, homes, and nation, there is little to no chance that Putin can achieve the regime change objectives of his special operations mission “non-war” (you can get fifteen years in prison in Russia for calling it a war). His world-uniting bloody rampage in Ukraine is a strategic catastrophe on every conceivable level and destroying Ukraine’s historical capital will not salvage it, or Russia’s stained reputation.

It would be an act of sheer folly to try to attack the capital should Putin’s forces make progress in the south and east as they shift their troops to these fronts. Siege warfare is never a good proposition for an attacking force, even when not against a defiant city like Kyiv which covers 325 square miles and is filled with thousands of massive, ambush-ready concrete structures, like the ones used by Chechens to pick of Russian invaders in the much smaller city of Grozny. The 6^th century Chinese philosopher general Lao Tzu famously warned;

“The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided. The [besieging] general, unable to control his irritation, will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants, with the result that one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken. Such are the disastrous effects of a siege.”

For all of his stunning defeats in the last few weeks, Putin, like Hitler at Stalingrad and General Pavel Grachev in Grozny, is still capable of launching his cannon-fodder troops into a heavily defended urban fortress like “swarming ants.” Many of his troops, including whole units who were not told they were invading Ukraine until they crossed into it, will be sacrificed on the altar of his unbridled ego should they assault the massive Ukrainian capital. And, while he may yet destroy this beautiful city with the same sort of indiscriminate bombardments he has used to smash the once-vibrant cities of Grozny, Aleppo, Kharkiv and Mariupol into body-filled rubble, history tells us one thing about city destroyers like Russia’s genocidally inclined dictator; It is easier by far to destroy a people’s homes, hospitals, theaters, schools, playgrounds, churches, universities, and cities than it is to break their fighting spirit.

Some have vowed to defend Ukraine, a land many fled to in 2014 after Putin’s forces invaded the Crimean Peninsula and began to repress the local Crimean Tatars.

Despite the risk of 15-year jail sentences for protesting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Crimean Tatar World Congress publicly came out against the invasion and said in a tweet, “Our Congress recognizes its humanitarian and moral obligation to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainians … so help them in all ways they are capable.”

From 1997 to 1998, I lived with Crimean Tatars – both in their places of Stalin-imposed exile in Uzbekistan, where many still remain, and in their ancestral Crimean homeland – while researching two books on this resilient ethnic group. I found a people who had been through centuries of genocidal persecution, but emphasized their nonviolent approach to challenging Russian brutality.

Crimea’s ancient inhabitants

The Crimean Tatars formed as a distinct ethnic group from the 11th to the 15th centuries. This ethnic formation began when nomadic Turkic horsemen, known as Kipchaks, arrived from the vast Eurasian steppe, which extends from modern-day Kazakhstan through Ukraine to Moldova. They mixed with the long-settled populations living on the Crimea’s , such as the Germanic Goths.

The final process of consolidation as an ethnic group was completed when the nomadic Mongols conquered Crimea in the 1200s and their descendants converted to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, after intermixing with the peninsula’s original population.

The Mongol Golden Horde, a state founded by Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan, subsequently ruled over Crimea and Russia for 240 years. When the Golden Horde disintegrated in the 1400s, the Tatars of the Crimea created their own Khanate – a state governed by descendants of the Genghis Khan dynasty.

The Crimean Khanate went on to rule the region extending from the Caucasus Mountains to Moldova for centuries, even after the Mongol empire in China, Russia and the Middle East collapsed.

While Crimean Tatars came to be feared by the Russians as horse-mounted raiders and enslavers of the Russian people, their bold expeditions were carried out, in part, to prevent Orthodox-Slavic settlers from encroaching on their ancestral pasture lands. For centuries following Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Tatars of Siberia in the 1500s, Russian settlers had began an inexorable southward advance onto the steppe lands of the Tatars, known in Russian as the Ukraina, or the frontier.

Soviet historians later tried to define the Crimean Tatars as “a mob of wild, barbarian bandits.” However, in my visits to their former capital of Bakchesaray, the Garden Palace, located in a scenic gorge in the Crimean Mountains, I found Turkish-style imperial mosques and minarets, beautiful medieval marble fountains engraved with Arabic, and a palace evocative of a lost glory.

In 1774, the Russian Empire, using vastly superior numbers and new gunpowder technology, finally crushed the Crimean Tatars’ cavalry-based army and annexed their realm nine years later.

Genocide under Stalin

The Russian conquest of their homeland almost destroyed the Crimean Tatars as a distinct ethnic group. The once-free Tatar peasants were turned into serfs by their new Russian masters, their communal lands were confiscated, and their centuries-old mosques, bazaars and graveyards were

As hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars abandoned their southern mountain villages and nomadic yurt encampments to flee to Ottoman Turkey, the dwindling remnants of this ancient people in Tsarist Crimea became a largely landless and repressed minority in a newly Slavic majority land.

Worse was to come under the Tsars’ heirs, the Soviets. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided to ethnically cleanse the peninsula’s remaining Tatar population during World War II after accusing them of being a race of collaborators.

Crimean Tatar women, children, and men, including those fighting in the ranks of the Soviet Army against Germany, were brutally deported in KGB cattle trains to the depths of Soviet Central Asia in May 1944. Approximately 1 in 3 Crimean Tatars died in an ethnic cleansing that Ukraine and several other countries later recognized as a genocide.

Widely dispersed from their ancestral lands in the Central Asian deserts among a hostile local population, the surviving Crimean Tatars might have disappeared as a nation under Communist programs designed to wipe out their distinct identity. But they tenaciously managed to keep their collective identity alive and fought a decadeslong, transgenerational battle to return to the romanticized “yeshil ada,” or the “green island,” of Crimea.

As Soviet rule weakened and collapsed from 1989 to 1991, approximately 250,000 Crimean Tatars, roughly half the nation, migrated back to their homeland on the shores of the distant Black Sea. By that time, the Russian administration-dominated Crimean Autonomous Republic had been made part of Ukraine.

In the late 1990s, I lived in a squatter settlement with the Shevkievs, a Crimean Tatar family who had returned to the then-Ukrainian territory of Crimea from exile in Uzbekistan. I still fondly recall eating their famous chiborek fried meat pastries, hearing ancient folk ballads of the brave, horse-mounted Tatar warriors fighting the Russians, and being welcomed with open arms by this impoverished but resilient family and people.

By this time, the Russians made up 58% of the Crimean autonomy’s population and the indigenous Tatars only 12%. Anti-Tatar sentiment among the dominant Russians was widespread. I saw crowds in the Crimea marching with placards of Stalin as an overt message of hostility toward the Tatars.

The return of the Russians

In 2014, Putin annexed the Crimea to punish Ukraine for its efforts to form closer ties with Western Europe and the U.S. For the Crimean Tatars who had rebuilt their devastated nation in democratic Ukraine, the conquest of their homeland by their historical nemesis, now ruled by an increasingly autocratic Putin, was a nightmare come true.

Among the new Russian Federation authorities’ first measures after annexing the Crimea Autonomous Republic was to ban the Crimean Tatars’ parliament, known as the Mejlis, which had given women the right to vote in 1918. They also arrested, tortured and killed Crimean Tatar activists.

Thousands of Crimean Tatars fled Russian oppression in Crimea following its 2014 annexation. Many settled in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, or nearby Kherson, a town Putin’s forces claimed they had captured on March 2, 2022.

One displaced Crimean Tatar, who fled the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 to Ukraine, declared in late February 2022, “We have nowhere left to run, so we’ll have to fight.”

[Get The Conversation’s most important politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter.]

Brian Glyn Williams, Professor of Islamic History, UMass Dartmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it? It’s not a good place for any party to end up with a cultlike situation.” It is widely accepted even by many Republicans that Trump launched a cult-like movement, one that in this case called on his followers not to drink Kool Aid, but to inject disinfectant to “knock it [Coronavirus] out” in his words and to drink medically unproven and potentially lethal Hydroxychloroquine. As the head of an anti-science cult, Trump openly mocked and attacked medical scientists and encouraged his followers to avoid the advice of his own CDC (Center for Disease Control) and frontline doctors and nurses. These medical professionals it should be recalled pleaded with the public to help them in their desperate fight to save lives by simply wearing masks and practicing social distancing.

In leading the resistance against the CDC guidelines designed to protect the American public Trump convinced millions of his devoted followers to potentially die for his cult of personality in what history might record as a metaphorical “drinking of the hydroxychloroquine.” While Trump—in a reversal of President Harry Truman’s bold acceptance of presidential responsibility “the buck stops here”—weakly proclaimed “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the fact that America lost approximately a quarter of a million Americans to the ravages of this pandemic on his watch, history will record that much of the death stemmed from his far reaching, cult leader-like decisions.

Trump’s War on the CDC and the Truth

Trump’s litany of lethally misguided decisions began in January when his economic adviser Peter Navarro presciently warned him in a memo that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage. The somber threat assessment of up to half a million lives lost, which tracks with current trajectories for the pandemic, seems to have sunk in. In February Trump was recorded in an interview with legendary author Bob Woodward acknowledging the unprecedented threat the virus posed to both the population he was sworn to protect…and the economy. In the unprecedentedly frank interview Trump did something he has still not done publicly, he honestly acknowledged the real threat to millions of Americans the lethal virus posed stating “”This is deadly stuff,” adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.

Soon thereafter the consensus among medical professionals came to be that wearing masks was the best means for preventing the spread of this “deadly stuff” (i.e. airborne COVID 19 aerosol droplets). Using high-speed video one study found that hundreds of droplets were generated when saying a simple phrase, but that nearly all these droplets were blocked when the mouth was covered by a damp washcloth. Surgeons and other medical professionals had been wearing medical masks to stop the spread of germs for decades so it was no-brainer to call for them to be worn in the COVID 19 crisis, just as they had been by doctors fighting Ebola in Africa.

As the head of a cult of personality that his son in law Jared Kushner openly admitted launched a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party, in February 2020 Trump could have donned a MAGA mask or an American flag mask and channeled John F. Kennedy’s bold call for patriotic sacrifice by proclaiming to his diehard followers “Ask not what your mask can do for you, but what your mask can do for your nation!” Trump’s devoted followers openly proclaimed in interviews that if he told them to don a mask they would and millions of his devotees would have followed his example of cult head leadership if he called on them to wear a mask. Trump could have also done as South Korea’s president did and boldly launched a federal, unified, top down, nationwide emergencyresponse that involved a government-enforced mandatory use of face masks, a strict ban on social gatherings, and a highly effective national Coronavirus tracing program that led to the strictly enforced quarantining of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus. In systematically implementing these central government policies on a nationwide basis South Korea, with a population of almost 52 million, was able to limit its COVID 19 deaths to a remarkable 464 deaths as of October 31 (that translates to less than 3,000 deaths in America with a population of 330,000 instead of the current 247,000 deaths).

History will show that the above commonsensical steps are exactly what Trump did not do, instead he chose to divide the nation with an “us” versus “them” approach to masks and social distancing as the pandemic struck. Trump clearly saw the pandemic as political rather than a health crisis. The calculated tack he pursued to address this political crisis played a major role in the fact that America began to lose over 1,300 to the virus in a single day (more than twice the entire number of nationwide COVID 19 deaths in South Korea in 9 months) and to see over 170,000 new cases in a single day. By mid-November America was experiencing the daily equivalent of a Jonestown mass suicide or a three-times-a-week 9/11 mass casualty terror attack. Under the president’s leadership America would see the most Coronavirus cases of any nation in the world and become the global epicenter even as the unemployment rate ultimately soared to 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression. In the epidemiological sense the USA came to resemble the “hot zone” of Congo during the Ebola outbreak and European nations banned their citizens from flying to America.

The president’s self-serving calculus in deliberately not following the highly effective South Korean model or advice of the medical community and instead undermining his own government’s CDC’s safety measures was as cold, calculating and cynical as it was immoral. It is patently obvious that Trump saw the virus as a threat to the economy and recent history clearly shows that incumbent presidents who preside over a strong economy get reelected. Anything that would enable the American people to continue to work and keep the economy going, even as morgues and Intensive Care Units were overwhelmed with the dead and dying, was, in Trump’s self-interested Machiavellian perspective, legitimate. Trump was cynically prepared to sacrifice the health and lives of millions of Americans on the altar of his ambition to be reelected via a sound economy. This “either masks” or “the economy” choice was a false choice as the economy was dependent on a healthy, and living, work force.

What were the president’s subsequent fateful, strictly economy-based decisions that helped lead the USA, which Fox News reported has just four percent of the world’s population, to suffer twenty five percent of the world’s deaths to the virus that other countries like New Zealand controlled? First, instead of being truthful and urgently warning the American people that COVID 19 was “five times more deadly than the flu,” as he acknowledged in his interview with Bob Woodward, Trump deliberately and repeatedly lied about and downplayed its threat. In February, for example, he tried to convince the American people not to be afraid of the deadly virus that would by mid November infect almost 11 million and kill almost 250,000. The president would mislead his nation by describing the deadly pandemic as nothing more than the “common flu” and falsely stating “This is a flu. This is like a flu.” Trump repeatedly lied to the American people about the lethality of the contagious virus he had previously been warned about and offered false information such as “You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” Trump would also prevaricate and say

of Coronavirus “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” as well as “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” and cases are “coming way down.”

Trump’s Policies That Aided the Spread of the Coronavirus

But Trump’s ultimately self-defeating policies, which were to aid and abet the spread of the pandemic, went far further than simply deceiving the American people and lulling his blind cult followers into a false sense of security as hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen died from the raging pandemic. As America’s governors responsibly moved on an ad hoc basis to fill the federal level national leadership void and, in a patchwork fashion, implement CDC guidelines to protect their populations due to the absence of a top down, nationwide government policy, Trump calculatingly encouraged armed anti-mask and anti-social distancing protestors in Michigan. He cynically called on them to “liberate!” their state from its Democrat governor and openly fight against his own CDC’s health guidelines. Taking cues from the president, one group of 13 militiamen who were opposed to the Michigan governor’s spring lockdown hatched a plot to kidnap, try and execute her before they were arrested by the FBI.

To compound matters, Trump then irresponsibly carried out a series of cringe-inducing mass rallies in the fall that were later found to have been “super spreader” events where throngs of packed and maskless devotees risked their lives. Fox news would report that after a largely maskless Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma there was a record high surge in Coronavirus cases. Trump’s true believers in the rallies blindly showed their devotion to the cult of Trump by proudly ignoring the very social distancing and mask guidelines meant to protect them and their loved ones. Among those who appear to have become infected (and later died) at one of Trump’s irresponsibly lethal rallies was former Republican presidential candidate Herman Caine who proudly had his maskless picture taken with fans at the Tulsa, Oklahoma rally. We have no idea how many other Herman Caine’s died in his super spreader rallies.

As the high priest of a cult that replaced the Republican Party’s pro-life stance with what could be considered a pro-death stance, Trump’s lethal policies of rejecting masks and social distancing and lulling Americans with such recent falsehoods as “we are rounding the corner [on the pandemic]” beautifully” enabled the deadly virus to spread closer and closer to us all. Among the most obviously false tenets of Trump’s cult was the “nothing is happening here” mantra that there was no skyrocketing death toll just “more testing for the virus.”

In addition to unquestioned truths, cults often need an “apostate,” “heretic” or “ungodly” enemy to focus their true believers’ wrath against. Reverend Jim Jones’ cult in Guyana focused its followers’ fury on the “sinful” American government. Trump soon found a sinister enemy for his followers to focus on, the very American medical professionals who were risking their lives in overwhelmed Intensive Care Units to save patients infected with COVID 19. Far from depicting the previously widely respected medical professionals as frontline heroes in the war on the deadly pathogen, Trump spread a falsehood among his followers that doctors were financially incentivized to lie and exaggerate Coronavirus deaths in order to receive financial bonuses from his government. This easily disproved lie served to undermine his followers’ belief in the skyrocketing death toll from the Coronavirus and further incentivize them to ignore the health guidelines of the now distrusted medical professionals. Not since Typhoid Mary, a 19^th century cook who consciously infected dozens with the deadly disease, had an American done so much to infect other Americans.

If this were not damaging enough to the American people’s health, Trump actively worked to undermine and discredit America’s top infectious disease expert, his widely respected Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci. Trump described Fauci, who polls showed had more support than Trump, as a “disaster” and health care professionals as “idiots.” Outdoing the president, his former advisor Steve Bannon had his online show banned from Twitter after he called for Dr. Fauci to be decapitated and his head put on a pike in front of the White House. Fauci, who became the focus of intense and widespread anti-masking sentiment among Trump followers, received so many death threats that he was given FBI bodyguards for his protection. Meanwhile, at his packed maskless campaign rallies Trump mocked his opponent Joe Biden to boos from the audience proclaiming that Biden would do something terrible, “listen to Dr. Fauci” and “listen to scientists.”

As the pandemic swept through the heartlands of America turning even thinly populated states like the Dakotas into the world’s Coronavirus hotspots Trump diverted any blame from himself and in addition to stirring up anger against medical professionals channeled it towards Asian Americans by irresponsibly placing all the blame on China. He repeatedly referred to the pandemic as the “China flu” and “Kungflu” and horrific cases of beatings, violence and abuse of Asian Americans, including non-Chinese Asian Americans of Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Japanese etc. origins spiked. Across the country there were also cases of angry blind followers of Trump’s war on medical science and masks anti-maskers attacking and beating store or restaurant employees who asked them to wear masks.

Blindly accepting the president’s anti-medical science preaching was not a huge leap for his cult followers. It will be recalled their party had a history of denialism towards science traceable back to the 1970s when many Republicans rejected the medical community’s findings that cigarettes caused cancer (not to mention their more recent rejection of the science behind global warming). But the million vote question remained; Would the president’s lulling with falsehoods and anti-Fauci and anti-medical science approach to the pandemic resonate with those beyond his diehard base who had not drunk the Hydrochloroquine?

The High Political Cost of Trump’s Efforts to Play Down the Virus and Sabotage the CDC.

The signs that Trump’s approach was not resonating with those beyond the reach of the Fox evening news echo chamber or his ecstatic rallies began to appear almost as soon as Joe Biden became the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and began to contrast himself to Trump by wearing a mask in public and practicing social distancing. One candidate wore his mask as a symbol of his belief in science while the other chose not to and instead promised his followers the Coronavirus would go away any day now. Trump openly mocked Biden for wearing a mask in the first debate and mocked him for “staying in his basement” during the lockdown.

As Trump, his spokeswoman, his former spokeswoman, his head of Housing and Urban Development, his chief of staff, his wife and son as well as Vice President Pence’s staff and several Republican senator allies and one governor ally and 130 of his Secret Service bodyguards became positive with COVID 19 (even as Biden and his staff remained negative) the differences between the contenders’ policies and understanding of the real threat the pandemic posed became increasingly glaring. Polls began to show that increasing majorities felt Biden was better suited to deal with the pandemic than Trump who defined himself as an anti-Coronavirus “cheerleader.” While Trump created an alternative universe for his denialist followers where he claimed the virus was “disappearing,” fifty five percent of voters listened to the prognostications of the health experts and felt the worst was yet to come. And far from turning on Dr. Fauci, a poll by the Independent reported that he was the only person associated with the Trump administration who saw their approval rating rise.

Sensing that his denialist approach was not reaching the un-converted who were worried about the mounting death toll and spread of the virus as the election approached, a self pitying Trump griped at a rally “With the fake news, everything is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. I had it. Here I am, right?” His message that COVID was not a real threat because he had survived it with the support of the best doctors in the world was cold comfort to the hundreds of thousands of American families burying loved ones killed in the pandemic or those who had become infected and suffered terrible “long haul” effects from the virus. As the election loomed Trump’s final message remained one of defiance and imperviousness to the facts. At a rally he encouraged Coronavirus fatigue among his followers saying of Americans “They’re getting tired of the pandemic — aren’t they? You turn on CNN. That’s all they cover: ‘Covid, covid, pandemic. Covid, covid, covid. They’re trying to talk people out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.”

But even if Americans were tired of the pandemic they were not willing to do as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows did when he threw in the towel and surrendered to Coronavirus saying “we are not going to control the pandemic.” As the election fast approached, a worried Republican pollster captured the unease in the Trump camp stating “I think the polling is picking up everything, which is that the pandemic is overwhelmingly the most important issue facing the country. And right now, that’s not helpful to the president.” Democratic advisor James Carville captured the mood of voters in 1992 with the phrase “it’s the economy stupid” and the key takeaway from numerous polls on the eve of the election seemed to be “it’s the Coronavirus stupid.” Whether Trump liked it or not the election was going to be a referendum on his handling of the greatest health emergency the nation had seen since the 1918 Influenza pandemic.

Even as Trump held his final rallies, Midwestern states like Wisconsin that had voted for him in 2016 became the global epicenter of the deadly virus that many Trump supporters had previously thought would be limited to New York and other coastal Democrat governed states. Millions of Americans (including many of the vulnerable elderly who were written off as expendable by Trump followers who were focused on getting young people to reopen the economy at all cost) came to blame Trump for the spread of the virus that he had systematically downplayed. While polls showed Trump was trusted on the economy, a Gallup poll taken less than a month before the election showed that by a margin of 52% to 39% Americans trusted Biden more than the president when it came to the spreading pandemic. To compound matters, in a rejection of Trump’s anti-mask campaign that should have served warning to the president, 90 percent of those polled in October said they wore masks. This boded ill for a president who had made anti-maskism a central platform of his reelection campaign and boded good for Biden who wore a mask proudly.

