There is a need for a monument (in addition to a state) for the Kurds. We need to name them on the streets, our poets (nowadays there are very few) have to pen verses in their honor and our politicians must visit them by offering them solidarity and contracts. The Kurds (with the help of the US) have just liberated Raqqa, the city where ISIS was hanging and crucifying and stoning and planning massacres of Europeans.
The Kurds opened their cities (like Erbil) to Christians displaced by Islamic fundamentalists. Only among the Kurds do you find Western volunteers who have gone to fight, not for the Caliph, but against him. The only place in the Middle East where today, apart from Israel, a Jew can show a kippah without being attacked is Kurdistan.
Nine months after Trump promised to defeat ISIS "quickly and effectively," the US armed forces and their Kurdish allies took Raqqa, which until Tuesday was the capital of the the Caliphate. After scornfully minimizing ISIS as a "JV team”, Barack Obama realized his egregious misnomer, but then said that "it will take time" and "it is a long-term and complex challenge."
Joshua Keating, writing for the left-wing newspaper Slate, noted that Trump had instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules for air strikes to the minimum required by international law by eliminating the White House surveillance procedures to protect civilians and ordering the CIA to resume targeted killing (America has just bombed in Yemen for the first time). Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a well-known Trump critic, praised this "dramatic change" over Obama's politician's management. The result is quite obvious.
In July, ISIS was expelled from Mosul and this week Raqqa was freed. Trump did in nine months what Obama did not accomplish in three years.
And Europe, the famous multilateral Europe? Angela Merkel sealed the pact with Erdogan's Turks, those who are bombing the Kurds, and Macron's France tightened the ranks around the covenant with Iran, the force that pushed the Kurds out of Kirkuk. Europe is still held prisoner by the syndrome of Munich.
You see these videos of women from Raqqa who have given up the veils that ISIS had imposed upon them. These videos are the most beautiful image of the just war against Islamic fundamentalism. But there is a sour note: in 2001, when the Afghans raised their faces to the sky and played with kites again, all the Westerners were there to free them, while today only the Kurds and the US made it possible.
If it were up to Mr. Obama and Monsieur Hollande, the French loser who said "we will bombard Raqqa" after 90 people were murdered at Le Bataclan, today the Caliphate, instead of losing Raqqa, would be in Regensburg, Germany.
Thank you, Kurdish friends! Thank you, America!