The town of Kobanê is important for IS both in strategic and symbolic terms. Situated close to the Turkish border, a mere two-hour drive north of Raqqa, the officious capital of the Islamic State, Kobanê has been on the Islamists’ wish-list for a long time. Seizing Kobanê would mean splitting Rojava—the region in northern Syria predomina ntly populated by Kurds, also known as ‘West Kurdistan’—in two, and securing IS’ control over an important stretch of the border with Turkey, making it even easier for them to receive support and foreign jihadists from abroad. Moreover, the earlier defeat of IS by the Syrian Kurdish forces both in Kobanê and Sinjar has been interpreted as a slap in the face of the jihadists. Especially the fact that almost a third of the Kurdish militias are made up of women has served to shame the radical Islamists who prefer to see women covered in black robed from head to toe, rather than unveiled, independent and empowered with a AK-47 in their hands. The last important fact that has put Kobanê high on the agenda of the Islamic State is that this is the place where the Rojava revolution started on July 19, 2012 when the town was liberated from Assad’s forces and became home to the Democratic People’s Revolution. In this struggle, Syria’s Kurds have declared their autonomy from the state and have since been working to implement democratic autonomy and people’s assemblies as a means to govern themselves.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 20:19:47 +0000
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