Far from being a rallying point to gain new voters, Trump’s instinct to politicize what should have been a unifying medical issue to rally the nation around hurt him among the majority of voters who trusted Dr. Fauci not the president. A clear majority believed in the science behind wearing masks and social distancing and an October poll showed that six in ten Americans were favorable to those wearing masks despite Trump mocking them. Despite his best efforts to turn the nation against masks, Trump was going against the majority. Tellingly, by turning such widely approved, commonsensical health measures as wearing masks into a sign of disloyalty to his cult, Trump lost the support of many non-cult voters in highly infected states that had voted for him in 2016, such as Arizona and Wisconsin (these two states flipped to Biden in the November 2020 elections and helped give him the presidency). In Georgia, where the Republican governor emulated Trump by suing the mayor of Atlanta to prevent her from having mandatory wearing of masks, voters similarly flipped the state from Trump to Biden in the November election.

Ironically, governors such as Ohio Republican governor Mike Dewine who moved quickly and decisively to enact strict measures to enforce lockdowns, social distancing, and mask wearing, instead of downplaying the pandemic with falsehoods and sabotaging the CDC, saw their approval ratings go up. Trump it seemed had gambled with the lives of millions of Americans on what turned out to be a losing bet that they would in essence not listen to their lying eyes and ears and instead trust his promise that “we are rounding the bend.” In retrospect the president should have followed Mike Dewine’s path to widespread popularity among undecideds, Democrats and Republicans by being honest with the American people and working to save American lives…instead of his job. In fact if the president had done nothing and simply played golf and left the job of combatting the pandemic to the CDC instead of leading the resistance to its guidelines he would have fared far better with the electorate since he would not have offended the commonsense of millions of non-cult member Americans. In this sense it was not the pandemic per se that hurt him in the elections, but his response to it that bordered on lethal malfeasance.

In the end, the Washington Post was to report, 82 percent of voters who said the Coronavirus was their most important issue in choosing a president supported Biden, according to preliminary national exit polls. This was all Biden needed to do an exact repeat of Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory over Hilary Clinton (which he repeatedly described as a “landslide”) and win 306 to 232 votes. While Trump had needlessly alienated many voting constituencies before the election, including Mexican Americans after describing Mexicans in blanket terms as “rapists” and Arizonians after launching a campaign to degrade the state’s beloved native son and Vietnam hero John McCain, it was his unpopular Coronavirus policies that cost him his the most support in the tight 2020 presidential election. Simply put, tens of millions refused to drink his cult of death Kool Aid and subscribe to his alternative universe where the virus would just “go away” and wearing masks to protect themselves and fellow citizens was somehow disloyal to the president, unpatriotic and un-American. For a clear majority of Americans masks remained a sign of collective and personal responsibility, not a sign of being un-American.

There is no way of knowing how many Americans’ lives were lost as a result of the president’s 2020 anti-CDC campaign that galvanized such fervor among his true believers who rapturously packed his dangerous rallies and stubbornly refused to wear masks to protect fellow citizens and loved ones. A new study, however, shows that universal wearing of masks, if belatedly mandated (as South Korea did), could save 130,000 lives by the end of February 2021. As grieving Americans bury more of their Coronavirus-infected loved ones than were lost in the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom, combined it remains to be seen whether Trump and his loyal cult followers will belatedly assist the CDC in trying to save those 130,000 lives during the remainder of his one term presidency…or whether his self-focused calls for mass suicide by the blind faithful are unquestioningly obeyed as they were in Jonestown. There are, however, worrying signs that Trump will hold more of his super spreader rallies where he has promised to fight to delegitimize the election results and make his claim that the election was “stolen” from him. In fact this process which portends further super spreader events has already begun. On November 14, thousands of maskless Trump supporters organized by the openly racist Proud Boys gathered in Washington for a “Stop The Steal” rally to protest against the supposed stealing of Trump’s presidency.

Regardless of whether or not Trump concedes defeat or goes on a pandemic spreading tour to once again rally his true believer base, one thing is abundantly clear. In January 2021 America will have a new president. On November 9^th president elect Biden channeled President John F. Kennedy by reaching out to the nation with a plea for all Americans, regardless of their political orientation, to wear masks stating “It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day. It doesn’t matter your party or your point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Please, I implore you, wear a mask. Do it for yourself. Do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement, but it is a good way to start pulling the country together.” Biden has proposed a plan (available on his website) to follow in South Korea’s footsteps and for the first time launch a federal, nationwide, top down program designed to increase tracing, provide more funds for efforts to assist medical facilities and governors in battling the pandemic, and encourage more mask wearing and social distancing (despite Trump’s claims Biden has not called for a nationwide lockdown). Biden has also promised to listen to the medical experts and that is perhaps something that the families of almost a quarter of a million families who buried loved ones lost to the pandemic under Trump can take some solace from.

On November 19, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced during the first Coronavirus task force briefing held by the Trump administration in four months that vaccines had been produced by the very medical scientists the president had derided to his followers as “idiots.” As the daily death toll in America approaches 2,000 and daily infection rates surpassed 187,000 this came as welcome news to a traumatized nation that lost more to the pandemic than any other country. Dr. Fauci, the target of so much hatred from Trump’s cult followers, announced in the widely covered briefing that New York city-based Pfizer and Boston-based Moderna had created vaccines that he assured the American people were safe (here he was pushing back on New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s criticism that they might not be safe). Fauci and Vice President Pence, who was far more visible than Trump who showed his utter lack of interest in the pandemic by not attending a Coronavirus Task Force meeting in five months, then announced plans to distribute the vaccine as early as late December, first to health workers who are at far greater risk as they treat infected patients. There is thus cause for hope that the virus that has taken the lives of over a quarter of a million Americans in less than nine months can be treated.

Sadly, the rollout of the vaccine in the largest medical distribution in American history will certainly come too late for tens of thousands of Americans who will continue to die in the pandemic’s greatest and deadliest spike yet over the next few months. The global epicenter of the raging virus as of late November is in the Dakotas where Republican governors proudly refused to issue mask mandates and skepticism of the Coronavirus “hoax” (as Trump labelled it) is rife. As a result of a widespread culture of Coronavirus denialism and anger at masks, North Dakota has the highest mortality rate of any state or any country in the world according to Fox News. In the Dakotas Trump’s cult of death is taking its highest toll and one frustrated South Dakota nurse wrote that many of her patients dying of the virus were still engaged in denialism about it. She recorded the sad reality of Trump’s continuing impact on those who believe their cult leader, not the distrusted medical scientists, as follows:

“I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens.”

It it not surprising, given his influence among Republicans which is amplified by Fox News pundits such as Laura Ingraham who has attacked governors who issues mask mandates as “Coronavirus crazed tyrants,” that counties that voted for Trump have higher infection rates than those that did not.

To compound matters, as the incoming Biden administration—which has proclaimed “there is nothing macho about not wearing a mask. Wearing a mask is a sign of being patriotic”—prepares to take the White House and control of the campaign to defeat the pandemic on January 20, 2021, the Trump administration has refused to assist it out of spite. More than two weeks since his decisive election loss, Trump remains dug in at the White House, refusing to concede and to help his successor deal with the pandemic. Since becoming a lame-duck president, Trump has not only blocked cooperation with the incoming Biden administration, he has remained largely silent on the Coronavirus and instead focused on undermining the integrity of the election results.

A concerned Biden has fretted that, if his administration has no cooperation in preparing to take over the distribution of the vaccine and other health measures before January 20, 2021, “more people could die.” But for all the fact that Trump is proactively trying to prevent cooperation between his health officials and the incoming Biden administration, cracks are appearing in his cult. As thousands of Midwesterners see their communities ravaged by what they were told was a hoax and see loved ones die, there is a new sense of skepticism towards Trump’s war on the science of defeating the pandemic among many disillusioned former cult members.

Among the disillusioned is North Dakota governor Doug Burgum who broke with his former anti-mask policies as North Dakotans began to become infected and die in the thousands. On November 13, Burgum separated ways with Trump and announced that “the era of individualistic responsibility” for wearing masks and social distancing had ended and he as governor was mandating masks and other social distancing measures designed to protect North Dakotans. It remains to be seen whether this major break with a cult that has been responsible for so many deaths across the nation in 2020 signals a growing rejection of Trump’s influence over his followers…or whether it remains an anomaly in a movement that still has the unquestioned loyalty of millions of citizens in the most pandemic-wracked nation on the earth.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Business Insider: “How Trump Lost Control Of The Coronavirus Pandemic, Told As A Motion Comic”

Dartmouth, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Six years ago, in October, 2014, the brutal ISIS terorist group came for the Kurds in the Syrian enclave of Kobani. It would have been a gateway for them into Turkey, on which it bordered. The US intervened from the air, helping halt what would have turned into a genocide, and the unlikely relationship forged between the US Air Force and the leftist Kurds pointed the way forward for the Obama administration in formulating a strategy to defeat ISIS in eastern Syria– an astonishingly successful strategy. In the fall of 2019, President Donald J. Trump threw these Kurds under the bus and greenlighted a Turkish incursion into northern Syria to displace them.

On the sixth anniversary of the siege of Kobani, it is time to remember the story of the beginning of the end of ISIS.

The Socialist Syrian Kurds Draw a Line in the Desert.

The Kurdish-Dominated Autonomous Region of Rojava, Northern Syria. Fall 2014.

In the spring and summer of 2014 ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, terror group burst onto the world stage by conquering northern Iraq including that country’s second largest city of Mosul. At this time the 36,000 man ISIS Jaish or war machine, that had defeated the famed Kurdish Peshmerga (Those Who Face Death) of northern Iraq, evicted five US trained Iraqi Army divisions from Mosul, and conquered one third of Syria and Iraq, was described as “an unstoppable juggernaut, sweeping Iraq and Syria in an unending, unstoppable, terrible blitzkrieg.”[1] By the fall of 2014 the terror group’s attention shifted to the three north Syrian Kurdish enclaves made up of Kobane, Afrin, and Hasakah. There, approximately 2.2 million terribly repressed and in many cases citizenshipless Kurdish inhabitants lived along northern Syria’s Turkish border (they formed roughly 15 percent of Syria’s total population).

The Syrian Kurds’ dream was to unite these three northern Kurdish provinces into one secular Socialist democratic, pro-women’s rights, pro-Christian and Arab minority rights autonomous homeland to be known as Rojava (the Land of Setting Sun). In the initial stages of the Syrian War, which broke out in 2011, Syrian government troops had pulled out of these three separate Kurdish enclaves effectively ceding control over them to the local Syrian PKK (a Kurdish autonomy seeking insurgent group in Turkey) linked socialist Kurdish volunteer militia known as the YPG (People’s Protection Units). The embattled and retreating Syrian government had not attacked these breakaway Kurdish zones and a truce prevailed.

The Kurdish enclaves of northern Syria collectively known as RojavaBut in the fall of 2014, a new threat emerged from the south that threatened to shatter the Syrian Kurds’ dream of carving out a Socialist democratic autonomy in northern Syria: the seemingly unstoppable ISIS war machine. By this time, ISIS’s hard-charging jihadists had conquered one-third of Syria and Iraq and seemed to be on an inexorable victory march toward the Kurdish-inhabited Turkish border town of Kobane. The city’s conquest would have important strategic implications as it would give ISIS control of a vital stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border, which could be used to expand clandestine re-supply routes. As hundreds of ISIS pickup trucks with anti-aircraft guns mounted in their rear beds and US Humvees captured by ISIS fighters from fleeing Iraqi Army soldiers, along with mortars and frontline battle tanks, swept across the desert and converged on Kobane, the small city and its Kurdish population seemed doomed.

But Kobane’s defenders, Kurdish YPG fighters vowed to fight the fanatic invaders, who they felt “stood for everything bad in the world,” to the death.[2] Some journalists sensationalized this impending battle between the Kurds, the largest nation on the earth without their own homeland, and the seemingly unstoppable fanatic forces arrayed against them as a scene straight out of a Mad Max movie. It was to be an epic battle between a thus-far-unbeaten army of dedicated jihadists and an untested group of Kurdish Socialist fighters, which included thousands of newly mobilized women volunteers.

The YPG were socialists who dreamed of uniting the three distinct north Syrian Kurdish enclaves of Rojava into an egalitarian, “consocialist,” multi-ethnic, democratic federation that gave equal rights to women and ethnic minorities of the sort envisioned by the jailed (in Turkey) founder of the Turkey-based Kurdish PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) rebels, Abdullah “Apo” Ocalan. Foreigners often romanticized the Socialist YPG and their revolution. A Reuters account of the YPG, for example, stated:

They have repeatedly appealed to progressive democratic ideals as a way to counter the jihadists in their struggle for the hearts and minds of the region’s inhabitants. Last January, the group held elections in the territories they control. They made a point of including all ethnic and religious communities. “Everybody has to be represented,” is one of the articles in the self-proclaimed “Constitution of the Rojava,” which refers to their de-facto autonomous region in northern Syria.[3]

Another fascinating component of the YPG that won them praise from abroad was their establishment of a female fighting unit known as the YPJ (The Women’s Protection Units). These Kurdish women fighters were lionized by the media. On their website, the YPG stated that the YPJ was formed “to use armed battle as a way of liberating women from terrorism and patriarchal thinking as well as alleviating women’s grievances in general.”[4] One YPJ female fighter told stated “When we liberate a town from ISIS we first get rid of Sharia, we open a school for all the children and Jineoloji [the science of women’s rights] for women.”[5] The YPJ fought as hard as their male counterparts and had a special section in local graveyards for fighters “martyred fighting fascism (the Turks) and Daesh (ISIS).” The leadership of the Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party) was “unabashedly feminist” and a remarkable forty percent of the YPG (the military wing of the PYD) defenders were women.[6]

The female fighting force became famous when a picture of one of its fighters went viral online. In the picture, an unveiled, smiling Kurdish woman known simply as Rehana, or the “Angel of Kobane,” was shown holding up a peace sign with one hand and toting an AK-47 assault rifle in the other while dressed for battle in the famous green guerilla uniform commonly associated with the Kurds. The photo was shared millions of times on Facebook and Twitter, along with a legend that she single-handedly killed as many as 100 ISIS fighters. Although the story was likely apocryphal, it served as inspiration for Western journalists as it flew in the face of their preconceived notions of oppressed women in the Middle East and shattered traditional expectations regarding the role of women in combat.

In the West, the photo was a point of interest. In Syria, it was something more; it was both a symbol of Kurdish resistance to ISIS and a call to action. The “Angel of Kobane” helped inspire nearly 10,000 women to join the YPJ ranks and take up arms against the ISIS misogynists known for raping and taking women as sex slaves. The female Kurdish fighters reveled in the belief that ISIS’s strict interpretation of Sunni Islam denied its fighters access to paradise if killed by a woman. A 22-year-old Kurdish fighter named Haveen captured the female fighters’ spirit stating;

“I like that when we kill them they lose their heaven. They are so scared of us! If we kill them they can’t go to heaven. It makes us laugh…. We make loud calls of happiness when we see them to let them know we are coming. That’s when they become cowards. I don’t know how many of them I’ve killed. It’s not enough. I won’t be happy until they’re all dead.”[7]

There was also Asia Ramadan Antar, known to many in the West as the “Kurdish Angelina Jolie” due to her remarkable resemblance to the Hollywood superstar. But Antar was no actress, she was a real-life frontline fighter and one of the most renowned female Kurdish fighters in the YPJ. Antar was involved in many battles with ISIS, but ultimately, like many of her sisters, she was killed by ISIS.

Journalists risked their lives to film units of brave Kurdish female volunteer fighters armed with everything from light infantry weapons to rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) in their desperate fight against the misogynistic ISIS stoners of women “sinners.” Their bold defiance was starkly contrasted with the hatred of independent women of the sort espoused by the incoming ISIS fanatics. One Middle East observer was to note of this unique role of women fighters in the male-dominated region, “Rojava is the only region in the world where women have organized themselves to ideologically and physically fight Islamist forces to protect civilians from fanatic religious rule.”[8]

As the battle of Kobane loomed in the fall of 2014, members of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe flocked back home to join the fight and soon foreigners who idealized the Syrian Kurds began to join the YPG as well. Among them were two Americans, Nicholas Alan Warden and Robert Grodt, who were subsequently killed fighting near the ISIS capital of Raqqa and in the western Kurdish province of Afrin.[9] Members of biker gangs from Holland and Germany also joined the Syria YPG fighters.[10] The YPG had an active social media presence and has a website in English at www.ypgrojava.org which appealed to Western volunteers for assistance.

With the world watching, it became clear that Kobane could become a test for both the legendary Kurdish female fighters, their male comrades, and Obama’s new UCW (Unconventional Warfare) proxy strategy of confronting ISIS by supporting local forces with arms and bombings, instead of American boots on the ground in the vanguard. Essentially, the most powerful man in the world would be depending on an outgunned and untried Kurdish force that was forty percent woman to vindicate his surrogate approach to war in the sands of the Middle East.

There was thus a larger geostrategic and political aspect of this battle that reached from the hastily dug Kurdish trenches at Kobane up all the way across the Atlantic to the White House. For, as it transpired, there was a political battle being waged in the power halls of the American capital. For months, Republicans had been lambasting Obama for having “disengaged” America from the Middle East and had described his foreign and military policy as one of “withdrawal and retrenchment.” Republicans had also been accusing Obama of “cutting and running” when he withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq in December of 2011. Overlooking the fact that ISIS was simply a rebranded version of Al Qaeda in Iraq AQI (which had arisen under insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in 2003 and 2004 to resist the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq) Donald Trump even engaged in revisionist history and blamed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for having “created ISIS.”

But Obama proved to be impervious to the calls for conventionalizing the war and launching an escalated US-led ground intervention in the vast deserts of Syria. He remained vehemently opposed to “reoccupying” Iraq via a big war like Operation Iraqi Freedom Iraq and deploying front line combat troops into the multi-sided sectarian quagmire in the region to fight a fanatical Sunni enemy that had already cost America thousands of soldiers’ lives during the indecisive 2003-2011 Iraq War. Instead, Obama went through with his plan to carry out a more cautious proxy air campaign that became known as “working by with and through” local fighters to “degrade and defeat” ISIS. By late September 2014, Obama had placed his bets on support of the Kurds in the defense of their cherished north Syrian homeland and decided to assist them with the full might of US airpower.

The defense of Kobane would, therefore, be both a test of the untried Kurds and a test of Obama’s “standoff” unconventional warfare strategy of relying on surrogate forces in the region to fight against ISIS, instead of directly putting Americans in the frontlines in the volatile Middle East. Far from “letting the Middle East burn,” as some of his critics described it, Obama meant to leverage local “firemen” to put out the ISIS desert inferno, instead of Americans. The president insisted that US forces “lead from behind” and essentially serve as “combat advisors” at the “brigade level.” Although at this point there would be no boots on the ground for US troops, officially at least.

Obama vowed to assist the Kurds with airlifted weapons, supplies, and air support to prevent the fall of their city and the region around it. From the corridors of power in Washington, where Republican congressmen and senators were attacking Obama for, as then-House Speaker John Boehner put it, for his “absence of strategy,” to the Turkish side of the border (where thousands of Kurdish refugees were able to sit on a hill and watch U.S. bombs fall on their nearby home city), to ISIS’s de facto capital of Raqqa, where imam prayer leaders called on the faithful to pray for divine assistance in their jihad, the world watched as Kobane’s defenders prepared to try to halt the seemingly unstoppable ISIS tide that was now surging toward them.

To compound matters, the powerful Turks to the north of Syria were opposed to Obama’s plan to unite with their mortal Kurdish allies, Socialist men and women. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted angrily to the plan stating “the PYD [the political party of the YPG], for us, is equal to the PKK; it is a terrorist organization. … [I]t would be wrong for the U.S., a NATO ally, to open talk of such support and expect us to agree.”[11] Frustratingly, the Turks who had tanks lined up on the border facing ISIS refused to attack the terror organization and merely watched as the ISIS fighters stormed Kobane. The United States, however, went ahead with planned airdrops of medical supplies and light infantry weapons for the Syrian Kurds. Secretary of State John Kerry responded to Turkish concerns saying;

Let me say very respectfully to our allies the Turks that we understand fully the fundamentals of their opposition, and ours, to any kind of terrorist group, and particularly, obviously, the challenges they face with respect to the PKK. We have undertaken a coalition effort to degrade and destroy ISIL, and ISIL is presenting itself in major numbers in this place called Kobani.” He added that while the YPG was “an offshoot group of the folks that our friends the Turks oppose — they are valiantly fighting ISIL and we cannot take our eye off the prize here.[12]

The support came just in time. By late summer 2014, ISIS had perfected the technique of piercing enemy lines with a blitz of suicide car bombers followed by advances by troops whose suicidal ferocity was legendary. But the Kurds, fueled by a history of conquest by neighboring powers, statelessness, and fierce resistance, refused to be cowed and vowed to resist at all cost. A YPG Kurd captured the bold defiance of his fellow fighters when he proclaimed, “We will resist to our last drop of blood together…If necessary we will repeat the Stalingrad resistance in Kobane.”[13]

Even as the Kurds dug in to defend Kobane, skilled and heavily armed ISIS fighters systematically surrounded the city and methodically probed the outer lines of the besieged defenders. They attacked from the west in the town of Jarabulus, to the south near Sarrin, and to the east near Tal Abyad. As the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, ISIS easily swept through the outer ring of villages that made up the larger Kobane Province like an unstoppable wave, effectively advancing on all three fronts and tightening the noose around the neck of Kobane.

