If Kobani Falls Should We Care?

In a newly released ISIS video, British hostage John Cantlie appears as a telelvision reporter and claims he is in the Syrian border town of Kobani, where he says militants are winning the battle for control. To quote the smart-ass Clooney character in Brother, Where Art Thou, Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity!” It's as if IS is as close as you want it to be, as scary as you want it to be. They captured lots of Humvees and have been using them as suicide VBIED bombs, which is scary as hell. Just 2 or 3 days ago, artillery shells were hitting Kobane almost non-stop. Now there are none to be heard. You have imparted upon leftists a whole lot of things that they don't believe. I am not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, not have I been for quite some time, although I did hold a pacifist position when I was younger. kobaniIt's perfectly clear to me from a look at history that sometimes violence in necessary. Tony's what you call a Democratic Centrist. he spends all his time here engaged in the Old Democratic Party Sport of Hippie Punching. Since President Barack Obama is adamant that American troops will not join the fight on the ground, the U.S. has been working to help arm, equip and revamp training programs for national and Kurdish Peshmerga security forces in Iraq kobani and moderate rebel fighters in Syria. The Peshmerga and other Kurdish forces have been key in containing — if not defeating — IS across much of northern Iraq. Making sure they keep up that front is a top priority for the U.S. The US military said Sunday it had airdropped weapons, ammunition and medical supplies to Kurdish forces defending the Syrian city of Kobani against Islamic State militants. The fiercest fighting in days shook the Syrian border town of Kobani overnight when Islamic State fighters attacked Kurdish forces with mortars and car bombs, sources in the town and a monitoring group said on Sunday. Speaking tonight, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, suggested that preventing the fall of Kobani was not a strategic US objective. As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani, you have to kobanistep back and understand the strategic objective,” he said. Not to justify the Baathists or anything, but this is why Hussein and Assad Sr. were so brutal. That's what it took to keep a lid on the sectarian fanatics. Turkey's foreign minister insisted Thursday that it's not "realistic" for the world to expect it to go it alone in launching a ground operation against ISIS, even as a monitoring group said the extremists kobani had seized a chunk of a key battleground town near its border. And ISIS is inching closer to overtaking Kobani, the Kurdish enclave in Syria that's a stone's throw from the Turkish border. Turkey has offered to help Kurds enter the fight for Kobani, parts of which have apparently been re-taken from Islamic State militants, while the U.S. has air-dropped arms for the first time to help the city's defenders. Mana Rabiee reports. Subscribe: More updates and breaking news: Reuters tells the world's stories like no one else. As the largest international multimedia news provider, Reuters provides coverage around the globe and across topics including business, financial, national, and international news. This group has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria. Mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.