Meredith Tax: Turkey Helps ISIS Attack Rojava

The Kurdish people have sacrificed 13,000 lives in the fight against ISIS. Progressives should support their effort to build a secure base for direct democracy, feminism, and pluralism. In the night of Thursday, January 20, ISIS mounted a fierce attack to free its prisoners, several thousand of whom were being held in Sina’a prison in Hasaka, a city in the autonomous, majority-Kurdish area of Syria often called Rojava. As a car bomb ripped into the prison gates, fighters from ISIS sleeper cells attacked with gunfire and a coordinated riot began inside the jail.

In the battle that followed, prisoners took human shields and ISIS snipers occupied nearby buildings while the Rojava militia—the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF)—brought in as many as 10,000 soldiers, with air and ground support from the United States. After prematurely declaring the battle over on Wednesday, the SDF discovered 90 more ISIS fighters hidden in a basement, while sniper and suicide attacks continued in the surrounding neighborhood, from which thousands of residents had fled. The battle did not finally end until January 30.

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, has repeatedly said it does not have the resources to hold thousands of ISIS prisoners and their families safely, much less bring them to trial. But the prisoners’ countries of origin do not want to repatriate them, so Rojava is stuck. Nor does it have the resources to rehabilitate and educate the children of ISIS families, including seven hundred teenage boys held in a separate prison whom ISIS used as pawns or hostages in the jailbreak. As an indignant press release from the Kurdistan National Congress says, “After benefitting from the sacrifices of the SDF in the war against ISIS, the world powers have left thousands of their citizens in North and East Syria as a ticking time bomb that can explode at any time, as we have just seen.”…

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/turkey-isis-rojava-prisoners/

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Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)

Israel is committing the crime of apartheid: Human Rights Watch

Israel Guilty of Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians: UN Rapporteur