There was, however, one opening in their encirclement in north, toward the nearby Turkish border, and approximately 200,000 refugees fled for their lives to this frontier to escape the ISIS assault before it was complete. But this neighboring sanctuary was closed by late September 2014, as Turkish authorities feared that many of the Kurds fleeing into their country were fighters from the YPG who they saw as a subgroup of their mortal enemies, the Turkey-based PKK Kurdish rebels. The secularist PKK Kurds had been fighting for autonomy in southeastern Turkey since the 1980s in a war that was estimated to have cost over 40,000 lives, mainly Kurdish.

As ISIS approached, the American Special Force frantically trained their indigenous allies to coordinate with them to harness the precision might of the U.S. air armada. In an effort to create UCW “battle synergy,” the Kurds were trained by American special operators to act as spotters on the ground. They were tasked with identifying ISIS targets and relaying the information to the American Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) located in Qatar. CAOC would then send bomb coordinates to aircraft such as B1-B Lancer strategic bombers from the 9^th Bomb Squadron which would be on call over Kobane. The aircrews would attack the target and then await confirmation from the Kurds on the ground.[14] One Kurd fighter named Muhammad Abu Abdel was to relay how difficult it initially was for its defenders, most of whom were average civilians before the war, to learn how to work with the American advisors to channel the might of the US Air Force down on their enemies.

In the early days of American cooperation, in 2014, “our skills were so primitive we would send tracers in the sky to guide the bombers to the targets,” he said. “We didn’t know about map coordinates and GPS and all that stuff, didn’t even have internet and target maps like we have now. Before the [2011 Arab Spring] revolution, I was a businessman. I never knew anything about military science.”[15]

There were legitimate doubts that civilians like Muhammad Abu Abdel who had become citizen-soldiers overnight could repulse hardened, heavily armed ISIS fighters who were willing to martyr themselves in blitz attacks and offensive car bombings. As the debate unfolded, the bombing campaign began on September 27, 2014.

Despite criticism of Obama’s plan of action, the initial test of U.S air power working in conjunction with Kurdish spotters on the ground seemed to work. The battle rhythm of Kobane soon began to include the thunder of bomb strikes as the Kurds urgently worked to bring down U.S. bombs on their advancing enemy. While the Coalition strikes proved helpful, it would, however, take more than airstrikes to save the outgunned Kurds. Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby acknowledged this reality stating “we have hit some dynamic targets, smaller, tactical targets there [in Kobane]. And we do believe that they have had an effect on ISIL [ISIS] in and around that town,” but went on to caution that “airstrikes alone are not going to do this. They’re not going to fix this. They’re not going to save the town of Kobani.”[16] Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken acknowledged “it is going to be difficult just through airpower to prevent ISIS from potentially taking over the town.”[17] Ultimately, it would be up to the Kurds to defend their city on the ground as Americans assisted them from the skies above. On October 1, over 4,000 of ISIS leader Caliph al Baghdadi’s black-clad fighters, brandishing assault rifles atop captured American M1 Abrams battle tanks and firing mortars, launched their much anticipated offensive into the heart of Kobane city deploying tanks, rockets and artillery. Their thrust proved to be irresistible and Kurdish resistance broke, much to the dismay of the Obama White House and Pentagon. Within 24 hours ISIS had captured 21 villages on the outskirts of Kobane and their advance left the city completely encircled by ISIS forces, the northern escape route was now closed. ISIS fighters then punched into the heart of Kobane after forcing the YPG to retreat southeast of the city. U.S. forces carried out numerous airstrikes against ISIS’s positions south of Kobane, but ultimately failed to halt the group’s inexorable offensive. As ISIS set Kobane’s buildings aflame to obscure the vision of U.S. fighter bombers patrolling the skies above with clouds of black smoke, the Kurds’ line of defense wavered. ISIS appeared to unstoppable. At this time, doubts began to surface both regarding the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s “standoff” surrogate strategy as well as the lightly armed Kurds’ ability to repel the relentless waves of ISIS fighters swarming them from all directions. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman captured the widespread pessimism when he stated “The fighting in the past 24 hours has been the fiercest since the IS[IS] began its offensive…There are real fears for the Kurds’ capacity to resist, as the IS are using tanks and other heavy weaponry in their attack.”[18] West Point’s Counter Terrorism Sentinel reported;

YPG infantry units were clearly outmatched for much of the siege. While they employed agility and deep knowledge of local urban terrain, their dearth of heavy weapons coupled with lesser force numbers put them at a great disadvantage. ISIL had massed numerous tanks and a plethora of “technical” fighting trucks around Kobani’s perimeter to sustain the siege with overwhelming firepower, creating a battle of attrition…As ISIL units bore down on western Kobani in technicals hitting YPG positions with heavy fire, hunkered-down YPG fighters could often only answer with small arms fire while economizing their finite ammunition stocks.[19]

An American volunteer who joined hundreds of volunteers from around the world, including Dutch and German biker gangs who were moved by the David vs Goliath Kurdish defense of their lands against the ISIS fanatics, told me “we were told not to go to Kobane as it was doomed and the fighters there were never going to survive the full brunt of a total ISIS offensive.” Air Force Magazine reported at this time “Kobani was on the verge of becoming a major failure.”[20]

Despite the hard fought defense and sacrifices of hundreds of female and male Kurdish fighters who had U.S. support, the advantage clearly laid with the ISIS attackers. Their fighters were heavier armed, battle tested, more numerous and willing to die to in combat to achieve their twin objectives of victory and martyrdom. In particular, they were willing to launch massive car suicide bombing attacks on stubborn defenses. The car bombs had a devastating impact on morale. It was not long before the infamous black ISIS flag was planted on a four-story building located near the center of Kobane, marking the terrorists’ official penetration of the symbolic and strategic border town. Asya Abdullah, a co-leader of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, described the grim situation on the ground;

There are still thousands of civilians in the city and IS[IS] is using heavy weapons. If they are not stopped now, there will be a big massacre…They have surrounded us almost from every side with their tanks. They have been shelling the city with heavy weapons. Kurdish fighters are resisting as much as they can with the limited weapons they have.[21]

But even as the enemy advanced, a nineteen-year-old female Kurdish teacher expressed her determination to fight to the death, boldly proclaiming “I’m not leaving here. Either I die here or we win.”[22] A Kurdish fighter named Botani similarly explained, “Our fight is not just for the Kurds, it is a fight for all of humanity. When people are getting their heads chopped off and tossed aside like animals, it is a duty to fight.”[23]

To prevent the city center from falling to ISIS fighters, the Obama administration pushed its reluctant ally, Turkey (a mortal enemy of the YPG and PKK Kurds), to let hundreds of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters from northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government armed with heavy weapons cross its territory to bolster Kobane’s beleaguered, outgunned Kurdish defenders. Ignoring the concerns of the Turks who feared arming the Syrian Kurds, the Obama administration also made the decision to air drop weapons and ammunition to the outgunned Kurdish defenders. On October 20, three USAF C-130s conducted multiple airdrops to resupply Kurdish forces, defending the city. “There was an urgent need to help,” explained a senior Obama administration official, “This was the quickest way to get the job done.”[24] In the airdrops were 24 tons of small arms and ammunition and 10 tons of medical supplies. The emergency airdrop proved to be an enormous boon to Kobane’s outgunned, outnumbered defenders who fought back furiously using the new American supplies and weapons. Fred Kaplan was to capture the drama of the events unfolding in Kobane for the beleaguered US president who doubled down on his Kurdish bet with the air supplies that infuriated the Turks but proved invaluable to the Kurds.

Suddenly, the fight for this little-known town took on vast symbolic significance. And if ISIS was telling the world that Kobani was a decisive battle along the path to the Islamic State’s victory, then Obama—who’d put American resources and credibility on the line—had little choice but to treat it as a decisive battle as well. If ISIS won, the propaganda windfall would be immense. So, Obama upped the stakes, dropping not only bombs on ISIS but also weapons and supplies to the Kurds.[25]

At this time the U.S. also stepped up precision bombing runs that killed hundreds of ISIS fighters who continued to throw their forces into the battle despite heavy loses. In all, the U.S. hit more than one thousand targets in and around Kobane. In a last-ditch effort to reverse the tide, American B1-bomber pilots ultimately went “Winchester” on the advancing ISIS fighters (military parlance for dropping all the bombs on board a fighter bomber on a mission), engulfing ISIS-held locations in a storm of explosive rain. American aircraft carried out a scale of bombing campaign not seen since the massive US invasion of Iraq in 2003 in and around this small city on the dusty plains of northern Syria.[26] While the Americans attacked the army of terror from the skies, Kurdish female and male fighters desperately attacked them on the ground and over a thousand died defending their city.

The fate of Kobane and Kurdish dreams for uniting this town and the surrounding province of Kobane to unite with the north Syrian Kurdish provinces of Afrin and Hasakah to create a state called Rojava hung in the balance as the battle swept through the city. The pivotal moment in the battle came when ISIS threw everything they had, including massive car bombs, to take Mistanhour Hill, a strategic location that would give them the ability to fire down on central Kobane. As the Kurds fought street by street in Kobane and on the hill, American bombs were directed onto ISIS positions by Kurdish ground spotters who had grown more proficient in calling down “lead into the head” of ISIS. But in the end ISIS prevailed and captured the strategic hill.

By October 9^th, ISIS fighters had also advanced to within 100 meters of the city’s center of Kobane and succeeded in capturing the Kurds’ military headquarters. At this time, one Kurdish fighter predicted “It’s over” if ISIS got the city center and the border crossing to Turkey. By late October, ISIS controlled 60 percent of Kobane and the city’s fate seemed to be sealed. ISIS continued to pour reinforcements into the battle realizing this unprecedented global focus could give them a tremendous propaganda victory in defeating not only the Kurds, whose democratic, pro-women’s rights, pro-Christian minorities rights, socialist society was considered an abomination, but in defeating the American president who had bet so much on the campaign.

But the tenacious Kurds were not yet beaten. As ISIS took casualties pushing forward, street by street, the Kurds fought back furiously sustaining hundreds of deaths and were able to rally despite their tremendous loses. As U.S. bombs paved the way for them, the Kurds launched a counterattack that halted the ISIS advance. In late-October their forces stormed Mistanhour Hill and retook this strategic position after sustaining tremendous casualties. They then repulsed ISIS from central Kobane in street fighting supported by American precision-guided satellite laser bombs.

By this time ISIS had presented so many targets for US “dynamic strikes” that they were suffering unprecedented losses. A Pentagon spokesman said of ISIS “The more they want it, the more resources they apply to it, the more targets we have to hit. We know we’ve killed several hundred of them.”[27] The Air Force Times was to report;

The enemy was “sending troops there constantly,” said a weapons systems officer from the 9^th Bomb Squadron identified for security reasons only as Scram. “They were very willing to impale themselves on that city.” That made the battle site target-rich: There were fighters out in the open and on top of buildings and bridges.[28]

This combination of American “air artillery” and Kurdish defiance on the ground ultimately proved to be decisive and ISIS began to sustain unsustainable losses. Gradually its forces began to fall back. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights would write on November 13, 2014, that ISIS fighters had been shocked and demoralized by the “fierce resistance” of the YPG fighters. On January 26, 2015, the Kurds, having sustained massive losses and the total destruction of their city, finally declared victory in the desperate battle for Kobane after five months of hellacious fighting. By March 15^th, the ISIS fighters had been driven from the Kobane province, the dream of Rojava had been saved and ISIS’s dream of gaining control of the entire northeastern Syrian border with Turkey crushed. An account at the time recorded;

Islamic State militants have made fatal strategic mistakes in Kobane, allowing American and Arab warplanes to obliterate them from the air and Kurdish forces to suck them into unfamiliar ‘meat grinder’ street battles, an expert has claimed. During the four-week battle for Kobane, ISIS has used the same tried and tested ‘pincer movement’ it deployed during the rapid seizure of vast swathes of northern Syria and western Iraq earlier this year. In the majority of those lightning advances, ISIS was able to capture towns and cities with little to no resistance – as the group’s reputation for torture and brutal murder ensured local security forces either defected or abandoned their posts, rather than face certain slaughter at the hands of the fanatics. But as Kobane is located less than 200 yards south of the Turkish border fences and is surrounded largely by desert, the massively outgunned Kurdish fighters there have had nowhere to flee, encouraging them to gather in the centre of town and defend the city in furious street-to-street battles.

ISIS, which originally expected to storm into and seize Kobane within a few days and further enhance its aura of invincibility, had suffered its first major defeat. The Iraqi Kurdistan presidency would triumphantly proclaim “Today we received the news of liberation of defiant Kobane. I congratulate all people of Kurdistan. This is the victory of humanity over the barbaric terrorists.” Across the world, the Obama administration breathed a sigh of relief. The president’s UCW approach to war had had its first victory and there was hope that it could now be used in other places to go on the offensive.

In the aftermath of the battle, ISIS officially acknowledged, for the first time, that its fighters had been decisively defeated. In a video released by the pro-ISIS Aamaq News Agency, ISIS fighters cited American airstrikes as the primary reason of the defeat and downplayed the role of the Kurds, whom they referred to as “rats.” According to ISIS “The warplanes were bombarding us night and day. They bombarded everything, even motorcycles.” Another explained how the airstrikes “destroyed everything, so we had to withdraw and the rats advanced.”[29] ISIS would attribute their defeat to “the lack of knowledge about how [western] jets operated and what their capabilities were.”[30] But American pilots who worked with the Kurds to defeat ISIS gave the credit to their Kurdish allies and one said of their bravery;

There were times we were bombing across the street, and as soon as the weapons were going off, they are charging into the rubble to take out what’s left and move forward that line of troops to the next block,” Maj. Johnson said. “It’s an amazing job the [Kurdish forces] did and how they are, more so than air power, critical to victory in Kobani.” [31]

Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, summed up the success of Obama’s proxy/surrogate approach, stating, “I think the air strikes helped a lot. It helped when we had a reliable partner on the ground in there who could help us fine-tune those strikes.”[32] An embedded New York Times gave an eyewitness report of a firefight wherein an SDF fighter using a Samsung tablet with google earth called in an airstrike on a building from which his unit was receiving ISIS fire.

“Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” he wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a United States military operations room. Then he waited for the American warplanes to scream in. The strike that ensued soon after blasted a crater at exactly the coordinates provided by the Kurdish fighter. It left a circle of bodies, including one of an Islamic State fighter who died slumped over his AK-47.[33]

Clearly the Kurds and Americans had perfected deadly battlefield “synergy” and the first test of Obama’s and Central Command’s proxy approach to war had been passed with glowing colors. While ISIS downplayed the defeat and vowed to return to Kobane, this was clearly a decisive turning point and sent a loud message to all the constellation of anti-ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria; ISIS could be defeated.

As the previously undefeated ISIS militants retreated, Kurdish refugees, who had been watching the battle from less than a mile away from the hills of Turkey, joyously poured into the city to celebrate its liberation. A senior U.S. State Department official triumphantly proclaimed of the hard-fought victory “The entire notion of this organization that is on the march and the inevitable expansion and inevitable momentum has been halted at Kobane.”[34] After three and half months of fighting for a rubbleized largely evacuated city that at one time had fallen 80 percent to ISIS, Central Command’s “air artillery” (precision guided bombs) proved to be a decisive factor in enabling the Kurds to defeat ISIS’s increasingly costly offensive by January 2015. The untried Kurds had succeeded where the massive US-trained Iraqi Army, other jihadi groups, and Syrian Arab Army had failed and had defeated a full-scale ISIS offensive.

The victory at Kobane signaled the beginning of a more ambitious Pentagon campaign to work “by, with, and through” the Kurds to move elsewhere against ISIS without conventionalizing the war by putting the large numbers of troops in harms way in a repeat of the Iraq War quagmire which cost 2 trillion dollars and almost 4,500 lives (Trump recommended deploying 30,000 troopw). Obama was criticized by Republicans as “leading from behind,” but that was exactly what the Green Beret Special Forces specialized in. Their mission was to act as “force multipliers” or “enablers” to assist local proxy forces in doing the actual fighting, and dying, to achieve US interests.

With the help of US Special Forces and state-of-the-art, precision guided air-munitions such as JDAMs (Joint Direct Terminal Munitions or satellite guided bombs), the tide of ISIS’s proclaimed “ever expanding Caliphate” was turned in this decisive battle. The Kurds of northern Syria, who had been unknown to much of the world prior to this much reported victory, went with their momentum and went on the offensive. U.S. Central Command now saw in the PKK-linked socialist YPG Kurds of the three northern Kurdish dominated provinces of Syria – Afrin, Kobane, and Hasakah – its greatest ally in the country and proclaimed they were the “only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa [the ISIS capital] in the near future.”[35] The Kurds, whose motto was that they had “no friends but the mountains,” now proudly proclaimed “we have no friends but the Americans.”[36]

Clearly the Kurds’ fierce belief in their Rojava Revolution and its egalitarian ideology had equaled the jihadi beliefs of the ISIS fanatics. Combined with their ability to call in “air artillery” this proved to be the deciding factor in their resistance. But would the YPG/YPJ Syrian Kurdish men and women volunteers be able to pivot from defending Kobane and their villages and towns in the north to assist the Pentagon and Obama administration in going on the offensive against the Caliphate in the vastness of the Arab-dominated Syrian desert? That was a question no one seemed to know the answer to in 2015 for this would mean sacrificing their lives to become proxies for a foreign power. An untrustworthy power that had abandoned the Kurds when they requested a homeland after World War I and again when it encouraged them to rise up against Saddam Hussein in 1991, then left them to be slaughtered by his vengeful forces.

History would show that the answer was a resounding yes. The Obama administration deployed 500 US Special Forces to work as “aid and assist accelerants” and, together with their Kurdish hevals (comrades) in arms, the Kurds pivoted to the offensive in 2015. In 2016 they took ISIS’s main terror exporting center of Manbij, in the fall of 2017 they captured ISIS’s capital of Raqqa and by March 2019 they captured ISIS’s last bastion at Baghouz. In the process of liberating the lands of the northeast they gave their American allies de facto control of one third of Syria, denied Iran a land bridge to Damascus, provided the Pentagon with 22 bases in this strategic region, tracked down ISIS’s messianic leader Caliph al Baghdadi and lost 11,000 of their fighters (the US lost just six in combat). It was the most effective proxy campaign in history and it cost America a fraction of the price of the almost two trillion dollar 2003-11 Iraq War.

Sadly, in October 2019 Trump betrayed the Pentagon’s stalwart allies by impulsively ordering the “small footprint” of 2,000 US force multipliers operating with the Kurds to immediately abandon their bases and allies and retreat to Iraq. Then he green lit a Turkish jihadist invasion of the fragile pro-Christian minority, pro-US democracy of Rojava. This massive Turkish jihadist invasion displaced 100,000 civilians, caused hundreds of deaths, led to widespread destruction of America’s allies’ democratic lands, and was seen as a boon by regrouping ISIS, Russia (which triumphantly seized abandoned America’s bases), Iran, Hezbollah and the murderous Syrian dictator Basher al Assad. America lost not only the one third of Syria it controlled, but the trust of the region’s 30 million Kurds who, having idealized America and its democracy, realized they truly had no friends but the mountains.

For more on the Kurds and the Pentagon’s war on ISIS see: Brian Glyn Williams. Counter Jihad. The American Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. U Penn. 2018. For articles on ISIS and the US war see: brianglynwilliams.com Brian Glyn Williams is Full Professor of Islamic History at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and formerly worked for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center and US Army’s Information Operations in Afghanistan. Robert Troy Souza is a member of the Center for Targeted Killing.

NOTES

[1] “A month ago, ISIS’s advance looked unstoppable. Now it’s been stopped.” Vox. October 28, 2014.

[2] “Meet America’s Allies who Helped Defeat ISIS.” New York Times. February 17, 2018.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “When Female Fighters Lead the Charge.” Ypgrojava.com. https://www.ypgrojava.org/When-Female-Fighters-Lead-the-Charge

[5] “Women vs. the Islamic State,” Reuters, February 8, 2015.

[6] “Syrian Kurds Have Tripled Their Territory Fighting the Islamic State in 2015.” Vice.com. December 22, 2015.

[7] “Isis in Iraq: The female fighters that strike fear into jihadis – because they’ll rob them of paradise,” The Independent, April 10, 2016.

[8] “Kurdish Female Fighters of Rojava,” Yourmideast.com June 15, 2015. http://www.yourmiddleeast.com.

[9] “Foreign Fighters Back Kurdish Militia in Syria in Fight Against Turkey.” New York Times. January 27, 2018.

[10] “Dutch biker gang members join the fight against the Islamic State.” The Washington Post. October 16, 2014.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] “The Kurdish Stalingrad,” The Economist, November 1, 2014.

