Turkish Mendacious Delusion

"[ISIS had chosen to] make this a ground battle, attacking a small group of people there who while they are an off-shoot group of the folks that our friends the Turks oppose, they are valiantly fighting [ISIS] and we cannot take our eye off the prize here."
"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."
"But we have undertaken a coalition effort to degrade and destroy ISIL, and ISIL is presenting itself in major numbers in this place called Kobani."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

"Iraq's Kurdish regional government announced that they are in co-operation with Turkey and the U.S."
"Actually, we are helping peshmerga forces to enter into Kobani to give support."
Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu

  Islamic State (Isis) fighters continue their attack on the Kurdish bastion of Kobani, Syria. Photograph: VINCENT WARTNER/SIPA/REX

Ah, yes, Turkey and its standback involvement in the fight for Kobani. Well, Turkey after all, did indeed invest its hopes in Islamic State overcoming the resistance of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to departing Syria. And to that end nurtured the Islamic State, giving it a place of haven, and no doubt presenting it with more durable gifts like funding and assault assets. And within Turkey there appears to be considerable popular support for ISIS.

As much as Turkey decries the terrorists in its midst, clarifying for the world at large that Turkish Kurds are an unsavoury, unruly, disrespectful lot, and their defenders the PKK rampant terrorists, Turkey keeps its own counsel on the terrorists it acclaims and supports, like the Islamic State, like Hamas, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Leaving Turkey in rather bad odour of late among other Sunni Muslim countries, Turkey's neighbours.

But, as a member in good standing of NATO and a collegial ally of the United States, Turkey has relented in its staunch refusal to aid Syria's Kurds by permitting humanitarian aid to cross the border to end up with the Kurds in Kobani, much less allow Turkish Kurds to come to the aid of their Syrian brethren. Now, it grandly announces, the Iraqi Peshmerga with whom Turkey enjoys good relations, have been encouraged by Turkey to embark on an aid mission to Kobani.

Mind, Iraq's Kurds have plenty on their plate defending their own territory from the Islamic State there. And they declare they've received no such go-ahead-pals message from Turkey. So while Mr. Cavusoglu failed to provide those devilish details, it remained unclear where and how Turkey was enabling Kurdish fighters into Syria after its prolonged refusal to allow any such thing.

But Kobani-based Kurdish journalist Barzan Isso negated the statements by the Turkish foreign minister as "a Turkish political manoeuvre that has nothing to do with reality", since no Peshmerga fighters had arrived in Kobani from Syria. He did, however, speak of the American airdrop he witnessed of bundles containing "modern weapons" like anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles and large numbers of artillery shells and medicines for the besieged Kobani Kurdish fighters.

The bundles had been dropped while heavy winds prevailed leaving two bundles to land in areas held by Islamic State. For whom their normal supply route has in the last few days been disrupted, leaving them without the arms supplies they have depended on. However, he explained, Kurdish fighters were alert to retrieve one of the bundles, while the other was blown up with pinprick precision by the Americans from the air, to keep it from falling into Islamic State's eager possession.