The Peshmerga’s entry into the Kobani battle is an example of successful regional cooperation of the kind that is vital in the fight against the radicals. A fighter group from one country entered another country with the cooperation of a third regional country. Turkey acted on this mushrooming threat disappointingly late, but its eventual green light for fighters to transit through its territory shows the region and the world that there can be regional solutions to regional problems, if only regional actors put aside their differences to defeat a common enemy.
While it is necessary to confront the Daesh militants wherever they are found, the international community cannot allow the Kobani conflict drive its attention away from the core of this fight, which is not in that town. Kobani may be a just cause, but it is the tip of the iceberg that calls itself the ‘Islamic State’. Daesh has successfully turned the world’s attention away from the more strategic locations in its possession such as Iraq’s Mosul, and Syria’s Raqqa, its de facto “capital” where it has set up an archaic regime of terror and torture.
It is incumbent on the international community not to allow Daesh to take control of the narrative as it seems to have done by shifting the focus to Kobani. Once that town is cleansed of this menace, the international community — and more importantly, regional states — should not lose a second before striking at the so-called caliphate’s centres of political and economic power. No enemy can be defeated from the periphery. Let Kobani be a test-run for regional cooperation.