[14] “B-1 Pilots Describe Bombing Campaign Against ISIS in Kobani,” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2015.

[15] “Meet America’s Allies who Helped Defeat ISIS.” New York Times. February 17, 2018.

[16] U.S. Department of Defense, press briefing by Rear Admiral Kirby. October 8, 2014. http://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/606942/department-of-defense-press-briefing-by-rear-admiral-kirby-in-the-pentagon-brie

[17] “Fight for Syrian Town of Kobani at Standstill After US Airstrikes.” NBC News. October 9, 2014.

[18] “Islamic State: Kurdish fighters retreat as IS militants advance towards Syrian town of Ain al-Arab,” ABC News, October 1, 2014.

[19] “The Battle of Kobani Comes to the Fore.” West Point Counter-Terrorism Center Sentinel. Volume 7 Issue 11. November December 2014.

[20] “The Siege of Kobani.” Air Force Magazine. August 29, 2018.

[21] “Kobane: Civilians flee IS street-to-street fighting,” BBC, October 7, 2014.

[22] See for example footage of the Kurdish woman describing her willingness to die for Kobane here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jWVTjUVecI

[23] “Turkish lawmakers OK military action against ISIS,” CNN, October 2, 2014

[24] “U.S. Airdrops Weapons and Supplies to Kurds Fighting in Kobani,” New York Times, October 20, 2014.

[25] “Obama’s Quagmire.” Slate. October 31, 2014.

[26] “In battle for Kobane, US crews recount heavy bombing,” MSN, February 14, 2015.

[27] “Islamic State Retreating in Key Syrian Town of Kobane.” BBC. October 2014.

[28] “Inside the B-1 crew that pounded ISIS with 1,800 bombs.” Air Force Times. August 23, 2015.

[29] “Isis finally admits defeat in Kobani after air strikes force its fighters to retreat,” Guardian, January 31, 2015.

[30] “New document sheds light on the changing nature of ISIL’s combat tactics.” The National. September 20, 2017.

[31] “Inside the B-1 crew that pounded ISIS with 1,800 bombs.” Air Force Times. August 23, 2015.

[32] Ibid.

[33] “Kurds Roll Back ISIS, but Alliances are Strained.” New York Times. August 10, 2015.

[34] “Too Soon to Say Mission Accomplished in Kobane: US Official,” Reuters, January 27, 2015.

[35] “Pentagon to Arm Syrian Kurds for Raqqa Fight.” Stars and Stripes. May 9, 2017. https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/pentagon-to-arm-syrian-kurds-for-raqqa-fight-1.467532

[36] “For the Kurds, No Friends but the Americans.” Huffington Post. November 3, 2014.

Robert Troy Souza has published in CTC Sentinel, Middle East Policy, Real Clear Defense and The Huffington Post.

—

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Journeyman Pictures: “Kurdistan: The Battle For Kobani”

Williams, Boston/Bamiyan. On November 13th yet another suicide bombing shredded the lives of people across the globe in a land whose seemingly endless conflict has once again been forgotten by many, if not most Americans. But, as devastating as that blast that took the lives of twelve people and wounded twenty others in Kabul was, it pales in comparison to a far worse atrocity that took place three months earlier. Even by Afghan standards the August 17th slaughter of 80 people by an ISIS suicide bomber targeting Hazara Mongol “apostates” who were celebrating a wedding was sickening. The infiltrator detonated his powerful bomb in the middle of a packed wedding hall in front of the band and, in a horrible instant, turned a scene of joyful celebration into a bloodbath. In a tragic reversal of the maxim that art imitates life, the bloodshed surpassed the butchering of Stark bannermen in the “Red Wedding” episode in the popular Game of Thrones series in its wanton cruelty.

The relentless ISIS targeting of Hazara Shiites by suicide bombers reminded me of my encounters I had with this ethnic group while doing counter-terrorism work for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center in Afghanistan in 2007. I had been tasked with tracking the movement of suicide bombers, like the one who infiltrated the wedding, in the southeastern lands of the ethnic Afghans (often known as Pashtuns, the country’s dominant, Indo-European Aryan group who also make up the bulk of Taliban fighters) when I first encountered Hazara highlanders. The Hazaras, a minority that claims descent from Genghis Khan’s world-conquering horsemen who live primarily in the remote fastness of Afghanistan’s central Hindu Kush mountains, played an outsized role in the Afghan National Army and US military operations for good reason. As long-repressed members of the Shiite sect, who have seen their villages torched and people massacred by the Taliban from the dominant Sunni sect, they were fighting an enemy that considered them to be “Godless heretics” worthy only of butchering.

During the course of my extensive fieldwork in the Taliban-infested Pashtun lands, where I came to admire the courage of the Hazara soldiers serving alongside US troops, I became overwhelmed by the mindless and often random horror of the war. After arriving at the scene of particularly gruesome suicide bombing of civilian men, women, and children in the eastern town of Gardez, I got permission to leave the killing behind for a while and decompress in the sheltering peaks of the Hindu Kush. There, in the snowy mountain-ringed Hazara capital of Bamiyan, I found panagah, sanctuary, and a welcoming people governed by Afghanistan’s only female governor. In those terraced, clay-walled mountain villages clinging to the side of steep, misty valleys, I also found widespread gratitude to the Americans for their role in liberating the Hazaras’ lands. Theirs was a relatively peaceful world that was so far removed from the war ravaging the hot Pashtun lowlands to the southeast that I imagined it to be an Afghan Shangri La. While there were signs of the Taliban’s cruel rule over this people, such as the crumbled ruins of the magnificent 6^th century Buddhas of Bamiyan that had been blown up by the Taliban iconoclasts as “heathen idols” in 2000, this mountainous realm was relatively peaceful, welcoming and safe.

Williams in the Hazaras’ legendary Bamiyan Vale with the niche carved in the mountain behind him where one of the ancient 5^th century Buddha carvings stood before being blown up by the Taliban as “heathen idols.”

My fondest memories are of a class of Hazara school children who came out of their simple school to sing for me (including one girl who proudly showed me a cherished item that could have gotten her killed in the Taliban-dominated southern plains where women are denied the right to write and read, her first pencil) and of singing women working in the fields wearing bright red headscarves, instead of the burqa head and body-covering veil that was enforced in the more conservative Pashtun lowlands. Other sights that were seared in my conscious included those of young men riding proudly on their shaggy steppe ponies with hunting hawks on their arms, men lined up for prayer in the fields at sunset facing Mecca, and laughing children following me everywhere trying to see what the American in their lands was up to. I also recall the horse-mounted Hazaras’ rough and tumble version of polo known as buzkashi and evenings spent with my hosts dining on mouthwatering Kabuli rice and kabobs and listening to ancient epics.

Afghan school girls photographed by Williams on his journeys in the mountains.

The August wedding slaughter of so many of this welcoming people who have faced centuries of conquest, slavery, slaughter, and repression at the hands of the ruling Afghan-Pashtuns brought back painful memories of my fieldwork as well as warm memories of the mountain refuge I found among the Hazaras of Afghanistan. I wanted my fellow countrymen to care more about this people’s suffering and wondered how Americans would react if 80 people were slaughtered in a wedding celebration here. As a Bostonian, who remembers the outpouring of grief across America following the killing of three people in the Boston Marathon bombing, the Hazara wedding massacre reminded me of the sympathy and support we received after that tragedy. I wanted the same concern and sympathy for this pro-American people who were suffering from savage attacks by the Taliban and a relentless bombing campaign by ISIS.

In this sentiment I was thankfully not alone for in Boston I was blessed to have a dear friend who knew the epic land of Afghanistan far better than me and was as frustrated by the widespread American disconnect from the Hazaras,’ and all Afghans,’ suffering as I was. He too was anguished by the images of grief, including unbearably sad photos of the slain sister of the bride in the Kabul bombing being buried in her beautiful Hazara silk wedding costume, that were circulated by grieving Hazaras on Facebook. Only, instead of finding an outlet for his frustration and sad war memories in writing about Islamic realms as I did as an author, he found a salve for his grief in the rich texture of his people’s handwoven carpets.

Rezayee, Kabul/Boston. For me, as an immigrant to the remarkable panagah or sanctuary that is America from the Afghan capital Kabul, the Hazaras are not ‘Afghanis’ (the term for Afghanistan’s currency) or mere blurring abstracts from yet another mind-numbing story of death in a warzone that is so remote it might as well be on the moon; they are my friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and most importantly, my wonderful, bright, precocious nieces—who are still there defying death at the hands of Taliban morality enforcers to get an education— and they are my qaum, my tribe. I had to force myself to breathe as I looked at the photos of the senseless wedding bloodshed on the internet from my safe home in Boston.

For me, the images of the devastated groom Mirwais and his inconsolable bride Raihana, who have said they would rather be dead and buried alongside the rest of their slain loved ones, are simply unbearable. The long history of massacre and mass murder of my people, displayed yet again, this time in the unprecedentedly demonic wedding bloodbath in western Kabul, has brought Hazaras in Afghanistan and abroad, where we have been scattered to the four winds, together like a family trapped in a basement from a tornado. It is a basement I have lived in since I was first arrested in a police sweep in Kabul and tortured via electrocution as a teenager. That dark memory is only one of many painful memories I have to live with day in and day out.

Rezayee in Kabul as a teenaged kite-flyer, a traditional Afghan hobby made famous in the West in Khaleed Hosseini’s bestseller The Kite Runner, with his kite tribute to American and Afghan friendship featuring both countries’ flags.

PTSD is a gloomy blanket that can enshroud one for life. An unexpected sound, smell, or scene, a random phone call, or especially a news report from faraway, like this recent story of families wailing for lost loved ones in a mass burial following the wedding massacre, can trigger it, sweeping me away 7,000 miles to the other side of the world to my birthplace. There are clinical ways to cope with PTSD, but I have chosen to deal with my pain by painting the red carpets of my people, like the very ones I and my refugee family wove to earn money to support ourselves in neighboring Pakistan after fleeing the war.

It is true that red is the color of the blood that was spilled in the August abomination that took place in what should have been a celebration of faith, family, hope, community, and the future, but it is also the color of my warmest memories from my watan, my childhood homeland. Red is the glorious color of gul-e-surkh, the wild lalah tulips that blanket the valleys of the Hazarajat, my people’s ancestral mountain homeland, in the spring during the Nowruz New Year celebration. But most importantly for me, red is the soothing pigment of the Hazara carpets whose deep, rich, red hue, known as royan, comes from the madder bush that is collected in mountain glades. It is the reddish choobi or vegetable dye made from walnuts, pomegranates, and the reseda plant that I used to prepare as young man to meticulously weave various shades of red into “Kazak” nomad-style carpets in the scorching heat of Pakistan among thousands of other Hazara refugees in the sprawling Haji Camp neighborhood of Peshawar.

Rezayee holding a “Kazak” carpet featuring ancient, nomadic anthropomorphic designs with his Boston ‘family’ including Williams to his right in Red Sox cap.

We Afghans have a saying, “You cannot wash away blood with blood.” But I paint life-size versions of my people’s red carpets to wash away the painful memories of bloodshed and to connect to my people’s craftwork. Our carpets are unmatched in their beauty and that has made Hazaras famous throughout Eurasia as weavers of anthropomorphic designs traceable to the primeval Hun, Mongol, and Kazak horsemen of the plains of Eurasia and the floral patterns of ancient Persia.

I often reflect on the journey to my new home Boston, a resilient, previously terrorist-targeted city filled with friends who I see as family, that is defined by its defiant, post-marathon bombing mantra that I admire so much, “Boston Strong.” As I look back on my flight from my former homeland to my new home Boston, I sometimes wrestle with the demons of survivor’s guilt. I am here, safe. They, the groom and bride, Mirwais and Raihana, my incredibly brave nieces, and so many of my people are still there, in that beautiful, but sad land I still love.

Even as I live here in a safe, vibrant city defined by its enlightened openness to outsiders like myself and enveloped in a blanket of safety that my embattled people in Afghanistan can only imagine, ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other demons of their ilk masquerading as men, are sharpening their knives in anticipation of the abandonment of our land that Trump has signaled with his recent troop drawdown announcement. My people live in dread of the post-American return of the Taliban tormentors to our rebuilt, bustling capital and to our Central Highlands of Hazarajat, and we believe one thing. The day the Americans leave, the Taliban will be back on our doorsteps to take their dark vengeance on us for our having sided with the Americans, just as the stalwart, pro-American Kurds of Syria were attacked by invading Turkish forces in October for daring to fight alongside the recently-withdrawn US troops against ISIS. This time when the dark enforcers come, we fear it will be worse than last time when the Taliban massacred thousands of our people in an attempted 1998 genocide in places known to us, like Dai Kundi and Mazar-i-Sharif, but known to few beyond the borders of our land.

Rezayee painting a “Kazak” nomadic carpet in his studio in Boston.

While most Americans are disconnected from the horrors in Afghanistan that have shattered the lives of so many young dreamers like Mirwais and Raihana, and many in America may even believe Trump’s hubristic brag that he “obliterated” or “wiped out” ISIS and that the remaining 13,000 US troops in Afghanistan can therefore come home, the burnt bodies of 80 Hazaras who were remorselessly killed by the far-from-beaten jihadist tormentors of my people are a silent testimonial to the terrorists’ enduring resilience. The dozens of coffins buried in a mass funeral by their grieving friends and family are also a mute rebuttal to the president’s false “Mission Accomplished”-style boast of victory over the fanatics that was made following the March 2019 Kurdish capture of ISIS’s last bastion in Syria.

I fear that the dark-hearted men of Afghanistan, who long to once again turn my land into a harsh, religious prison camp, and the increasing number of cold-hearted people here in America who do not feel that suffering people fleeing from lands plagued by horrors—like the one that took place in that wedding hall—are worthy of asylum, will prevail. Should my people, who have fought so bravely for freedom and democracy alongside US troops against the Al Qaeda 9/11 terrorists, their Taliban hosts, and ISIS beheaders of Americans, be soullessly abandoned the way Trump recently abandoned the anti-ISIS democratic Kurds of Syria, I know much blood will be spilled. When that blood is spilled and our villages are set aflame by the black-turbaned Taliban invaders, the red carpets I loved from my childhood will be but a memory. The magnificent handwoven carpets of my youth, whose weaving was forbidden when the cruel Taliban ruled our mountains, will be the fading echo of scream of torment from a once vibrant land; a distant, forgotten land that will be consumed by the raging fires of fanaticism that will surely send many more of my people fleeing abroad in my footsteps in search of panagah.

Should that dark day come, I pray that my American countrymen find it in their hearts to put aside blanket, broad-brushstroke bans on Muslim peoples like the pro-American Hazaras and equally pro-American Kurds, reject blind, xenophobic fear of others, and instead offer my people the same sanctuary I have found in this wonderful land I now proudly call my watan, my homeland.

Brian Glyn Williams is Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and author of Counter Jihad. The American Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and a book based upon his summers spent with the Uzbek Mongol anti-Taliban horsemen of northern Afghanistan The Last Warlord. The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan Warrior who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime. He worked for the US Army’s Information Operations in Kabul and for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center in eastern Afghanistan. His website can be found at: brianglynwilliams.com

Javed Rezayee moved to the United States in 2006 after working with the United Nation’s DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration) program helping warlords and ex-combatants resume a civilian life in the war-torn Northeast. Rezayee earned his B.A. from Tufts University where he also taught storytelling. In New York, he worked for George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. In addition to eight years of working in the nonprofit and human rights fields, Rezayee has authored several short stories based on his childhood, including Black Kitty of Kabul. When not painting the beloved carpets of his youth, his preferred pastime is cooking his favorite Afghan dishes for friends and family and spending time with his baby niece.

On October 26th US Delta Forces, acting on intelligence provided to them by their trusted Kurdish allies, launched a dangerous, long-distance heliborne raid from Iraq, across a region in northern Syria that had recently been thrown into chaos by the US withdrawal, against the compound where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was in hiding in the far western province of Idlib. As the formation flew across a land that its troops had controlled just two weeks before, the Pentagon reported that it sustained ground fire. Considering that adversarial Russian forces, who had attacked American troops in Syria prior to this on several occasions (including in the 2018 Battle of Kasham), had moved into fill much of the vacuum created by the hasty mid-October US retreat from the region, it is fortunate that the slow moving American Chinook helicopters were not targeted by advanced S-400 anti-aircraft systems Putin had deployed to the theater. Had they been targeted by this sophisticated weaponry, the operation could have ended in a military and a political fiasco similar to the debacle Jimmy Carter confronted when a failed Delta Forces heliborne rescue mission to free the Iranian hostages in 1980 ended with gloating Iranian television images of burnt US aircraft in the desert. Only the blame would have more squarely fallen on Trump for turning over the strategic territory, that was previously under firm US control, to America’s Russian-backed Syrian Arab Army adversaries who have certainly not forgotten our shootdown of one of their planes.

While news outlets reported that the formation of slow-flying transport helicopters flew “70 miles” from the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil to the target in western Syria, a simple search of “distance calculator” reveals that Baghdadi’s compound in Barisha was actually an extraordinary 470 miles (757 kilometers) from the US launch base (if it was indeed Erbil). This would mean that, having recently abandoned their airfields and forward operating bases located in Syria near Idlib province where the ISIS leader was killed, the pilots flying the clumsy US transport helicopters—that members of my US Army I.O. team in Afghanistan referred to as “flying school buses”—would likely have probably had to engage in dangerous in-air refueling over hostile territory in addition to receiving “sporadic gunfire” (although there have been rumors that the helicopters may have leap-frogged off a Syrian helipad and that their flight commenced at Al Assad airbase in western Iraq). When one recalls previous catastrophic shootdowns of the vulnerable Chinooks, including one in Afghanistan where all 38 members of the flight crew and Navy SEAL special forces on board were killed in August 2011, the added risk Trump’s withdrawal decision exposed our airborne troops to becomes obvious. To put this daring raid across a vast, war-torn land that had been made hostile just two weeks earlier by Trump’s decision to abandon America’s bases to the Syrian, Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah alliance and invading Turkish forces, the raid on Bin Laden’s compound was by contrast less than half the distance 205 miles (330 kilometers).

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi h/t Military Times.

Ironically, the raid that killed al Baghdadi was based on five pillars of counter-terrorism in the region that Trump is seemingly intent on dismantling. These were, 1. the field operations of CIA professionals who have been undermined in ominous terms as a nefarious “deep state” by Trump. Their operations and local spy networks have also been disrupted by Trump’s greenlighting of a Turkish invasion of the area in northern Syria that the US formerly controlled. 2. In-theater American troops who have been disengaged from the battle on regrouping ISIS in the Syrian half of the caliphate by Trump’s withdrawal order. 3. Frontline counter-ISIS military/counter-terrorism bases and intelligence gathering outposts that were abandoned to the Russians after Trump’s withdrawal order. 4. Our abandoned, intelligence-gathering Kurdish allies who have their hand on the pulse of their land and now feel betrayed. 5. And the diplomatic corps which has been so crucial in establishing ties with the Kurds. It is this very State Department, that has been “hollowed out” by the president who has a “unique contempt” for their diplomatic mission (prompting a concerned former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis to comment “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.”)

Embed from Getty Images
Last ISIS-Held Village In Syria Falls to US-Backed Forces
BAGHOUZ, SYRIA – MARCH 23: Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters pose for a photo with the American flag on stage after a SDF victory ceremony announcing the defeat of ISIL in Baghouz was held at Omer Oil Field on March 23, 2019 in Baghouz, Syria. The Kurdish-led and American-backed Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) declared on Saturday the “100% territorial defeat” of the so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The group once controlled vast areas across Syria and Iraq and a population of up to 12 million, an aspired “caliphate” that drew tens of thousands of foreign nationals to join its ranks. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

While Trump supporters will doubtless engage in all manner of contorted verbal acrobatics to try rationalizing the president’s irrational directives undermining all five pillars that came together to lead to Baghdadi’s death, one does not need to be a military strategist to understand that the president’s withdrawal order defies sound military logic, counter-terrorism strategy and commonsense.

But despite Trump’s decision to abandon America’s anti-ISIS intel-gathering outposts/helipads, withdraw frontline US counter-terrorism troops and intelligence operatives (who he knew were engaged in a delicate, ongoing operation to trace and kill Baghdadi) and needlessly antagonize the very Kurdish allies, who were at the moment of their betrayal tracking the terrorist leader’s movements, the Kurdish-directed Delta Forces overcame the newly-created logistic/force-security obstacles and successfully “neutralized” their HVT (High Value Target). Despite all Trump’s self-congratulatory gloating in the success of the mission, the real heroes of the fraught operation were the US Delta Forces known as “The Unit,” the pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment known as the “Night Stalkers,” and the Kurdish Asayish intelligence known as “The Security.”

