can easily ignore the threats of military action from Turkey

Last June, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)
captured Tal Abyad, an important crossing point on the Turkish border
north of Raqqa, allowing the PYD to link up two of its three main
enclaves, around the cities of Kobani and Qamishli; it is now trying to
reach the third enclave, further west, at Afrin. These swift advances
are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a
US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower.

Reiterating: "These swift advances
are possible only because the Kurdish forces are operating under a
US-led air umbrella that vastly multiplies their firepower"Readers here are well aware of this fact and have been for a good long while

I was just
east of Tal Abyad shortly before the final YPG attack and coalition
aircraftthere are provisions in this bill that we do not support.”

Friday, February 26, 2016

For the last five years Afrin (Kurdish: Efrîn) was the most tranquil of the three Kurdish enclaves in Syria. As in the other two Kurdish cantons, Kobane and Jazira (Kurdish: Kobanê, Cizîrê), the Syrian regime army pulled back from the region in spring 2012 and left it to the control of Democratic Union Party (PYD) forces, the Syrian sister-party of Turkey´s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). As in Kobane and Jazira, the PYD and declared Afrin’s autonomy in January 2014. Unlike Jazira, there were no regime forces in Afrin, and unlike Kobane, the Islamic State (ISIS) never attacked Afrin. Afrin only had frontlines with the regime enclave in Nubl and al-Zahra and a variety of different