Kurds Aiding Kurds

From Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region lawmakers have authorized their peshmerga fighting forces to travel to neighbouring Syria to add to the aid required to successfully and finally combat Islamic State terrorists in the town of Kobani, bordering Turkey. This will represent the badly-needed boots on the ground that no one else in the neighbourhood seems willing to proffer. It is Kurds helping other Kurds.

Whether the decision will be fulfilled will be hugely dependent on official Turkey's mood, whether Recip Tayyip Erdogan feels inclined at that particular moment to assent to their movement to allow the Iraqi peshmerga to pass through to Syria. There were reluctant rumblings that this would be the case, but the mercurial, autocratic Erdogan who hates the Kurds even more than he does the terrorists that he doesn't quite approve of in comparison to those he does, chafes at the very thought.

He is silently seething over the perfidy of the United States which has been aiding the Syrian Kurds by airstrikes against the Islamic State, and through their airdrops of weapons to the Kurds. All of whom Mr. Erdogan sees as the enemies of Turkey, or perhaps more precisely his very own personal enemies of choice.

Kurdish officials and doctors have stated publicly their belief that Islamic State jihadists had released some kind of toxic gas in a district in eastern Kobani on Tuesday. Residents reported typical symptoms of chemical poisoning including dizziness and watery eyes. And this certainly will not represent the first or the only time that the Islamic State has resorted to such weapons of human destruction.

The information minister of Syria, a regime that just about equals the atrocities committed by the Islamic State, reported that Syria's air force had succeeded in destroying two of the three fighter jets ISIS had managed without too much trouble to seize and according to reports, test-flown with the aid of former Sunni Iraqi pilots over Aleppo.

They are well-matched, the Syrian regime and the Sunni fanatics who fancy themselves a caliphate. Just as Bashar al-Assad has his military resort to strafing his civilian Sunni population, starving them, torturing them, treating them to chemical gas attacks and barrel bombs, so too does the Islamic State favour ethnic-sectarian cleansing in butchering their own targets, from Christians to Yazidis and Shiites.

The Kurds, left to defend themselves, do what they can to give succour to one another. In Suruc, Turkey, close by Kobani across the border in Syria. There, Kurdish women buried three Kurdish fighters, a 20-year-old woman and two young men whose names are known, but whose families are not. This was a measure to give them the dignity of support in death to honour the support those fighters have lavished toward their Kurdish people.

"Our house has been demolished in Kobani and we are living in tents. ...At least we can support our martyrs and we will accompany them to their graves", Fatma Muslim, one of dozens of women who turned up at the hospital in Suruc morgue for the funeral procession to the nearby cemetery, explained.

Mourners carry the coffin with the body of female Kurdish fighter Hanim Dabaan, 20, killed in the fighting with the militants of the Islamic State group in Kobani, Syria, during the funeral of three fighters, at a cemetery in Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014. The three fighters were killed during the last few days battling Islamic State group fighters in the Kurdish Syrian town of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab,located on the border with Turkey. They were buried without their families present; in the chaos of war, since mid-September, hundreds of thousands of Kurds have become refugees, and contacting the families of those killed is not always possible.

With no family members to provide the last rites in the Islamic tradition to wash and shroud the dead, it was volunteers who did that. "There is nobody to wash them. There is only one doctor who can wash them, and the rest are volunteers", said 21 year-old Akeed Hamad who offered to help the older Kurdish women, carrying the flag-draped coffins to their graves.