The Kurds’ role in providing the invaluable intel needed to locate and kill the messianic ISIS leader Caliph al Baghdadi, seen as “God’s Shadow on Earth” by his diehard followers, was absolutely crucial by all accounts (except for Trump’s). Without their local assistance, Baghdadi would not have been discovered hiding in, of all suspect places, a Turkish controlled “safe zone” near the Turkish border. The Washington Post was to report that it was Kurds who recruited a source that led the CIA to al Baghdadi writing “The disaffected ISIS member had become an informant for Kurdish forces working with the Americans, the official said. And he provided critical information on Baghdadi’s whereabouts.” The New York Times was to further report on their vital role;

“American officials said the Kurds continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi’s location even after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the American troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone. The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country. (emphasis mine)”

NBC news ran an article with the headline “Kurdish Informant Provided Key Intel Which Led to the Killing of ISIS Leader al Baghdadi” which reported on the Kurds’ recruitment of one of the ISIS leader’s security advisors:

“His [Kurdish military leader Mazloum Abadi] intelligence service had a source deep in al-Baghdadi’s inner circle who described a room-by-room layout of the terror leader’s compound on the Turkish border, including the number of guards, floor plan and tunnels.”

English speaking Kurdish commander and senior advisor Can Polat, who gained widespread trust among American troops whom he joined in combat against ISIS, summed up the key role of the Kurds by providing unprecedented granularity of detail of the hunt for the notorious ISIS leader whose death Trump proudly claimed in a lengthy 48 minute speech:

“Through our own sources, we managed to confirm that Al Baghdadi had moved from Al Dashisha area in Deir Al Zor to Idlib. Since 15 May, we have been working together with the CIA to track Al Baghdadi and monitor him closely. One of our sources was able to reach the house where Al Baghdadi was hiding. Al Baghdadi changed his places of residence very often. He was about to move to a new place in Jerablus. Our own source, who had been able to reach Al Baghdadi, brought Al Baghdadi’s underwear to conduct a DNA test and make sure (100%) that the person in question was Al Baghdadi himself.”

More than a month ago, the decision was made to eliminate Al Baghdadi. However, the US withdrawal and the Turkish invasion prompted us to stop our special operations, including the pursuit of Al Baghdadi. The Turkish invasion caused a delay in the operation. (emphasis mine).”

Polat would later emphasize “all intelligence and access to Al Baghdadi as well as the identification of his place, were the result of our own work. Our intelligence source was involved in sending coordinates, directing the airdrop, participating in and making the operation a success until the last minute.” The Kurdish leader Mustefa Bali similarly explained the role of the Kurdish led SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) in the raid in a tweet stating “Successful and effective operation by our forces is yet another proof of SDF’s anti-terror capability. We continue to work with our partners in the global @coalition in the fight against ISIS terrorism.” SDF Commander General Mazloum Abdi claimed there had been five months of “joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring” which pinned down Baghdadi’s precise location. A State Department Official would subsequently confirm that Abdi’s statements were true “He, his people, and his intelligence sources, played a key role in all of this…It’s a very, very important role. Nobody should underestimate how key the SDF was in all of this.”

Trump Refuses to Share the Glory with the Kurds (Who are Widely Praised by US Generals)

But if the Kurds were expecting any thanks from Trump for their widely acknowledged, crucial role in the greatest counter-terrorism success since the killing of Osama Bin Laden, a success that the president will certainly exploit for himself on the campaign trail, they were to be sorely disappointed. In his remarkable 48 minute detailed discussion of the raid, Trump went to great lengths to first profusely thank, of all people, the Russians for being “very cooperative, very good” (the Russians subsequently refuted the president’s claim stating they had “no reliable information” about the raid in advance). He then shocked many observers and hardened the Kurds’ views of America by thanking Turkey, the very nation whose jihadist proxy invasion of the Kurds’ lands following Trump’s sanctioning of their assault seriously disrupted the CIA and Kurds’ al Baghdadi operation. In a surreal disconnect from the real negative impact Turkey had on the joint Kurdish-American anti-ISIS operation that killed a terrorist hiding in Turkish-controlled territory in Syria, Trump called the Turks “terrific.”

Trump’s bizarre shout-out to the Turks, who have deployed “thousands” of fanatical former ISIS fighters in their proxy force that invaded Kurdish lands after Trump gave them the green light on October 6th, must have been beyond galling for the Kurds. Especially since The Military Times reported that “A sustained counterterrorism campaign to knock out ISIS sleeper cells is in jeopardy of ending as Turkish warplanes reportedly destroyed a coalition-trained SDF commando camp tasked with taking out ISIS leaders and financiers.” The Turks’ jihadists, who were dispatched to northern Syria to fight America’s anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters, were described by one disgusted US Green Beret who was given the task of training them as “either working in terrorist organizations or sympathetic to them.”

It was only as an afterthought that Trump afterwards, in much less glowing terms, acknowledged, almost in passing, “I also want to thank the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us.” Later in his long speech, when asked by a reporter to flesh out details on the “certain support” that the president grudgingly acknowledged the Kurds played, an obviously uncomfortable Trump was reticent and reluctantly admitted only that “they gave us some information, that turned out to be helpful.” But then he went out of the way to stress that the Kurds played “not a military role at all.” When he was asked whether the United States had relied upon “foreign intel,” Trump was deliberately misleading on the Kurds’ role and said it had not. “So, we had our own intel,” the president dismissively noted. “We got very little help. We didn’t need very much help.”

Trump’s clear reluctance to give the Kurds the credit that they so richly deserve for their success in finding the world’s most wanted man (no doubt driven by his desire to undermine an ally who he betrayed) compares drastically to the Pentagon’s long history of effusive praise for its key “boots on the ground” allies. On one occasion, as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fought through blinding sand storms that prevented vital Coalition “overwatch” air support and faced an unprecedentedly savage blitz of ISIS VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices), a grateful US Army Colonel reported “The SDF is engaged in a difficult battle & fighting bravely to protect and free their people from ISIS. We salute the martyred SDF heroes as the intense fight against evil continues.” On another occasion, after the SDF broke through fanatically defended ISIS positions sustaining horrific loses, a Pentagon source reported

Our SDF partners are still making daily progress and sacrifices, and together we are still finding, targeting and killing ISIS terrorists intent on keeping their extremist hold on the region. We cannot take our focus off our mission, and we must not lose our momentum in taking these terrorists off the battlefield and preventing them from resurfacing somewhere else.

A March 2017 Pentagon report also spoke in glowing terms of the SDF’s bravery after they played a key role in a dangerous heliborne raid on ISIS as follows:

During the period of darkness, March 21-22, the Syrian Democratic Forces, with their Syrian Arab Coalition fighters, launched a multi-pronged offensive behind enemy lines to liberate the Tabqah Dam in Syria from ISIS. The offensive was led by the dedicated multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces and supported by the Coalition. A key element of the Coalition’s strategy against ISIS is to work by, with, and through committed and capable local partner forces fighting to liberate their own people and lands.

The Coalition supported this offensive with air movement and logistical support, precision airstrikes, Apache helicopters in close air support, Marine artillery, and special operations advice and assistance to SDF leadership.

“It takes a special breed of warrior to pull off an airborne operation or air assault behind enemy lines,” said Col. Joe Scrocca “There is nothing easy about this – it takes audacity and courage. And the SDF has that in spades.” [emphasis mine]

Map of Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) operations to defeat ISIS, Turkish invasions of their lands, and Russian-American “de-confliction” zones of influence.

The widely respected US Envoy to the Anti-ISIS Coalition Brett McGurk, who spent years liaising with the Kurds summed up the military’s view of the Syrian Democratic Forces saying “The S.D.F. is the best unconventional partner force we’ve ever had, anywhere.” Sadly, this was a sentiment that the US president who had praised the Kurds before betraying them set about systematically trying to demolish to legitimize his betrayal of them.

Trump Engages in a Disinformation Against the Kurds Designed to Demean Their Valor, Motives and Contributions and Legitimize His Betrayal

Having decided to militarily betray the Pentagon’s Kurdish battlefield allies that were so effusively praised by the military, Trump’s subsequent dismissals of their undeniable courage, vital contribution to the war effort, and crucial role in finding the world’s most wanted man come off as churlish. Never more so than when the president disparaged the Kurdish men and women volunteer fighters, who were the first ones to repulse the seemingly unstoppable ISIS onslaught in the costly defense of the town of Kobane, as mere mercenaries tweeting “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.” Trump then went even further and disowned the Syrian Kurds and acted as if the US did not have a role in driving them into confrontation with the Turks by pushing them to attack Manbij (ISIS’s main terrorism export launch pad which lay beyond their lands in neighboring Arab lands where the Turks forbade them to advance). He did so when he falsely tweeted “They have been fighting Turkey for decades (sic). I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”

The two million “tribal” Kurds of Syria have most certainly not been fighting Turkey for “decades” in “endless wars” and in fact they did not gain weapons until the collapse of Syria in 2011. And far from fighting for “1,000 years” as Trump falsely claimed (Kurds actually fought for Turks in the Ottoman Empire up until its collapse in the 1920s), the Syrian Kurds only fought the Turks when they invaded their lands in 2018 in Erdogan’s cynically mis-named Operation Olive Branch. Far from crossing Turkey’s heavily guarded border to invade Turkey and fight in the expanses of Anatolia with NATO’s second largest army via their predominantly light infantry weapons, the Syrian Kurds used their arms to defend themselves. They defended their homes, families, and homeland from the onslaught of an ISIS jihadist army bent on wiping them out as “secular Jews and pigs” and Turks who defined their own forces as “Islam’s last army” fighting a “jihad.” And in an upending of US foreign policy that sent shivers through Israel which has been fighting Syrian aggression, Trump abdicated all US influence and responsibility to allies like the Kurds and Israel in the region stating “That has nothing to do with us. What does that have to do with the United States of America if they’re fighting over Syria’s land?”

Embed from Getty Images
Syrian Kurds gather around a US armoured vehicle during a demonstration against Turkish threats next to a US-led international coalition base on the outskirts of Ras al-Ain town in Syria’s Hasakeh province near the Turkish border on October 6, 2019. – Ankara had reiterated on October 5 an oft-repeated threat to launch an “air and ground” operation in Syria against a Kurdish militia it deems a terrorist group. (Photo by Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP) (Photo by DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images).

If Trump’s callous “its not our fight” re-rendering of “endless tribal wars” history and washing of his hands of the Turks’ invasion of the Kurds was not enough, the president then demeaned the Kurds’ valor stating “You know, when we send 30 F-18s in front of them, they fight much better than they do when we don’t.” But, in a transparent effort to legitimize his illegitimate decision to betray the Syrian Kurds, Trump went even further and tried to delegitimize America’s greatest terrorist-hunting ground force. He did so by painting them as worse than the ISIS fighters who enslaved and raped thousands of Yazidi women and girls as a sick act of worship, butchered Christians by crucifying them, massacred Arab tribes that resisted them, and beheaded Americans on film. ISIS also dispatched suicide bombers to slaughter “Christian infidels” in Paris, Brussels and Barcelona, murdered Shiites on an industrial scale, established terror affiliates across the globe, inspired mass murder in America, and created a harsh shariah law prison camp that horribly repressed 12 million people.

But all of these jihadist horrors were overlooked by Trump in his effort to conflate the Syrian Kurds with PKK Kurdish guerilla insurgents fighting President Erdogan’s troops for greater autonomy in their ancestral lands in eastern Turkey. In what was the most ignoble shameful statement in the whole sordid episode, Trump disingenuously made the preposterous statement that “The PKK which is a part of the Kurds, as you know, is probably worse at terrorism in many ways and more of a terror threat than ISIS.” To further undermine the Pentagon’s Kurdish allies, Trump then made the reality-bending accusation that the Syrian Kurds were selling oil to Iran. Trump’s preposterous statement and flat out lie “I didn’t like the fact that [the Kurds] are selling the small oil that they have to Iran, and we asked them not to do it,” overlooks an obvious fact. The Iranians, who produce four million barrels of oil a day, are one of the world’s greatest oil exporters and have never needed to import Syria’s small amount of oil of 50,000 barrels of oil. A local oil expert joined in the global chorus of voices rejecting Trump’s easily disproved accusation and patiently explained that, not only did the primitive, recently bombed local oil facilities not have enough oil to meet local demands, “There is no border between the Syrian Kurdish region with Iran, and the oil produced in their areas is not enough to satisfy local needs, and the war destroyed a large part of the oil fields.”

Trump then doubled down on his defense of bipartisan-condemned decision to abandon the Kurds to the Turks by launching a campaign designed to further belittle the allies he had just discarded. The president cynically besmirched the Kurds saying “they are no angels” and “they did not fight for us in [the 1944 amphibious invasion] Normandy.” But, in a region dominated by genocidal dictators, Shiite ayatollahs, sectarian death squads, Turkish backed war-criminal jihadists, Al Qaeda’s local branch, ISIS terrorists, misogynists, Islamist slaughterers of Christians and Yazidis, Takfiri fanatics, rampaging Russian forces, murderous Assad regime Shabab “Ghost” militias, Wahhabi mullahs, Hezbollah fighters, and Turkish ultra-nationalists, by contrast the pro-women’s rights Syrian Kurds —who saved the ancient “pagan” Yazidis from ISIS genocide and protected endangered Christian minorities—are veritable angels. Ironically, in light of Trump’s snide rip on the Kurds “not being angels,” among the Kurds was a famous female fighter known as the Angel of Kobane, one of the many women from the YPJ (Women’s Protection Unit) who fought bravely and died in the thousands against the jihadist-misogynists who hated these liberated women and all they stood for. And, while the Kurds may not have fought their way across Nazi occupied Europe to attack the Panzer tank divisions and Luftwaffe air force of the Third Reich’s mighty Wehrmacht on the beaches and cliffs of Normandy, they did actually fight on our behalf in World War II. Ten Kurdish companies fought in joint American British Allied operations in Greece as part of the British Assyrian Parachute Company.

Such hateful, counter-factual comments and outright lies by the Commander in Chief horrified and dismayed the US soldiers who fought alongside their courageous Kurdish allies and stunned the Kurds who had previously believed the president was there friend and supporter. As recently as September 2018 Trump claimed “we don’t’ forget” the Kurds’ real sacrifices and stated to a Kurdish reporter:

“We do get along great with the Kurds. We’re trying to help them a lot. Don’t forget, that’s their territory. We have to help them. I want to help them. They fought with us. They died with us. They died. We lost tens of thousands of Kurds, died fighting ISIS. They died for us and with us. And for themselves. They died for themselves. They’re great people. And we have not forgotten. We don’t forget.”

But, having betrayed the very “worse than ISIS”-Kurds who the president had previously acknowledged “died for us” and described as “great people, great fighters, and great great people,” Trump reversed himself and purposefully did forget. In light of all his patently self-serving efforts to undermine the undeniable courage of the Kurds, impugn their motives, describe them as being “worse than ISIS” and construct a “fake news” narrative of them selling oil to Iran, the president was not surprisingly loath to share the glory of the killing of Baghdadi with them. His obvious attempt to retroactively diminish their role in the al Baghdadi operation was widely reported through such headlines as Business Insider’s “Trump downplayed central role Kurds played in Baghdadi raid after abandoning them in Syria” and the Washington Post’s “Trump minimizes Kurds’ role in Baghdadi raid, adding insult to injury.”

Trump’s clear reluctance to thank America’s frontline allies who sacrificed 11,000 of their sons and daughters defeating the ISIS terror scourge (thus enabling him to brag “I captured ISIS”) stands in clear contrast to previous presidents’ effusive praise of frontline local allies in the war on terror. Recall, for example, President George W. Bush’s invitation to a previously-obscure anti-Taliban Afghan-Pashtun rebel leader named Hamid Karzai to come to the Capitol where he received a standing ovation by Congress. The Kurds’ military leader Mazloum Abadi, who is widely respected by the US troops who entrusted their security to his fighters, has been invited by both parties to come speak to Congress (even as the Turkish president demanded his arrest). But it is highly doubtful the president will allow him this honor due to the Turkish president’s bullying, especially in light of Trump’s history of unwillingness to stand up to autocrats like Putin (vis a vis the intelligence community’s unanimous findings of Russian interference in the 2016 election) and the Saudi leader Mohammad Bin Salman, after his ordering of the butchering and dismemberment of a US resident Jamal Kashoggi in Istanbul (see Trump’s remarkable statement defending the Saudi leader and absolving him here).

Trump’s embrace of the autocratic Turkish president and efforts to airbrush the hard fighting SDF from his self-aggrandizing narrative of “his” war on ISIS is seen as a betrayal by the Kurds. As will be shown, the depth and impact of this betrayal, however, run far deeper than mere rhetorical efforts that are clearly meant to minimize their bravery, sacrifices in lives of thousands of their people, and crucial role in victories that he has repeatedly claimed for himself.

“No Friends but the Mountains.” A History of Being Used and Betrayed by Washington.

The abandoned Kurds, who understandably felt betrayed after sending their sons and daughters to fight for America in the Arab-dominated Syrian Desert far from their north Syrian Kurdish homeland known as Rojava, which aptly in light of Trump’s sellout translates to the “Land of the Setting Sun,” threw vegetables at the retreating American convoys flying the Stars and Stripe. Not since ignominious images of Huey helicopters evacuating fleeing American personnel from the roof of the Viet Cong-besieged embassy in Hanoi have such humiliating images captured an American retreat. Only on this occasion, America’s precipitous flight was caused not by an attacking force from the constellation of adversaries America had been jostling with in Syria, such as the genocidal Russians and Syrian Arab Army or Turkish “frenemies,” but by Trump’s capitulation to a much weaker power’s demands.

Embed from Getty Images
HOLE, SYRIA – NOVEMBER 10: Kurdish female troops from the Syrian Democratic Forces stand in a forward operating base overlooking the frontline on November 10, 2015 near the ISIL-held town of Hole in the autonomous region of Rojava, Syria. The forces, primarily Kurdish, are attacking ISIL extremists in the area near the Iraqi border and calling in airstrikes from U.S.-led coalition warplanes. The autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria has become a bulwark against the Islamic State. The Rojava armed forces, with the aid of U.S. airstrikes and weapons, are retaking territory which had earlier been captured much by ISIL from the Syrian regime. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images).

President Trump’s shockwave-inducing “impulsive” and “precipitous” (in staunch Trump supporter Senator Lindsay Graham Republican and Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s words) to cave in to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s demands to be allowed to attack our allies has been cast as a Turkish victory over Trump and America in the Turkish media. Trump’s decision to order the remaining “light footprint” force of just 1,000 US troops to abandon their bases in northern Syria, where they were punching far above their small weight by leveraging the Syrian Kurds as proxy warriors in Operation Roundup, clearly blindsided not just the Kurds, but the US generals and special forces in the field. For years these generals had stood up to Turkish threats and had even worn the patches of the local Syrian Kurdish YPG (Peoples Protection Brigades) out of solidarity with their local allies.

Trump’s whimsical decision also dismayed and infuriated the 80 member global Anti-ISIS Coalition, pro-Trump Republicans, Israel, NATO, and the stunned Kurds who served as the tip of the (now abandoned) spear in the remarkably successful air and proxy war to destroy the Islamic State in Syria begun by Obama in August 2014. Trump’s epic betrayal of the Syrian Kurds and green-lighting of a brutal Turkish invasion of their fragile pro-women’s rights, pro-minority democracy in northeastern Syria—that was built on lands they liberated at such horrific cost in lives from the ISIS terror state—was an unforced error and unmitigated humanitarian disaster that has already cost hundreds of civilians and hundreds of pro-American, anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters’ lives. It is also a stark warning to other overseas allies (including Israel which fears that its base-building Iranian Revolutionary Guard enemies will fill the US vacuum in Syria and the Brits whose foreign secretary said his government was not warned of Trump’s rash decision) that the mercurial Americans cannot be trusted to steadfastly honor their alliances or stand up to dictators like the Turkish president. Sadly, it is not the first time the Americans have leveraged the Kurds to achieve their goals and then paved the way for tyrants to massacre them.

The 35 million repressed Kurds whose ancestral lands have been carved up between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey were denied a homeland by the British, French and American victors after World War I. They have a saying that aptly captures their tragic history of betrayal by great powers “We have no friends but the mountains.” Sadly the Kurds, who had created a new saying “No friends but the Americans,” after Obama began to support their fight in 2014, have no foreign friends except for the Israelis (who feel a strong affinity for this race that has been so active in fighting the jihadists that threaten Israel). But they have been consistent and loyal friends to America. After fighting alongside America against the Nazis in World War II, the Kurdish support for the US continued in the following decades. In 1972, the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq to rise up against Baghdad at the request of the US-backed Shah of Iran. But when the Shah made peace with Baghdad, the Kurds (who acted in good faith and launched an insurrection) were betrayed by Washington and left to be slaughtered by Iraqi troops. Using language that mirrors the anguished pleas of the Kurds today, the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani wrote at the time;

“Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone. We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.”

As the abandoned Kurds were massacred and tens of thousands fled rampaging Iraqi troops, another Kurdish leader wrote letter in dismay which read “There is confusion and dismay among our people and forces. Our people’s fate in unprecedented danger. Complete destruction hanging over our head. No explanation for all of this.” Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger cynically told an aid “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke,” The Kurds again rose up and fought bravely against Saddam Hussein in 1991 at the request of the Bush Senior administration during the Gulf War. But the Kurds’ faith in the Americans was once again misplaced and they faced yet another US green lit massacre. As the Kurds acted on Bush’s request that they overthrow Hussein “the Bush administration stood still as Hussein struck back viciously. The White House went so far as to publicly state that it would not intervene militarily, effectively giving Hussein a green light.” But the Kurds continued to stand by the Americans, despite these two previous betrayals that cost them devastating loss of lives. They later fought alongside US forces again in 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom and played a major role in diverting Hussein’s troops away from the US thrust on Baghdad coming from the south to fight their Peshemerga (Those who do not Fear Death) forces in the north. Most recently, at the behest of Obama and later Trump, the Kurds plunged deep into the Arab-inhabited Syrian desert, far from their northern homeland, and spearheaded the destruction of the ISIS global terror threat (a five year rollback launched by Obama in 2014 that Trump has repeatedly claimed for himself in such self congratulatory and wildly misleading statements as “I captured ISIS. [General] Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month.”)

