The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

YPG

On The Front Lines Against ISIS

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Luke Mogelson reports from the border of ISIS territory, where Iraqi civilians fight for their survival.

When I visited the main junction in the center of town, however, three P.K.K. flags were mounted atop an empty billboard frame in the middle of a traffic circle. The highest one bore a portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader and founder of the P.K.K., who is serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison. A pillar of Öcalan’s ideology is strict gender equality, both in society and on the battlefield, and about half of the P.K.K. fighters posted around the junction were women. Many of them—cigarettes in their mouths, Kalashnikovs on their backs, and grenades fastened to the sashes around their waists—looked no older than sixteen or seventeen. Shortly after we arrived, I heard one young woman yelling furiously. She was standing in the rotary, beneath the flag of Öcalan, facing several peshmerga soldiers.

“You don’t talk to me!” she told them.

A moment later, a swarm of P.K.K. fighters, Yazidi militiamen, and peshmerga troops were shouting at and jostling one another. It seemed to be about the flags. The peshmerga troops appeared to want to raise theirs.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” someone yelled.

Many of the P.K.K. fighters had unslung their rifles and were holding them at the low ready. Others were propping machine guns on bipods behind vehicles and rubble piles. A man I had just been interviewing was stretched out on his stomach, aiming into the crowd.

“Hold on!” a peshmerga soldier shouted. “Don’t do this!”

“I’m going to raise our flag!” another said. “I want to raise our flag!”

“No, no, come back. Don’t do it.”

“Our home is destroyed, and now we’re going to destroy it again?” one of the Yazidi militiamen asked. “We should be fighting ISIS, not each other!”

Read the Full Report: The Front Lines – The New Yorker

News and Commentary

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From Around the Web – 18 February 2016

Turkey v Islamic State v the Kurds: What’s going on? – BBC News – Although military affiliates of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) have been some of the most stalwart and effective opponents of Daesh (the Islamic State), Turkey has chosen to focus their efforts on destroying the Kurdish freedom movement. The United States’ support of these efforts is unconscionable. This article from BBC News from a few months ago gives a decent overview of the situation.

Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era | The Guardian – French Economist Thomas Piketty writes that the Vermont senator’s success so far demonstrates the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.

Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement – Chris Hedges – Truthdig – Hedges argues that no movement or political revolution will ever be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political elites has effectively neutered it as a political force.

China’s currency reserves plunged in January – BBC News – China still has the world’s biggest reserve of foreign currency holdings. But that has declined by $420 billion over six months and stands at the lowest level in nearly four years. This is the most underreported and significant economic news of 2016, thus far.

Can the U.S. escape the slump? | SocialistWorker.org – Lee Sustar looks at the prospects for the U.S. economy amid global instability.

Greatest Threat to Free Speech in the West: Criminalizing Activism Against Israeli Occupation | The Intercept – Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman report that there is a coordinated and well-financed campaign led by Israel and its supporters to criminalize political activism against Israeli occupation, based on the fear that the worldwide campaign of Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment is succeeding.

The end of capitalism has begun | Books | The Guardian – Paul Mason posits that Capitalism will not be abolished by forced-march techniques, but by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviors.

More money for Wall Street, more problems for Chicago’s schools | Chicago Reader – From Ben Joravsky: “It seems the mayor and his council allies remain defiantly determined to waste money, raise taxes, and plunge Chicago Public Schools into bankruptcy.”

EFF to Support Apple in Encryption Battle | Electronic Frontier Foundation – “For the first time, the government is requesting Apple write brand new code that eliminates key features of iPhone security—security features that protect us all. Essentially, the government is asking Apple to create a master key so that it can open a single phone. And once that master key is created, we’re certain that our government will ask for it again and again, for other phones, and turn this power against any software or device that has the audacity to offer strong security.”

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050 – Forbes – Drew Hansen, writing for that hotbed of Socialist thought, Forbes, says that corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health.