The Nameless Non-War spills out from the hazy borders of Syria and Iraq into Germany, where Kurds and Islamists had to be separated with water cannon, as reported by Reuters:
German police used water cannon to stop clashes between hundreds of Kurds and radical Islamists in Hamburg overnight, and 14 people were injured and another 22 arrested, authorities said on Wednesday.
Around 400 Kurds had gathered by a Hamburg mosque, which they believed to be used by radicals, to protest against Islamic State insurgent attacks on the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani. A rival group of 400 hardline Islamist Salafists then formed. Police said they confiscated numerous knives and batons.
Earlier on Tuesday 500 Kurds had protested in central Hamburg, with a group of about 50 briefly blocking rail tracks at Hamburg station.
In the northern German town of Celle, Kurdish demonstrators clashed with an Islamist Chechen group, leaving five people and four police officers injured.
Germany is home to one of Europe’s largest Kurdish diasporas. Salafists make up only a tiny proportion of Germany’s Muslim population of 4 million but German intelligence says their numbers grew to 5,500 in 2013 from 4,500 the year before.
What the hell were a bunch of hardline Salafist supporters of ISIS doing in a mosque? Don’t they know ISIS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Islam? Also, although Reuters doesn’t mention it, the cutler was primarily in the hands of the ISIS sympathizers. The had some machetes, too.
Things were even worse in Turkey, where Kurdish citizens rioted over the Turkish government’s refusal to help the Kurds under siege in the border city of Kobani, even though the Turks have armor parked right along the border. This is not surprising to anyone familiar with the uneasy relationship between Turks and Kurds, the dislike of Turks for the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria (which is inevitably strengthened by bombing his most effective adversaries, leading Turkey to loudly declare that the Americans ought to be bombing Assad too), the view in Turkey that an independent Kurdish state would be a regional competitor, and the Turks’ certain knowledge that NATO will ride to their rescue if ISIS violates their border.
Unfortunately, it would seem no one in the Obama Administration thought about any of this, and the President is busy fundraising from filthy-rich Democrats (including one donor who is actually named “Rich Richman”) rather than working on Turkey for military assistance, so things are looking dicey in the strategically and symbolically crucial city of Kobani. It must not be encouraging for the Kurds surrounded by ISIS head-choppers on three sides, and surly Turks on the fourth, to watch the Obama Administration pre-spinning the fall of the city as a minor setback for the Nameless Non-War.
That’s why the Kurdish diaspora is demonstrating, and ISIS sympathizers – whose numbers in non-Middle Eastern countries are not to be underestimated – are pushing back. Hopefully renewed air strikes on ISIS positions around Kobani will turn things around, or maybe the Turks will roll in at the eleventh hour after some backstage dealing with the Obama Administration, because no civilized human being should be willing to tolerate the horror that will unfold if the non-Islamic Islamic State takes that city.
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