But it was not Trump the Vietnam draft dodger who fought through the windswept Syrian desert and rubbleized, IED-laced alleys of ISIS’s capital, the “heart of darkness” known as Raqqa, to kill thousands of jihadists and capture the 12,000 diehard ISIS fighters currently held in internment camps in northeastern Syria, it was the fearless Kurds. On this latest occasion, the hard-fighting Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces agreed to the Pentagon’s request that they leave their homeland, cross the Euphrates River to the west of their lands (which the Turks described as a do not cross “Red Line”) and capture ISIS’s main base for launching terror attacks abroad, the Arab city of Manbij. They also fought far from their lands to the south, in the vastness of the Arab-inhabited Syrian desert, at the Pentagon’s behest to defeat the global terror scourge of ISIS that has inspired jihadi slaughter in the heartlands of America in venues ranging from Orlando to San Bernardino to Manhattan. The Kurds fought far from home and died for much more than just their land (as Trump erroneously proclaimed in an effort to impugn their motives as the tip of the spear in the Coalition’s anti-ISIS campaign), they fought beyond Rojava to rid the world of the scourge of terrorists who carried out slaughter of young girls at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, drove a semi-truck through a crowd in Nice France, and slaughtered co-workers at a clinic in San Bernardino, California (just after these same co-workers held a baby shower for one of the terrorists).

Embed from Getty Images
Kurdish female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) gather during a celebration at the iconic Al-Naim square in Raqa on October 19, 2017, after retaking the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. The SDF fighters flushed jihadist holdouts from Raqa’s main hospital and municipal stadium, wrapping up a more than four-month offensive against what used to be the inner sanctum of IS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate”. / AFP PHOTO / BULENT KILIC (Photo credit should read BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images)

In return for the sacrifice of thousands of their sons and daughters, whose bodies fill martyrs cemeteries found in most villages in the region (the Kurds lost more than double America’s losses in the 2003-11 Iraq War), the long repressed two million Kurdish people of northern Syria and their newly empowered local Yazidi, Armenian and Syriac Christian allies desperately hoped for economic, military and diplomatic support from Trump. They hoped for the sort of consistent, reliable support Trump’s “best friend” (in Trump’s words) Vladimir Putin steadfastly gives to its allies in the region. They certainly felt they had earned protection from the Turks who had threatened that the Kurds would be “buried,” and they hoped for a seat at future peace talks to decide the future of Syria as well as political assistance from their democracy-exporting American superpower allies.

All Trump needed to do was maintain America’s micro force equivalent of a few platoons in the region until the petering Syrian War ended (only Idlib Province remained unconquered by the victorious Syrian government in their zone) so that the Pentagon and Washington could leverage their control over one third of Syria in the Middle Eastern “Game of Thrones” to achieve results beneficial to American interests. Staunch hawk and pro-Israeli National Security Advisor John Bolton, for example, planned to use America’s bases and de facto protectorate as a quid pro quo to get Iran to dismantle its bases (which threaten Israel) in Syria. The US could also leverage its forces on the ground, that controlled the lands northeast of the Euphrates River as part of a ‘de-confliction’ agreement with Russia, to make sure their loyal Kurdish allies received autonomy and safeguards for their fragile multi-ethnic grassroots democracy. The mere presence of US troops could have easily protected this fragile realm that had liberated women and Christian minorities from a Turkish invasion in the new Syria being constructed in upcoming peace talks. Protecting the Kurds by holding the line would grant America another democratic ally in the region, like Israel, that could be relied upon to assist the Pentagon in the future. Staying in Syria until the upcoming peace talks would not mean a so-called “Forever War” that Trump misleadingly described as Americans staying “in the Middle East for the next 1,000 years with thousands of soldiers fighting other people’s wars.” It meant just 1,000, not thousands plural as Trump falsely claimed, and it meant them staying in theater only for a year or two until the final outcome of the almost-finished war was decided.

Instead of wisely and patiently leveraging our control over most of Syria’s oil, dams and richest agricultural lands, Trump stunned the Pentagon—which has expressed a deep appreciation for the Kurds as frontline allies who it has repeatedly defended from previous Turkish threats—by unilaterally acquiescing to Islamist Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bullying demands for a US withdrawal. On October 6th Trump abruptly ordered US troops, who had been doing join patrols with the Turks on the border to appease Erdogan, by symbolically preventing (non-existent) Syrian Kurdish terrorism or incursions against Turkey, to be hastily evacuated. This evacuation gave the Turkish president the green light from the powerful Americans that he needed in order to launch a blitz into the Kurdish lands with tanks, artillery and aerial bombardments of civilian-packed cities on October 9th. Astoundingly, Trump, the author of the bestselling Art of the Deal, got nothing in return for his decision to evacuate our prized positions in Syria and (in his own words) “let Iran do what they want” in the country.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s decision defeats the purpose of his pulling out of the Obama nuclear Iran nuclear deal, which was torn up by Trump ostensibly to punish Iran for expanding its nefarious influence in places like Syria. His abrupt withdrawal decision, which was condemned by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu in a rare rebuke of the president, was defined as a betrayal in Israel. The Boston Globe reported in an article “Israelis see Trump’s Syria pullout as a ‘betrayal’ that could unravel the region”

The abrupt withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria and subsequent Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters have badly rattled Israel’s national security experts, who decried President Trump’s action as a betrayal of loyal allies and evidence that Israel’s most vital supporter is a fickle friend at best. Israeli officials reportedly had no warning of the withdrawal, which the White House announced Sunday after a call between Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

An Israeli daily had a commentary which read “Trump abandons allies without blinking and Israel is liable to be next. The entire balance of power in the Middle East is built on a very delicate web of supports, pressures, understandings, and agreements — and Trump is unraveling that web.” Yaakov Margi, a member of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament condemned the slaughter of Kurds unleashed by Trump saying “The world was silent during the Holocaust and was silent when the Armenian people were massacred [by the Turks] and did not recognize it. It is silent today to the slaughter of the Kurdish people by a tyrant [Erdogan] who is never satiated.’’

But it not only Israel, whose support has been a cornerstone of Republican politics for decades, that criticism of Trump’s abandoning of allies “without blinking” has been vociferous, but in a remarkable break from a party that has been in his thrall, somnolent Republicans have finally mustered the spine to lambast Trump on the issue of the betrayal of the Kurds.

Republican Criticism of Trump’s Great Abdication of the Middle East and Concomitant Rise of Russian, Turkish, Iranian Power

On October 6th the Kurds’ fears of another US betrayal came to fruition and the “complete chaos” many dreaded would come should the US depart finally descended on this relatively peaceful region that had had a modicum of stability and a Kurdish-led democratic civil society. The fragile peace and multi-ethnic harmony that prevailed in the autonomous North Syrian Democratic Federation compared drastically to the chaos, mass slaughter, and rubbleizing of cities by brutal Syrian and Russian indiscriminate aerial bombardments reigning in the rest of Syria conquered by Assad’s genocidal regime at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. On that fateful day in October, the proud history of Pentagon resolve against Turkish threats, bullying, and saber-rattling was jettisoned when Trump impulsively gave into the Turkish president’ demands (and by extension those of the Russian, Syrian and Iranian governments) that US forces immediately withdraw from the strategic region that US troops had almost unchallenged control over. Trump ordered US troops to unceremoniously abandon the very bases in that Major General Jamie Jarrad had earlier claimed he was “proud of” when he defied the Turkish president and threatened to defend them. Jarrad knew all too well that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was demanding that America abandon its bases so the Turks could invade and destroy the Kurds’ hard-won, multi-ethnic federation in the relatively peaceful lands they run through democratically elected local councils made up equally of men and women and long repressed Christian minorities.

President Erdogan has made no secret of his plans (described by a US State Department official as “possibly the craziest idea I have ever heard”) to ethnically cleanse the historically Kurdish-inhabited, fertile region and settle it with millions of more Islamically conservative Arab refugees from other parts of Syria currently living in Turkey. He had already done just that in 2018 when he brutally invaded the Kurdish westernmost province of Afrin driving out tens of thousands of Kurds and replacing them with Arabs to punish the Kurds for (naively as it turns out) agreeing to join a 30,000 member US-backed border force. On that occasion, the Trump administration failed to stand up for the Kurds who diverted their lightly armed forces from the unfinished campaign to defeat ISIS to embattled Afrin in a failed attempt try to defend their people from the much more powerful Turkish forces (after a six month “operational pause” the defeated Kurds returned from Afrin to dutifully finish the bloody campaign to defeat thousands of ISIS holdouts in the Arab-dominated Syrian Desert). Among the local Kurds killed in Afrin by the invading Turks was a 27 year old female fighter named Barani Kobane whose body was filmed by Turkish-backed fighters as they kicked her exposed and mutilated breasts. Fox News would report on this internationally condemned act of savagery by Turkish-backed forces that were ostensibly fighting terrorists.

“She’s beautiful, man,” declares one fighter as one purports to take a selfie with the defiled body. In Arabic, others declare “God is Great,” while some call the downed soldier a “female pig.” One even digs his dirty boot into her chest, and another puts the muzzle of his rifle at her head. “I was checking Facebook and I came across the video and was in shock; it was so awful that I had no words,” Ahmed [the slain girl’s brother], 31, told Fox News. “I didn’t know who the girl was…and then a commentator wrote it was Barin Kobani.” Barin Kobani, Ahmed’s beloved sister. In desperation, he called around hoping it was someone else with the same name. But within hours, SDF officials confirmed Ahmed’s worst nightmare. In agony, he delivered the news to the family. Over the course of the next week, more videos and images emerged – showing Barin’s remains in different locations and with different jubilant fighters, indicating she may have been paraded as a dead trophy through the streets.

While the fate of Kurds like Barin may not have bothered the conscience of average Americans, US Christians fear for the fate of small Christian minorities that lived in peace with the Kurds now that Turkey has launched its latest ethnic cleansing invasion. Evangelical Christians who tend to vote Republican worry about the fate of small Assyrian and Armenian Christian minorities whom the Kurds protected from jihadists. Franklin Graham, a close Trump ally and son of widely respected evangelical leader Reverend Billy Graham tweeted:

“TODAY I ask that you join me in praying for the lives affected by the White House decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria. Both Democrat & Republican leaders are deeply concerned bc this would be, in essence, abandoning our closest allies there — the Kurdish people. Also pray for the Christians who the Kurds have been protecting. They could be annihilated. Would you pray w/me that Pres. @realDonaldTrump will reconsider? Thousands of lives hang in the balance.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson blasted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a dictator and a thug and said he was “absolutely appalled that the United States is going to betray those democratic forces in northern Syria, that we are possibly going to allow the Turkish to come in against the Kurds.” He also attacked the American “president, who allowed Kashoggi [a US resident Washington Post journalist who was butchered and dismembered in Istanbul at the orders of the Saudi leader] to be cut in pieces without any repercussions whatsoever, is now allowing the Christians and the Kurds to be massacred by the Turks.” In moralistic terms that many American Christians understand, Trump’s shameless, unapologetic betrayal of the men and women (a remarkable 40% of the Kurds’ anti-ISIS force is made up of women) of the Kurdish-led, Armenian, Assyrian Christian, Arab, Yazidi, Syrian Democratic Forces is, as Republican Senator Lindsay Graham aptly stated, a dark “stain on the honor” of America (former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney went even further and called it “a bloodstain in the annals of American history”). Former vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney said “President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria is having sickening and predictable consequences” and she vowed that lawmakers “must and will act to limit the catastrophic impact of this decision.

But Trump’s decision is equally indefensible in strategic terms that are more important to pro-military Republican hawks. His unforced retreat decision ceded all of the Pentagon’s remarkable control of a commodity that Trump appreciates more than allies, or bases, influence or other resources, namely the east Syrian oil fields (the US and its Kurdish allies had gained control of Syria’s largest oil field the vast Omar field). After seemingly being made aware of the surrender of these reserves, Trump reversed himself and ordered hundreds of soldiers in Bradley fighting vehicles to cross into Syria from Iraq. Their new “re-invasion” mission was to blatantly seize these fields in what was a blindingly obvious dismantling of his own ending “stupid endless wars” rhetoric. Trump inherited a light footprint operation of just 500 highly effective ground troops from Obama when he assumed office. But his late October 2019 decision to deploy hundreds troops from mechanized units to seize oil fields in eastern Syria not only demolished his isolationist base-placating rationale for haphazardly ending US involvement in “endless wars in the sand,” but raised the number of US forces in the region to 900 (i.e. 400 more than had been there under Obama).

But despite this naked (and illegal by international laws) resource grab, at a time when Trump has bragged about “bringing our troops home,” the president surrendered much of Syria’s most fertile land, its largest hydro-electric dams, vital allies, and string of US bases in the one third of Syria US troops had gained control of (at a fraction of the price tag of Bush’s 1.7 trillion dollar Iraq “big war” which cost almost 4,500 US soldiers their lives). These strategic assets, that had been gained with just 2 (two) American deaths when Trump initially announced his withdrawal decision in December 2018, were surrendered to America’s adversaries, the Russian-Hezbollah-Iran-Assad alliance without a shot fired. And they were surrendered without getting anything in return. The only conceivable benefit that Trump (but not the American people, the Pentagon, the CIA, State Department or America’s Coalition allies) could have gotten out of his “folding” of a “winning hand” was some sort of deal related to his Trump hotels in Turkey (the president has acknowledged “I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul.”)

Most alarmingly for Republicans, Trump’s withdrawal decision that was announced (how else?) by tweet was also a greenlight for far-from-beaten ISIS, which the Pentagon and UN estimate still have 30,000 fighters whose dedication and commitment to the fight compares drastically to Trump’s impulse-driven fickleness and lack of follow-through tenacity. ISIS prisoners were filmed breaking out of Turkish-bombarded Kurdish prisoner of war camps as the outgunned Kurds desperately shifted fighters north to defend their lands from invading Turkish jihadist proxy fighters. If any of the escaping ISIS killers succeed in carrying out terror mayhem in Europe (as Trump actually predicted they would when he said “they are going to be escaping to Europe”) or here in America, Republicans know they can thank Trump for giving them a “get out of jail free” card to carry out their jihadi mass casualty terrorism slaughter of what they call “Crucifixers.” The blood of slain Americans and European “Christian infidels” will be on the hands of a president who has brought chaos to lands once protected by local Kurdish forces who had worked to guard an estimated 12,000 ISIS fighters and an astounding 70,000 more ISIS supporters held in ad hoc prisoner of war camps. This is a point Republican Senator and staunch Trump supporter Lindsay Graham made when he said Trump “will have American blood on his hands if he abandons Kurds because ISIS will come back, and if any American is killed anywhere because a resurgent ISIS, it will fall on the Trump administration like it did Obama.”

But most worryingly for Republican who believe in overseas alliances with partners like NATO (which Trump has discussed withdrawing from), the president’s unilateral decision was not made with any measured consultation with the British and French who were fighting in Syria alongside the Americans or with the State Department, National Security Council, Pentagon. His decision was a gift to the aggressive Turkish leader who has been widely criticized for Republicans for, among other things, his vow to carve out a “safe zone” in his country’s cynically misnamed “Operation Peace Spring” October invasion (similar to the “safe zone” Erdogan controls in western Syria that is home to Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Hayat Tahrir al Sham where Caliph al Baghdadi was also discovered hiding). This is the very leader who has been excoriated by Republicans like Homeland Security Committee Chairman Senator Michael McCaul who said “We let Turkey into NATO to protect them from the Soviet Union. And now our NATO ally is buying Russian equipment, Russian military equipment and, through its invasion into Syria, threatening our allies.”

Trump, who has shamelessly used rhetoric to throw the Kurds under the proverbial bus (or Turkish tank) has, by contrast, said of Turkey’s Islamist repeat ethnic cleanser president “He’s a friend of mine… he’s a hell of a leader, and he’s a tough man. He’s a strong man, and he did the right thing and I really appreciate it, and I will appreciate it in the future.” Trump’s friend, it should be recalled, is the very Islamist president who has supported both Hamas with supply convoys and brazenly encouraged his “brother’s” anti-socialist Maduro government in Venezula to “stand tall” against Trump’s sanctions. Turkey’s leader also caused widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike by buying banned S-400 anti-aircraft weapons from Putin in direct violation of NATO treaty agreements and imprisoned a US pastor on trumped up charges for two years. If this were not enough, Erdogan has fanned the flames of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Turkey, arrested and purged tens of thousands of teachers and journalists whom he defined as political foes, and turned a blind eye to the flow of “legions” of jihadists through Turkey to Syria to join ISIS and Al Qaeda’s local franchise.

Erdogan is not afraid to act in America either and has issued an Interpol arrest warrant for what he calls a “terrorist” but who is in actuality Enes Kanter, a Turkish-American NBA basketball player for the Raptors. Erdogan and state run media have also described Kanter as a “criminal,” and a “gang member” for “insulting the Turkish president (to which Kanter humorously responded on twitter “the only thing I terrorize is the [basketball] rim.”) And speaking of terrorizing, black-suited Erdogan bodyguards were filmed rushing and then beating and kicking downed and bloodied American, Kurdish and Armenian protestors in the face and in the head in Washington DC during his recent visit. This was a blatant import of the Turkish president’s brutality to a democratic country that, unlike Turkey, grants its citizens the right to hold public rallies against those in power.

The New York Times has also reported that Erdogan has been so emboldened by his outmaneuvering of Trump in Syria and success in driving the once seemingly invincible Americans out of the country that he is now seeking to build a nuclear weapon with the help of rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. Even as Trump has derided and mocked the Kurds (whom the Pentagon by contrast defined as “stalwart allies” and “stalwart partners,”) the president seems to harbor an inexplicable affinity to President Erdogan. His gushing over Erdogan resembles his admiration for Russia’s autocratic ruler Vladimir Putin (despite Putin’s history of attacking American interests around the globe from the Baltics to Syria to Ukraine to Europe to America that I have outlined in Newsweek).

As should be blindingly obvious, Trump’s isolationist base-placating, but disastrously counter-strategic order to immediately withdraw all troops from northern Syria and embolden Erdogan is an unprecedented, historic catastrophe for US prestige and influence in a vital region. It is also an unexpected gift for Moscow, Tehran, Ankara and Damascus (and for ISIS which took advantage of the Turkish invasion to carry out a car bomb attack in Kurdish lands). Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, who has been otherwise slavish in his praise of Trump, reacted to the dizzying collapse of decades of US influence and the concomitant Trump-driven rise of Russia as the region’s main powerbroker saying “This decision to abandon our Kurdish allies and turn Syria over to Russia, Iran and Turkey will put every radical Islamist on steroids. Shot in the arm to the bad guys. Devastating for the good guys.” Republican Senator Majority leader Mitch McConnell concurred and, in a rare rebuke of the president, warned “A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria would only benefit Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime. And it would increase the risk that ISIS and other terrorist groups regroup.”

This is a sentiment America’s NATO and European Union allies agree with. Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform summed up their dismay at Trump’s surrendering of their joint positions in Syria to Putin as follows “European governments have a very low regard for Trump anyway. They know that they need to work with the United States, but it confirms to them that Trump is incapable of thinking strategically, handing victory to the Russians in Syria.” General David Richards, the former head of the British military, and former commander of international forces in Afghanistan, told The Independent that “On an emotional level, and certainly from a tactical perspective, what is being done to the Kurds is plainly wrong. In fact it’s pretty awful after all they have done against Isis on our behalf. But more importantly, the region as a whole continues to suffer from the absence of a clear and coherent western strategy.” He added:

“Decisions have been taken by the Trump administration that are very difficult to fathom. At one level, we do not know what’s going to happen now to a bunch of very violent Isis prisoners. Are they going to become free again to carry on terrorist attacks? At another level these decisions also mean that Russian and Iranian influence will grow. I really can’t see how any of this protects or enhances Western interests. It’s quite the opposite.”

Strong Trump supporter Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also highly critical of the president’s withdrawal order as he had not banked on a US retrenchment from Syria just as Iran was building threatening missile bases there. Israel’s Haaretz news ran a headline which read “Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Is a Strategic Disaster for Netanyah” and reported “If anything is left of the ‘defense alliance’ between Washington and Israel, it’s on paper only.”

The sad reality is that, as McConnell correctly states, the president’s bi-partisan and internationally condemned cave-in to Turkey’s dictatorial Islamist leader and empowering of Putin and Assad represents a stunning and unexpected strategic bonza for a veritable “alliance of evil.” The list of US enemies that benefits from Trump’s needless retreat decision (that Republican Lindsay Graham described as “the dumbest f***ing idea I’ve ever heard”) includes the genocidal regime of Syrian dictator Basher al Assad the “Butcher of Damascus” which has killed far more Syrians than ISIS. It has done so via Shabab death squads, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals and packed cities with massive barrel bombs and use of deadly sarin nerve gases against civilians. And speaking of the resilient ISIS forever warriors, its followers are no doubt thrilled by Trump’s decision to abandon the Pentagon’s stalwart, ISIS-hunting Kurdish allies to the Turks (whose proxy jihadi forces include many of the Caliph’s militants including forces described by one expert as “gangsters” who are “also racist toward Kurds and other minorities.”).

