Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers on Wednesday approved a plan to send peshmerga fighters armed with heavy weapons to the Syrian town of Kobani to aid their fellow Kurds in fighting off the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
“The Kurdistan parliament decided to send forces to Kobani with the aim of supporting the fighters there and protecting Kobani,” speaker Yusef Mohammed Sadeq told AFP.
In Turkey, which agreed Tuesday to allow those forces to pass through its territory, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he doesn’t understand why the mostly Kurdish town, which sits on the border with Turkey, has taken on such strategic importance for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.
Erdogan reportedly was not happy when President Obama informed him over the weekend that the U.S. would airdrop supplies to the fighters in Kobani, telling reporters “such an operation is inexplicable. Who you are supporting, where the support goes is obvious.”
Most of the fighters in Kobani are aligned with the Democratic Union Party, a Syrian Kurdish group Turkey sees as an extension of the banned PKK, an organization of Turkish Kurds that has fought a guerrilla war against Ankara. Turkey, with the U.S. and European countries, considers the PKK a terrorist group.
That connection has been the principal reason why Turkey has been reluctant to aid Kobani’s defenders even as the Islamic State seemed on the verge of capturing the town.
But the United States, which initially shrugged at the possibility Kobani would fall, now sees its defense as a strategic goal. U.S. and allied warplanes hit Islamic State targets in and around the town again Wednesday — the latest in a campaign that appears to have helped turn the tide.
The weeks of continuous airstrikes were augmented by Sunday’s airdrop of arms, ammunition and medical supplies.
The Pentagon confirmed Wednesday that one of the 28 supply bundles dropped was intercepted by the Islamic State after going astray, but declared the airdrop a success. Another bundle that went astray was destroyed by U.S. fighters to avoid its capture.
“One bundle worth of equipment is not enough equipment to give the enemy any type of advantage at all,” Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters. “It’s a relatively small amount of supplies.”
