Cantlie Video Has Fourth Estate on the Defensive

There seems to be a great deal of mystery about the military situation in Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish city on the Turkish border that has been under assault by Islamic State since mid-September.

Last week, following news that the U.S. was supplying antitank weapons and other munitions by airdrop and that Turkey had cleared the way for the pesh merga to join the battle, I thought it was all over but the shouting. ISIS was being cleared from the city, resorting to car bombs in a desperate attempt to maintain a tactical advantage.

Well, today a defeat of Islamic State is far from clear.

Conniptions in the Western media monopoly began in earnest on Monday when Islamic State released a video of Brit hostage John Cantlie reporting in level tones from a serene-seeming Kobani that all stories in the Western press to the contrary "the mujahideen" were in complete control of the city and nary a Western reporter or PKK or YPG Kurdish fighter was anywhere to be seen.

The video production quality is impressive and Cantlie has some gravitas. So all in all one would have to conclude that it is a significant propaganda triumph for the caliphate.

The following is a transcript of Cantlie's comments as provided by the SITE web site:

0:00 

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful 

Inside 'Ayn al-Islam 

0:20 

[Aerial footage from "drone of the Islamic State Army"] 

0:40 

[John Cantlie] 

Hello, I'm John Cantlie, and today we're in the city of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border. That is in fact Turkey right behind me, and we are here in the heart of the so-called PKK safe zone, which is now controlled entirely by the Islamic State. For a month now, the soldiers of the Islamic State have been besieging this key Kurdish city and, despite continual American airstrikes, which have so far cost nearly half a billion dollars in total, the mujahideen have pushed deep in the heart of the city. They now control the eastern and southern sectors. 

Now, the Western media, and I can't see any of their journalists here in the city of Kobani, have been saying recently that the Islamic State are on the retreat. In the last 48 hours, hundreds of Islamic State militants have been reportedly killed in airstrikes, said the IB Times, on the 16th of October. We now we've killed several hundred of them, said John Kirby, the Pentagon official. The Islamic State is retreating from the Syrian city of Kobani, said the BBC on October the 17th, while Patrick Coburn said in The Independent that despite suffering serious losses, the Islamic State was continuing its assault on the city. 

Now this is all quite a turn-around from earlier in the month, when U.S. officials were saying, and I quote: "The strategically unimportant city of Kobani was going to fall into mujahideen hands in just a matter of time. It's going to be difficult with just airpower to prevent the Islamic State from taking the town, said U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken on the 10th of October. 

Now, good ole John Kerry doesn't seem to think the mujahideen are retreating. He called Kobani a "horrible example of the unwillingness of people to help those who are fighting the Islamic State". Now that's a dig at Kurd-hating Turkish President Erdogan. 

But the point is, from where I'm standing right now, I can see large swathes of the city, and I can even see the Turkish flag behind me, and all I've seen here in the city of Kobani is mujahideen. There are no YPG, PKK, or Peshmerga in sight. Just a large number of Islamic State mujahideen, and they are definitely not on the run. Without any safe access, there are no journalists here in the city. So the media are getting their information from Kurdish commanders and White House press secretaries, neither of whom have the slightest intention of telling the truth of what is happening here on the ground. Now, airstrikes did prevent some groups of mujahideen from using their tanks and heavy armor as they would have liked, so they are entering the city and using light weapons instead, going house to house. 

Now America is very keen for Kobani to become a symbol - a symbol of victory of the coalition that is working together to defeat the Islamic State. But they now and the mujahideen also know that even with all their airpower and all their proxy troops on the ground, even this is not enough to defeat the Islamic State here in Kobani and elsewhere. 

Kobani is now being reinforced by Iraqi Kurds who are coming in through Turkey, while the mujahideen are being resupplied by the hopeless United States Air Forces, who parachuted two crates of weapons and ammunition straight into the outstretched arms of the mujahideen. Now the battle for Kobani is coming to an end. The mujahideen are just mopping up now, street to street, and building to building. You can occasionally hear erratic gunfire in the background as a result of those operations. But contrary to what the Western media would have you believe, it is not an all-out battle here now. It is nearly over. As you can hear, it is very quiet, just the occasional gunfire. 

Two-hundred thousand inhabitants of the city have been displaced because of the fighting that came here. You can see the refugee camps over my right shoulder over there in Turkey, where the inhabitants now are. But contrary to media reports, the fighting in Kobani is nearly over. 

Urban warfare is as about as nasty and tough as it gets, and it’s something of a specialty of the mujahideen.

On cue, running to play catch-up in the propaganda game, are stories this morning by both the Gray Lady and the Associated Press announcing the entry of modest numbers of fighters -- 150 pesh merga and 50 Free Syrian Army militia -- into Kobani to provide support for the beleaguered YPG fighters there.

According to the AP story, "Syrian rebels enter Kurdish town from Turkey":

MURSITPINAR, Turkey (AP) — A small group of Syrian rebels entered the embattled border town of Kobani from Turkey on Wednesday on a mission to help Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State extremists in Syria, activists and Kurdish officials said. 

The group of around 50 armed men is from the Free Syrian Army, and it's separate from Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters who were also en route Wednesday to Kobani, along the Syrian-Turkish border. 

Idriss Nassan, a Kurdish official from Kobani, said the FSA group crossed to Kobani through the Mursitpinar border crossing in Turkey. Nassan, who spoke in Mursitpinar, said they travelled in cars but did not have more details. 

The FSA is an umbrella group of mainstream rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. The political leadership of the Western-backed FSA is based in Turkey, where fighters often seek respite from the fighting. 

The 150 Iraqi peshmerga troops arrived in Turkey from Iraq early on Wednesday and were expected to cross into Syria later in the day. Their deployment came after Ankara agreed to allow the peshmerga troops to cross into Syria via Turkey.

At the end of the New York Times story, "Iraqi Kurds Are Joining Fight to Drive Islamic State From Kobani," by Kamil Kakol and Kareem Fahim is an admission that there is some truth to the Cantlie video:

The United States has conducted more than a hundred airstrikes on the militants around Kobani, and has provided weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish fighters with airdrops. Even so, Kurdish officials in Kobani said Tuesday that the Islamic State had recovered from losses it sustained earlier this month as the airstrikes intensified, and now controlled up to half the city.

The Gray Lady's Robert Mackey posts a story, "Echoes of Patty Hearst in Kobani," that explores the authenticity of the Cantlie video. What is interesting about the Mackey piece is that the version of the Cantlie video he posts is edited down to exclude  much of the content of Cantlie's critique of Western journalists, namely, that because Western reporters are not on the ground in the city they are relying solely on the Pentagon and the YPG for their information. In other words, they are being played.

It is a legitimate point. The reporting on Kobani has been poor.

To be fair to the Gray Lady, her reporters have quoted civilians who have fled the city. But these quotes don't provide much illumination other than to confirm, "Yes, things are bad; so bad we had to leave our home and cross the border."

Mackey, sort of a Williamsburgesque laptop whiz meant no doubt to rope millennials into the newspaper, hews closely to the State Department line.

I don't think Islamic State will capture Kobani. The Kurdish fighters of the YPG have proven too formidable for that. Coupled with U.S. air power and newly arriving pesh merga artillery, Kobani will remain -- to the chagrin of Erdogan -- under the control of the Kurdish People's Protection Forces.