Equally thrilled are the Iranian ayatollahs who have been loudly demanding that the American “Great Satan” withdraw from Syria so they can establish a “land bridge” to their ally Assad and to Hezbollah in order to arm these two allies to fight Israel. Trump’s stunning decision is no doubt being cast in the minds of both Sunni and Shiite fanatics from Beirut to the Hamrin Mountains of Iraq where ISIS is regrouping to Tehran as divine intervention. One can also imagine celebratory vodka toasts being made among Russian generals who used Hind attack helicopters to crush CIA-backed Arab Free Syrian Army rebels in western Syria in a Cold War style proxy war in 2015, but found their attacks on US “co-location” bases repulsed by a determined American-Kurdish forces northeast of the Euphrates River “De-Confliction Line” in 2018.

A stunned Russian filmed himself entering just such a formerly defended US base that had been handed over to them without a fight on this occasion and gloated “I am on an American base where they were just yesterday morning, and this morning we’re here in a video” on his Facebook page. “Now we’ll take a look at how they lived, what they were doing.” Another video posted by a pro-Kremlin outlet declared “Manbij is ours!” and gave a triumphant tour of the abandoned US base that had previously been one of America’s main intelligence gathering outposts in the volatile region where ISIS is regrouping and Iranian Revolutionary Guards are expanding their influence. Never was the newfound lack of respect for America in the region more on display than when the invading Turks, emboldened by America’s chaotic retreat, deliberately “bracketed” US troops in an attack that a former US commander in Syria described as either Turkish “artillery soldiers were incompetent, or this was a purposeful act to send a message to U.S. and SDF/Kurds. Turkey fired on a NATO ally.”

So shambolic was the US military’s presidentially-forced evacuation from its bases that the Pentagon was forced to call in airstrikes on its own bases as US troops retreated. This was done to prevent American weapons, ammunition, and equipment from falling into the hands of the Turks, Syrians and Russians who rushed in to fill the vacuum Trump created in what could now be called Chaosistan. While US Special Forces have been dubbed “Master of Chaos,” Trump has clearly earned this moniker in a different sense. An incensed Republican congressman Adam Kizinger, who represents Illinois, tweeted in response to the chaos Trump unleashed “We bombed our own base on purpose, because of the impulsive decision by @realDonaldTrump didn’t leave time to evacuate the right way. Is this the America you grew up believing in?”

The consensus among most Republicans in Congress, other than staunch turn-your-back-on-the-world isolationist Senator Rand Paul, is that there was absolutely zero strategic rationale or tactical logic for Trump to give up Pentagon’s position of strength that brought American tremendous strategic dividends at such a low cost in American lives and treasure for nothing in return. The strategic dividends Trump surrendered included assets that were vital to American domestic security, such as bases in the actual region where ISIS cells are operating that could be used for counter-terrorism raids in conjunction with (formerly) allied Kurdish forces. Incidentally, the Pentagon’s small footprint presence in the region also gave much comfort and security to millions living in peace under the auspices of the mighty American hegemon and its democratic allies. This earned America widespread goodwill in the region and was a huge bonus in the greatest war in the war on terror, the battle for hearts and minds. Trump’s withdrawal decision is an “own goal” in soccer terms and a propaganda gift for Islamists who seek to recruit Kurds after warning them that America was no true friend of their people.

“Ending Endless Wars” as a False Rationale for the Legitimizing the Sudden Collapse of US Power in the Middle East

Trump had tried to defend his indefensible decision and deflect the withering storm of Republican criticism stemming from it by offering his diehard followers a tendentious rationale based on a false dichotomy of either a. an “endless war” (like the “big war” in Iraq that involved 168,000 US troops and a jaw-dropping $1.7 trillion dollar price that dwarfs the price of having a mere 1,000 troops in Syria) or b. a haphazard, chaotic scramble to evacuate our micro force of “accelerants” or “force multipliers” from our bases in Syria without informing our anti-ISIS allies (but informing their enemies the Islamist Turks). Trump’s blatant disinformation campaign has been successful in presenting his actions as statesmanlike and presidential for his isolationist base who incorrectly see it as ending Operation Iraqi Freedom-like quagmire (which he correctly has criticized for being a rash and self-defeating war that lead to the death of almost 4,500 US troops and the rise of ISIS).

The fact that Trump, who has pandered to his isolationist base by calling the US retreat part of his “ending forever wars” policy of “bringing our troops” home, actually ordered these very forces to be redeployed from Syria into neighboring Iraq, instead of bringing them home, is telling. The additional fact is that this “shell game” meant to deceive his followers involves his late October order for new US mechanized forces to seize oil fields in Syria following his withdrawal order. This “re-invasion” order comes even as he dispatched 1,800 new troops to Saudi Arabia (where they are not needed) and shows how false his disinformation narrative of ending “pointless” overseas deployments is.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell slammed Trump’s rationale for withdrawing troops from Syria in an op ed which offered this rebuke to the president “As neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more talk of ‘endless wars.’ But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars are won or lost.” McConnell also called Trump’s retreat a “grave strategic mistake” that was like “the Obama administration’s reckless withdrawal from Iraq, which facilitated the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.” This is not exactly an apt comparison because Obama ordered a phased, three year withdrawal of US troops in careful coordination with local Iraqi allies (who, unlike the Kurds, wanted US troops to depart). This gradual withdrawal to bases and then to Kuwait that made in fulfillment of Status of Forces Treaty willingly signed by President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Malki was also done with the agreement of the Pentagon (whose generals had real influence on Obama’s often overly deliberated decisions, unlike Trump’s decisions which are fait accompli unilateral dictates to the military).

Trump’s “ending endless wars” rationale for his retreat is, however, red meat for those in his base who believe the president is possessed of what he calls “unmatched wisdom” in regards to Syria. It is also manna for his “Make America Great Again by Abandoning the World” followers who are detached from foreign lands and the threats that ungoverned spaces in them pose, like those that manifested themselves on 9/11 and in the ISIS-driven attacks in San Bernardino, Manhattan, Orlando, Brussels, Paris, Nice, London, Manchester, Strasbourg, Barcelona…and even in Turkey in places like Ankara, Istanbul, Suruc, Adana and elsewhere (although the Turks downplay these ISIS attacks that have killed and maimed hundreds and continue to label the anti-ISIS Kurds of Syria the “real terrorists”). Trump gloated in detachment from the chaos he helped create overseas in seemingly irrelevant lands the and suffering of the irrelevant Kurds who were sacrificed on the alter of his efforts to gin up his isolationist base stating “we are 8,000 miles away.” But this assumption of distance-based security overlooks the fact that all the major ISIS attacks in the US, including the largest mass shooting in US history to that date in the 2016 massacre in Orlando, were carried out by lone-wolf jihadists inspired to carry out D.I.Y. mayhem by messaging from ISIS keyboard jihadists in Islamic State Middle Eastern lands.

In an increasingly connected world, where implosions in foreign lands like post-Soviet Afghanistan and post-US Syria leads to chaos, the suffering of peoples like the Afghans and Kurds can impact Americans who have no interest in “stupid wars.” Abdicating actions like abandoning the Afghan people after the Soviet withdrawal from the country in 1989 (which led to the rise of the Al Qaeda-hosting Taliban) or the abandonment of the Kurds creates wellsprings of resentment than can lead to mass-casualty terrorism here at home. And while the Kurds, who have a strong tradition of moderation and hatred for jihadism, are hardly likely candidates for anti-American terrorism, Trump’s betrayal has certainly hardened the hearts of this people who formerly admired the president and America. The sting of his green lighting for their destruction will burn for generations to come. The Kurds have reason to hate the American president for, as will be shown, his withdrawal was perfidious in that it proactively paved the way for our fighting allies’ destruction at the hands of the Islamist Turks.

The Great Betrayal. The President’s Senseless Perfidy Towards Our Kurdish Allies

For all the fact that Moscow, not Washington, is now the powerbroker in post-American northern Syria, the greatest beneficiaries from Trump’s brazen surrender of all the Kurds’ and the Pentagon’s hard-earned victories are the invading Turks. The Turks have already brutally cleansed Kurdish lands in the western province of Afrin in 2018 and they are now killing hundreds in the northeast and displacing tens of thousands. Among those who have been killed in recent days was a well-known Kurdish female politician and human rights activist named Khevrin Khalaf. As disturbing as the videos of our Russian adversaries triumphantly mocking the Americans from our abandoned bases are, the video of this women’s rights activist, who was filmed being dragged from her car by Turkish jihadist proxies and summarily executed on the roadside via shots to the head after being called a “pig,” is unbearable to watch (Turkey’s jihadists use the term “atheist pig” or “infidel” to describe Kurds due to their perception that the secular Kurds are not “real” Muslims). A friend of this woman who volunteered to teach refugees wrote of her death:

“On Oct. 12, my friend was brutally murdered by a group of assassins working under the order of the so-called Syrian National Army. They attacked Khalaf’s car, tortured her, beat her with blunt objects, broke her legs, dragged her by her hair until it was ripped from her scalp, and then shot her body and face until she was mutilated beyond recognition even to her mother.”

An autopsy of this well known Kurdish women’s rights activist described her brutal death as follows:

“From the above we conclude that the woman was beaten with a solid body on the head … also beating by sharp objects on the posterior face of the legs … and dragged from her hair causing the hair to [rip out] … then she was hit by gunshot … After falling to the ground, she was hit by four shots from the back … not at close range.”

The Secretary General of Amnesty International has reported that such summary executions of civilians by the Turks are widespread in a recent report which states:

“Turkish military forces and a coalition of Turkey-backed Syrian armed groups have displayed a shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians, during the offensive into northeast Syria…”

The Turkish military offensive into northeast Syria has wreaked havoc on the lives of Syrian civilians who once again have been forced to flee their homes and are living in constant fear of indiscriminate bombardment, abductions and summary killings. Turkish military forces and their allies have displayed an utterly callous disregard for civilian lives, launching unlawful deadly attacks in residential areas that have killed and injured civilians.

Two bound Kurds were also filmed by jubilant jihadists who were chanting an Arabic war cry “Allah u Akbar!” (God is Greatest) and “pig prisoners” writhing on the ground as they were gunned down in cold blood with a powerful battlefield sniper rifle and AK 47s. The butchered Kurdish female politician, bound and executed Kurds, and hundreds of lightly armed Kurdish male and female fighters who were “neutralized” (i.e. killed) by NATO’s second largest army, which has massive Leopard tanks, heavy artillery, and US-supplied F-16s, are all automatically labelled “terrorists” by Turkey’s state run media and jihadist proxies (ironically in light of Turkey’s “terrorist” claims, many of Turkey’s proxy fighters are in fact former Al Qaeda or ISIS fighter-terrorists who have been “fig leafed” as members of the so called Syrian National Army or Free Syrian Army). The deaths of these Kurds are the end result of a rash, impulsive decision made by Trump that one of the withdrawing members of the US force, who proudly wore a YPG Women’s Protection Unit patch on his uniform, clearly disagreed with.

But even if one does subscribes to Trump’s patently false “ending endless wars” rationale for withdrawing the small leveraging force equivalent of just a few platoons (that was not the leading edge in the Kurdish-fought campaign) from Syria just before peace talks are held (and then returning them to illegally seize oil fields a few weeks later), it is impossible to rationalize the senseless way in which it was done. To truly grasp the epic nature of Trump’s October 6th betrayal and its devastating impact on a people who had been fighting for us the day before, one need only read this heart rending sentence written by a journalist who witnessed the unfolding tragedy stemming from Trump’s shock decision, “As United States troops continued their withdrawal from Syria on Sunday, a line of cars carried their routed former allies, terrified civilians and dead bodies out of a pulverized border town that had been besieged by Turkish forces for more than a week.”

And in order to truly understand the truly perfidious nature of Trump’s bipartisan and globally-lambasted decision to withdraw US troops from their bases so the Turks could attack our Kurdish allies, consider this. In the weeks before the invasion, the Trump administration convinced the Kurds to systematically demolish their tunnels, berms, ammo caches, and defense networks that were built to protect their lands from a Turkish onslaught. Trusting the Americans, the soon-to-be-betrayed Kurds destroyed these defensive positions and ammunition reserves in good faith, believing in Trump administration assurances that Turkey would not invade their lands.

Had Trump given our Kurdish allies advance warning of his decision to talk to Erdogan and precipitously abandon them to the Turks, they would not have destroyed these vital defensive positions. While Trump has disingenuously tried to wash his hands of any obligations to our battlefield allies by claiming “we never gave a commitment to the Kurds,” a Fox News reporter who has met with US military officials tweeted. “Not true. According to a former top senior military adviser to President Trump, ‘We told them over and over ‘We are your friends. We will never leave you.” Members of the military who served alongside the Kurds in the war on ISIS have also said that they “reassured them we would never leave Syria and abandon the Kurds” And Trump himself actually said “We want to protect the Kurds.”

Had America stayed true to these promises made by the military, who doubtless believed what they promised when they gave their word that we would not abandon them, the Kurds would also not have allowed joint Turkish-American patrols in the regions between the Kurdish towns of now-besieged Rais al Un and Tel Abyad as ordered by the Trump administration. These Turkish patrols allowed the Kurds’ enemies to carry out reconnaissance of these subsequently invaded areas. It should be recalled that Trump knows how to reach out to those whom he considers allies in advance of his unilateral decisions. He did so recently when he warned Vladimir Putin in advance of an airstrike on Syrian air bases to punish Assad for using chemical weapons to kill dozens of civilians. He could have done so in the case of the Kurds as well if he had defined them as friends. The fact that he chose not to forewarn the Kurds comes off as perfidious and designed to deliberately expose them to an invasion by Turks who he claimed he knew meant to “wipe out” their people.

Had the Kurds, who have done far more to advance US interests since the 1970s than America’s Russian adversaries, been similarly forewarned by Trump of his intention to abandon them, instead of being blindsided and betrayed, they could have preemptively invited the Russians and Syrian Arab Army into their lands to act as a deterrent to a Turkish invasion. If they had been treated as allies, instead of an expendable commodity, or even as enemies, and warned months or even weeks in advance of Trump’s impending decision, they could have negotiated with Assad and Putin from a position of strength. The Kurds could have negotiated a treaty with the Assad regime with American flags still flying behind them over twenty two bases and outposts that were guarded by the might of the US air armada and such unmatched-state-of-the-art weaponry as HIMAR satellite guided munitions, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and terrifying AC-130 Specter gunships (like the ones used to decimate an attacking Syrian-Russian force at the Conoco oil field in 2018). Instead, the Kurds were deliberately kept uninformed by their ostensible ally, the American president who has made so much political hay on their victories, and were forced to beg Assad and Putin for help from a position of abject weakness. That position of weakness was defined by American flags fluttering over retreating US Stryker vehicles and tens of thousands of desperate Kurdish and Christian refugees fleeing burning cities in the face of a Turkish invasion.

As the Turks stormed into their lands on October 9th after receiving Trump’s go ahead, the Kurds were forced to belatedly reach out to the brutal Syrian regime of President Assad and Russian not from a position of US-backed strength, but as a discarded ally under assault from a powerful Islamist NATO army. That hardly allowed them to demand desperately sought after recognition for their local grass roots democratic autonomy that their people had painstakingly constructed with the hopes that America, the world’s greatest democracy, would protect it. Tragically, the Kurds and their Christian Armenian/Syriac allies have had to surrender to a Syrian Arab Republic regime, one that repressed them for decades and denied many of them citizenship.

The Kurds did so in a heartbreaking decision to abandon their hard-earned freedom and democracy in order to save themselves from Turkish jihadist slaughter and mass ethnic cleansing (much to the chagrin of sidelined Republican traditionalists and hawks who bemoan the sudden and total collapse of years of hard earned American influence in the region and concomitant unexpected rise of Iran, Assad and Putin’s power and influence). One US diplomat working on Syria, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of punishment for speaking out, summed up the shame he felt following the collapse of the Kurdish led dreams for a pro-women’s rights, pro-Christian minority rights democracy in Syria “The extent of our betrayal over the last year has been so immoral that it has shaken me to my core. We have turned everyone in Syria against them and now we are dismantling our once-ally, bit by bit, and feeding the pieces to their enemies.” Another horrified American diplomat serving in Syria penned a memo that captured the devastating impact of Turkey’s green lit policies designed to depopulate ancient Kurdish lands via Islamist militias to punish them for working with the Americans:

Embed from Getty Images
Turkish-backed Syrian rebel fighters gather near the Syrian-Turkish border north of Aleppo on October 7, 2019. – US forces in northern Syria started pulling back from areas along the Turkish border ahead of a feared military invasion by Ankara that Kurdish forces say would spark a jihadist resurgence. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement that “US forces withdrew from the border areas with Turkey” in northeast Syria. (Photo by Nazeer Al-khatib / AFP) (Photo by NAZEER AL-KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images).

Present at the Catastrophe: Standing By as Turks Cleanse Kurds in Northern Syria and De-Stabilize our D-ISIS [Defeat ISIS] Platform in the Northeast

Summary: Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an intentioned-laced effort at ethnic cleansing, relying on widespread military conflict targeting part the Kurdish heartland along the border and benefiting from several widely publicized, fear-inducing atrocities these forces committed. Our military forces and diplomats were on the ground in the northeast at the time. The Turkey operation damaged our regional and international credibility and has significantly destabilized northeastern Syria. It also continues to place Kurdish society in northeastern Syria — as a people on ancestral lands — in serious jeopardy.”

We should insist Turkey bear all the diplomatic and reputational costs for this venture and seek to prevent President Erdogan from flooding this de-populated zone with Syrian Arab refugees in Turkey. Our diplomacy will also need to recognize we — with our local partners — have lost significant leverage and inherited a shrunken, less stable platform to support both our CT [Counter Terrorism] efforts and the mission of finding a comprehensive political solution for Syria. End Summary.

The Kurdish commander Mazloum Abadi summed up the stunning collapse of his people’s dreams and security based on a callous foreign leader’s whim as follows:

“We didn’t believe that in the middle of the battle, when we’re fighting against ISIS, when we’re fighting against all the others, that our partners would abandon us. To be honest, the painful point for us was that America is a great country. How could a great country behave like that and abandon its allies in the middle of the fight? And, from that time on, how are people going to trust in the Americans or partner with them in any fight in the future?”

And no one should be under the illusion that Trump did not reach an agreement with Turkey to allow Erdogan to attack America’s anti-ISIS frontline fighting force. CNN was to report “A senior adviser to Erdogan told CNN Wednesday afternoon that it was saying, ‘President Trump and President Erdogan have reached an understanding over precisely what this operation is. In a subsequent press conference, Trump did not contradict that claim.’” Shortly after speaking to Turkish president Erdogan, the Trump administration endorsed the Turkish attack on the Pentagon’s allies announcing “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into northern Syria.” A notorious White House statement that is now part of the historical record stated in no uncertain terms that America was washing its hands of Syria and its Kurdish peoples “The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area.” For those who may have still harbored doubts about whether or not the US president supported Erdogan’s attack on the Kurds, Trump proudly stated that he “helped” them conquer Kurdish lands:

“Turkey has lost thousands and thousands people [sic it was Kurds who lost thousands] from that safe zone. So they’ve always wanted that safe zone [in northern Syria], for many years. I’m glad I was able to help them get it. But we don’t want to be there; we want to be home. I want our soldiers home or fighting something that’s meaningful.”

Embed from Getty Images
Supporters of the Homeland Party hold a banner that reads, “The USA is buried in this map!” and Turkish national flags during a protest near the US Embassy in Ankara on October 8, 2019. – Turkey said on October 8, 2019, it was ready for an offensive against Kurdish militants in northern Syria despite mixed signals from US President Donald Trump over whether he had approved the operation. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP) (Photo by ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images).

To pour salt in the wounds of his betrayal and role in helping the Turks “get it,” Trump then used mocking terms to belittle the killing of over 500 Kurds and Christians in the Turkish invasion of ancestral Kurdish, Syriac and Armenian lands. As Trump was cheered at a boisterous rally in Texas he callously tried to paint a picture of the destruction as being somehow inevitable and caused not by his opening the floodgates to a Turkish onslaught, but rather due to some petty squabble between “kids,” neither of whom were American allies. A grinning Trump stated “It was unconventional what I did. I said they’re going to have to fight a little while… They fought for a few days and it was pretty vicious. Like two kids in a lot [emphasis mine], you have got to let them fight and then you pull them apart.” Trump then tried to explain to his fans that America does not have a stake in the fate of the Kurds, who suffered their greatest battlefield losses to date in the Turkish invasion, by disingenuously trying to present the green-lit Turkish assault as an irrelevant border war between Turkey and Syria. Trump acted as if America was uninvolved in the Turkish invasion, that he himself sanctioned, by using isolationist rhetoric that eerily echoed the words spoken by Hitler-appeasing British leader Neville Chamberlain when the prime minister infamously dismissed the unfolding wars in 1930’s Europe as “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Trump similarly stated:

“They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with. Let them fight their own wars. We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria. Syria’s not happy about it. Let them work it out. They have a problem at a border. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

But there was more than mere “sand” in the Syrian lands Trump callously abandoned to civilian-murdering Turkish jihadists whom Trump glibly described as “kids,” there were valued allies whom the majority of Americans favored supporting with airstrikes and military aid in the war on the ISIS according to polls. And no one understood this better than the men and women in the US military who fought alongside the Kurdish led SDF to defeat an enemy that threatened to plant the flag of jihad on the White House and behead the American president.

“Lacking in Honor.” A Deep Sense of Shame in the Military

There is something distinctly ignoble and dishonorable in Trump’s efforts to belittle, disparage, and trash an indispensable frontline ally in the war on ISIS jihadists even as they were being attacked by a Turkish jihadist force unleashed on them with his blessing. It the president’s in-your-face brazen lack of decency and honor that bewilders the Kurds whom I have spoken with on the ground during my fieldwork and via Skype. In my interviews with dozens of Kurdish commanders who fought ISIS alongside the Americans, by contrast they repeatedly focused on their strongly held belief in namus (honor). I found this proud, ancient people to be almost obsessed with this culture-defining almost primordial concept that is certainly an abstract, at best, to Trump.

Honor is a concept I have also encountered in my own research on the Green Berets who leveraged horse riding Uzbek Mongol allies led by General Abdul Rashid Dostum to defeat the Taliban in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan in 2001 with just 300 US boots on the ground troops. During the course of my research into a book on this remarkable joint campaign that forged a lifelong friendship between the hard-fighting scions of Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde and US special forces titled The Last Warlord, I found a strong ethos of honor among the fearless Northern Alliance horse warriors. General Dostum captured the trans-generational impact that the Green Berets’ friendship as de facto ambassadors had on millions of Uzbeks in Afghanistan when he told me “We will always love our American dosts (brothers) the jasurs (brave or strong ones). They fought and bled with us and, if they need us again, we will come to their aid. Anywhere in the world. They are friends of my people and my grandchildren will know of their friendship to our people in our time of need.”

The importance of honor to this battle-forged fraternity of Uzbeks and US Special Forces was also epitomized for me at a 2016 event that I was honored to attend held beneath a statue of a horse-mounted Special Forces soldier at the new World Trade Center held to commemorate the remarkable joint US-Uzbek victory. The event ended with the horse-riding Special Forces of Afghanistan’s legendary leader General John Mulholland toasting the Green Beret motto of “Strength and Honor!” with (newly elected) Vice President Dostum’s son in the audience as an honored guest of his American “dosts.” The head of the A Team that rode with General Dostum in the mountains to overthrow the Taliban, Captain Mark Nutsch (played by Avengers’ Thor actor Chris Hemsworth in the movie based in part on my book 12 Strong) has been tireless in honoring his Uzbek allies.

Most recently, Nutsch has taken the lead in having a horse statue built to honor their tremendous sacrifices (they lost hundreds of riders to the Taliban in desperate US-backed 2001 mountain charges). He told me in no uncertain terms that “without the vital contribution of Dostum and our allies we could have never achieved our mission objectives. They are true heroes and friends.” And Mark Nutsch does not just mouth the words, he lives them as do many in the Green Berets. In a typical example of the honor and loyalty that defines this elite fighting brotherhood, Nutsch reached out to me to help him in his difficult struggle to gain asylum for his trusted Uzbek interpreter whose family has been targeted for death by the vengeful Taliban (sadly, in Trump’s increasingly xenophobic, anti-immigrant America such asylum applications for “terps” and other Pentagon local partners are almost impossible to gain).

Men of honor like Mark Nutsch are assets to America precisely because they are men of their word who local allies who greet them when they helicopter into their lands to fight the enemy can trust and befriend. The Green Berets of Syria who fought alongside much respected Kurdish commander Mazloum Abadi “Kobani” respected and admired him for his courage, loyalty, willingness to fight alongside them against the common foe, and sense of honor. The Washington Post was to report on how the US troops serving alongside him reacted to his abandonment by their Commander in Chief:

“Mazloum is too polite and loyal to criticize the American president. “We respect any decision made by the U.S., whether they want to stay or leave,” he says in a calm, flat, battle-hardened voice. American officers tell me later that Mazloum has been criticized for being too trusting of the United States, but Mazloum keeps insisting that he has confidence in his allies. I ask one of the U.S. officers what it was like to tell Mazloum in December that the United States would be leaving. The answer isn’t printable.”

As will be shown, unlike the president, the US troops in the region and the generals in the Pentagon were more than willing to stand up for the Kurdish alliance and threats to it from both ISIS jihadists and Turkish jihadists.

A History of American Troops and Generals Standing up to Turkish Threats That Compares Drastically to Trump’s Cravenness.

Captain Nutsch’s example of standing up for allies defines the military ethos of the US military which stood up to the Turks for five years before they were ordered to surrender to them. The presidential green lit invasion of Kurdish lands by an antagonistic Turkey, that had been easily kept at bay by the Pentagon for five years, caused widespread dismay among US troops who fought alongside their Kurdish allies in numerous, hard-fought battles. In the past, the Pentagon has deployed Army Rangers on flag flying missions to flashpoint places like Manbij northern Syria in a bold show of force to prevent Turkey from invading the lands of the Kurds and diverting their allies from their joint war on ISIS. On one occasion, when the Turkish president threatened America’s joint positions with the Kurds, Major General Jamie Jarrad, the Special Operations commander for the American-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, defiantly responded saying “You hit us, we will respond aggressively. We will defend ourselves. We’re very proud of our positions here, and we want to make sure everybody knows it.”

Under the Obama administration, US troops in Syria had robust “force protection” R.O.E. (rules of engagement) which meant that any attacks near their positions would be a considered a force threat, and the Turks knew this. That is why there was no Turkish attack in northeastern Syria under the Obama administration. Such bold flying of the flag and determination to defend our remarkable gains and allies contrasts glaringly with the ignominious images of US flags fluttering over departing US convoys on October 22 as they drove out of towns filled with doomed Kurds. It was these very Kurds who had offered perimeter protection for the US troops’ anti-ISIS frontline bases, guarded 12,000 ISIS fighters that their forces captured in combat, provided crucial eyes-and-ears-on-the-ground intel on ISIS for hundreds of US air and ground “kinetic” and covert operations (like the one that killed al Baghdadi on October 26th), and proxy forces to wage war on America’s behalf so our young men and women did not have to die fighting terrorists who beheaded Americans on video.

Prior to Trump’s forced abandonment of the military’s bases and allies, it will be recalled that it was these American troops that had earned fear and respect in Syria by decimating an attacking Russian-Syrian Arab Army force in a withering barrage of artillery and air strikes that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner mercenaries in 2018. With US forces determined to hold their strategic positions in the one third of Syria they controlled in the northeast, Turkey could never attack the anti-ISIS Kurds in the region. Attacking our Kurdish allies there would mean attacking the forces of a fellow NATO member and the world’s lone remaining American superpower, one that had far more advanced killing technology than the Turks, Syrians, or Russians. As one local Arab, who appreciated the protection the US troops provided the peace and stability the Kurds brought to the flashpoint northern city of Manbij put it over a year ago, “The mere presence of the coalition in the region gives a message to the [Syrian] regime and to the Turks not to interfere: ‘This is where you stop.’ The withdrawal of the coalition forces, and at their head the American forces, would cause complete chaos in the area.”

The CIA also had its close working relationship with the Kurds sundered by Trump’s callous decision. The Washington Post was to report in an article titled “Trump’s Betrayal of the Kurds is Sickening to US Soldiers” about an event held in Washington DC where members of the military and CIA recognized the Agency that the “sense of anguish was pervasive among those attending the event.” This source also reported:

“It’s a dagger to the heart to walk away from people who shed blood for us,” one former top CIA official who attended the black-tie dinner told me later. A retired four-star general who was there said the same thing: Trump’s retreat was an “unsound, morally indefensible act” and a “disgrace” to America and the soldiers who serve this country.”

This is something I can comment on based on my own fieldwork in theater with locals I leveraged for intel. I too forged a lifelong friendship with my local Afghan guides, fixers, guards, drivers, intelligence gatherers and friends while working for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center tracking suicide bombers in Afghanistan. Without a shared sense of trust in our common goals and the deep bonds of friendship we forged together, I could not have succeeded in my difficult mission of deciphering the enemies’ targeting patterns. I have had a hard time explaining Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds to my valued friends and comrades in Afghanistan who fear that our president may jettison them next and greenlight a Taliban takeover of their lands. For my proudly pro-American Uzbek friends in the north in particular, a sense of honor underpins their interactions with others. If it is no longer there on the part of their American “dosts” the Uzbeks will be unwilling to risk their lives to fight, and potentially die, for a cause that can be jettisoned by their allies from across the globe with a mere tweet.

Members of the US military, with a deep appreciation of their Kurdish comrades earned in over four years of battles fought shoulder-to-shoulder against the very jihadi fanatics unleashed by Turkey, have the same deep sense of allegiance to their local SDF “partner forces.” Many of them see Trump’s folly as the most shameful act in US foreign policy in recent memory. The troops on the ground fear that his epic betrayal will have ripple effects that impact not only the tens of thousands of people fleeing burning villages and towns in Rojava, but threaten the security of America which depends on the military’s battlefield-forged trust and alliances with local proxies. During an October 2019 gathering of Green Berets in Manhattan, I had the chance to hear how this renowned fighting brotherhood views Trump’s decision to betray the sort of local forces that this Special Forces unit is specifically trained to leverage to achieve American battlefield objectives in lands as far flung as Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Philippines, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Iraq and, until recently, Syria. The fury and disgust was palpable—not surprisingly in light of the deep friendships forged between men and women from other lands who depend on one another in battle. One retired Green Beret, who asked that his name not be used, summed up the worrying effect of Trump’s betrayal of the Special Forces’ Kurdish battlefield brothers and sisters as follows

How will the new Green Berets finishing specialization be able to land in other war zones to act as force multipliers with local militias if the local fighters we’re tasked with mobilizing know we will betray them when it suits our selfish interests? How can the new soldiers leverage local militias after those images of retreating US troops abandoning our allies were beamed around the world? We need the bond of our word to achieve our goals. We no longer have that vital commodity, which is our greatest asset when we are asking others to possibly die for us. After this colossal fuck up we need to rediscover our moral compass and try to earn back the good name we took decades to earn.

A Republican group has created a website (standwithallies.com) featuring a video of a Marine saying “Marines don’t leave friends and allies don’t leave allies” which has a message below it that reads:

“The House of Representatives voted 354-60 to condemn this shameful betrayal of America’s allies. While 129 Republicans voted for the measure, 60 voted against it. Sign our petition to tell those 60 that America still has honor, and Republicans stand with allies.”

Such sentiments are not hard to find in the military. One National Guard captain who served alongside the Kurds posted a remarkable video describing Trumps’ withdrawal as “un-strategic, un-American and immoral” and stated “The same army that stopped the Nazis is being sent home to clear the way for the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds.” He also emphasized “I joined the Army to prevent genocide, not pave the way for it.” Another member of the Army interviewed in Syria stated “They trusted us and we broke that trust. It’s a stain on the American conscience” while his comrade said he was “ashamed.” An American journalist reported similar dismay among disheartened US troops in Syria:

“I just spoke to a distraught US Special Forces soldier who is among the 1000 or so US troops in Syria tonight who is serving alongside the SDF Kurdish forces. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken. “I am ashamed for the first time in my career.” “We met every single security agreement. The Kurds met every single agreement. There was NO threat to the Turks – NONE – from this side of the border.” “This is insanity,” the concerned US service member told me. “I don’t know what they call atrocities, but they are happening [to the people in the lands the Turks invaded].” This American soldier told me the Kurds have not left their positions guarding the ISIS prisoners [as Trump falsely claimed]. In fact “they prevented a prison break last night without us.” “They are not abandoning our side (yet).” The Kurds are “pleading for our support.” We are doing “nothing.””

Trump’s callous, transactional, New York real estate developer-style view of alliances as temporary or disposable “deals,” both at home (where he has famously discarded friends and loyal supporters like his personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, campaign manager Paul Manafort, National Security Advisor John Bolton, widely respected Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, Attorney General Jefferey Sessions, legendary National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and so many others) and abroad, is as devoid of Kurds’ deeply ingrained, ancient sense of namus-honor as it is of the concept of their deeply cherished concept of “pevgiredayi,” loyalty. In the Syrian context, the president, he of the “fire and fury” bluster, has (to misquote President Teddy Roosevelt) “walked loudly, but retreated with his stick.” The motto of the erratic, and as yet undefined “Trump Doctrine,” could best be defined as “Weakness and Dishonor,” the very antithesis of the Green Beret motto so proudly quoted in General Mulholland’s toast to the legendary brotherhood of leveragers.

Members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces whom I interviewed about this historic betrayal, including their Christian spokeswoman, repeatedly told me that the American commanders, generals like Joseph Votel and Joseph Dunford, who led the surprisingly successful Syrian surrogate/air campaign, diplomats like the tireless and much-respected Envoy to the Anti-ISIS Coalition Brett McGurk, who painstaking forged the alliance and won the trust of the Kurds, and the US Special Forces who shared the trenches with them, defined the word honor. But they defined Trump as mirovek be rumet (lacking in honor). One Kurdish leader who served with the Americans in Syria in the anti-ISIS campaign summed up his peoples’ views of Trump’s honorless and strategically unsound betrayal order as follows:

“There are moral values and principles shared among comrades-in-arms who fight in the same trench. It is neither ethical nor logical for one’s comrade to abandon you in the midst of the battle and expose your back to the enemy. Rather, this is expected of an enemy – those who would have you slaughtered at the first opportunity. True comrades-in-arms do not leave the trench during the battle. They do not withdraw before ensuring final victory over the enemy and the preservation of all the gains achieved on the ground. It is neither intelligent nor wise to hand over all these gains on a golden platter to countries and entities that practice terrorism, support extremist organizations and seek to destroy or occupy the region as Turkey did in Efrin and other areas.”

In light of Trump’s Great Betrayal, it is hard to imagine that the pro-American Kurds, who the president surreally asked to help seize the oil fields in eastern Syria late October (in an example of his tone deaf lack of awareness of the true import of his historic back stab), will die for him or any American president again (much less for oil). I have spent time on the frontline among the Kurdish men and women volunteers fighting ISIS, from legendary generals like General Shirwan Barzani “The Black Tiger” to a unit of brave female fighters who asked for selfies with me as someone who hailed from a land they admired, and I was awed by their courage. I also gained a deep abiding respect for their personification of the very values America has exported around the globe as part of its stated foreign policy of supporting democracies abroad based on principal, but also to make the world a safer place at home. These Kurdish qualities I admired included courage, loyalty, open-mindedness, honor, a deep devotion to multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy, tenacity, and an ingrained tradition of protecting minorities like the local Christians and Yazidis. Their virtues also included fearlessness in battle, a hatred of dictators (like the very ones Trump embraces in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Russia and has empowered in Syria with his recent actions), and a deep abhorrence of Islamist dogma of the sort that predominates among the jihadists whom the president’s Islamist Turkish “friend” Erdogan has unleashed on them. As an American, I am now ashamed to go on future embeds with these brave men and women citizen-fighters who believed in the bond of friendship they forged alongside equally brave US Special Forces whom the Kurds proudly called their hevals (comrades). On numerous occasions, Kurdish fighters I encountered in my journeys across their welcoming land told me they “wished to be America’s 51st state.” After Trump’s unprecedented stab in the back, wherein he granted the Turks the right to cleanse the Kurds with jihadi militants bent on revenge—to punish them for their alliance with American “kafirs” (infidels) and construction of a “bidhat” (religiously forbidden) pro-women’s rights, pro-Christian minority rights democracy that is anathema to their fanatical ideology—I doubt that this positive view of the USA exists among this discarded nation of 35 million, who were formerly the most pro-American in the Middle East, still exists. I fear that the thrice betrayed Kurds’ one-sided, honor-bound sense of loyalty to America, stretching back to the time of Nixon’s original betrayal, has been forever destroyed by the Trumpian withdrawal order that was as senseless, blundering and adversary-rewarding as it was ignoble. This is same president who, having played the role of arsonist in northeastern Syria and igniting the relatively peaceful region with the tweet equivalent of a flamethrower, recently proclaimed himself fireman and creator of a “great day for civilization.” What was Trump’s gift to civilization you ask? He forced the Kurdish irregulars, whose lightly armed forces had been crushed by Turkish heavy armor and indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardments, to accept Turkey’s bloody conquests of their most fertile and populated lands in the north. His so-called “ceasefire” (which has been marred by Turkish attacks on ambulances and on hospitals, drone strikes, artillery strikes, and repeated Turkish assaults on Christian and Kurdish villages according to Christian monitoring groups) has frozen and legitimized a bloody Turkish conquest and annexation of multi-ethnic lands that has again led to the mass displacement of tens of thousands of indigenous Kurds of the sort seen in Afrin. If the axe has been buried, as the self-aggrandizing Trump proudly proclaimed due to his so-called “ceasefire,” it has been buried squarely in the backs of Kurds who were attacked from behind by the American president. This then is the Kurds’ presidential thanks for the real “great day for civilization,” their historic, but costly (in terms of fighters’ lives lost), March 21st conquest of Baghouz, the last bastion of the ISIS terror state that launched an unprecedented terror campaign that led to slaughter on five continents (a victory that Trump of course took credit for in many news conferences at the time). Kurdish leader Can Polat proudly proclaimed his people’s role in defeating a terrorist scourge that many thought could not be beaten when it first stormed across the Middle East in 2014 and liberating local Syriac Christians as follows:

“In our seven-year war against terrorist organizations and militant factions, we have sacrificed more than 8,000 martyrs [that number late rose to 11,000], including Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, and others. Eight thousand martyrs so that people may again hear the sounds of the church bells and the recitation of prayers in monasteries and mosques fearlessly, so that the Kurds and Syriacs may learn their mother tongues, their culture, and their history that has long been banned and hidden. Eight thousand martyrs to help the cities of Europe and America live in peace, free from fear that terrorists will blow up a bus or drive into revelers in a field or shoot indiscriminately at passengers in the metro, so as not to repeat incidents like that in Nice, the Charlie Hebdo attack, the massacres of Paris, Manchester, Maelbeek Metro, Brussels Airport, the September 11 attacks, and the Boston bombing.”

In 2016, a Kurdish fighter named Sherwan Derwish who followed his people’s tradition and assumed the name of his brother who was killed fighting ISIS similarly reported “We’re very proud. We did something for our people, and for the world. Two years ago, ISIS was feared by the whole world. We gave to our people and to the world something very good. We did it with the Americans.”

In comparison to Trump’s casual, swipe-of-the-hand sentence of death to hundreds of anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters like Sherwan Derwish who died resisting the Turkish invaders, the Kurds’ sense of idealism and pride in ridding the world of the scourge of ISIS alongside the Americans seems almost innocent, naïve…and ultimately doomed to yet another betrayal. In the past, grateful Kurds named restaurants and even their children after Obama and Trump. It is doubtful that any Kurd bearing the name of Trump will wear that name with pride or forgive the perfidious president who went out of his way facilitate the Turkish-Russian-Syrian destruction of the very sort of democracy that the US claimed to be invading the Middle East to promote under George W. Bush. Trump, who has called himself “the chosen one”, once gloated in the sense of infallibility he seems to have among his diehard supporters, who have essentially hijacked the Republican Party with a cult of personality, by bragging “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Trump certainly did not personally pull the trigger of the Turkish jihadist’s guns used to shoot the Kurdish female human rights activist Khevrin Khalaf in cold blood. But he typed the tweet that directly led to her death and to the death and maiming of hundreds of allied Kurds (including children horribly burned by Turkish chemical weapons) whose people fought valiantly for the values and policies that the Republican Party of “tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev” Ronald Reagan used to stand for, both at home and abroad. It remains to be seen whether Trump will lose voters over the shooting of Khervin Khalaf and many others that were not filmed (Turkey ordered its jihadists to stop filming) or whether the prideful lack of compassion many of the president’s voters share with him on the fate of America’s betrayed allies is rationalized as part and parcel of his false policy of “ending endless wars.” Sadly, the collapse of both America’s benign hegemon influence and pro-American Kurdish democratic autonomy in Syria is just another day in the Chaosistan that Trump the self-proclaimed “disrupter” has constructed via the random, aimless disruption of our country’s traditional foreign policy and its long-held and globally-respected values. These principles that Trump puts last in his bid to “put America first” once included loyalty to overseas allies, standing up to dictatorial aggressors, defense of democracy and endangered minorities, and that all important commodity that the Kurdish fighters and their Pentagon comrades so value, honor. But even if one does not subscribe to such lofty principles and instead subscribes to Trump’s selfish America-centric vision of abandoning US prestige, honor, influence, and allies in the world, one can still cherish something that should define all Americans, especially those who are members of the president’s Evangelical Christian base, and that is the transcendent, borderless concept of compassion for all humans…even Kurds.

——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

CBS This Morning: “Ongoing impact for Kurds after U.S. withdraws from Syria”