Operation Featherweight: Month 2, Week 3, Day 2.

On Saturday (20/9/14) 49 Turkish hostages who had been held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) since June were released by their captors. Although it seems unlikely that a ransom was paid Turkey's extremely close relationship with ISIL has led to fears that it may have entered into some sort of agreement with the group that would see the hostages released in return for Turkey refusing to allow coalition aircraft to use its airbases in the fight against ISIL or continuing to allow the flow of ISIL fighters and oil across its territory.

Although I don't have any particular trust for the Turkish government and President Erdogan in particular this suspicion does overlook one simple fact - taking hostages is a lot more complicated then it sounds. Once a group has taken people hostage it then has to feed them, house them, guard them and generally keep them hidden in case they become the targets of a rescue mission. This obviously takes up manpower and resources and the larger the group the more resources it takes. This group would have been particularly challenging because it included young children who tend to what they like anyway and special forces soldiers who require a lot of security to control. So once ISIL realised that they weren't going be paid a ransom or win any other sort of concession for their hostages they were probably quite happy to get rid of them. A similar thing actually happened in the Golan Heights in southern Syria where Al Nusra Front (ANF) took 45 Fijian soldiers attached to the United Nations Disengagement Observer Forces (UNDOF) hostage only to release them two weeks later. Fijian soldiers have a reputation for being big men who require a lot of feeding.

One possible agreement the Turkish government may have reached with ISIL is over the fate of the Kurds which Turkey has fought a civil war against for 30 years. The Kurdish Peshmerga are currently humiliating ISIL on the battlefields of Iraq and this has prompted ISIL to take revenge by attacking Kurdish villages in northern Syria around the city of Kobane/Ayn al-Arab (pop 45,000). This has prompted some 130,000 Syrian Kurds to try and flee into Turkey in recent days while some 300 Kurdish fighters have headed in the opposite direction to try and halt ISIL's advance. This has prompted Turkey to suddenly discover that it can control it's border with Syria and over the weekend it has deployed police and troops to violently stop the flow of Kurds into and out of Syria. Therefore it is possible that Turkey has secured the release of its hostages by doing a deal with ISIL that will see it stop the Kurds fleeing in order to allow ISIL to exterminate their mutual enemy.

This of course further highlights the stupidity of US President Obama's plan to train and arm Arab insurgents in Syria to fight ISIL at the expense of the Kurds. As we can all see the Kurds are currently fighting ISIL in northern Syria while Arab insurgent groups like the Islamic Front (IF) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are not and aren't really in a position to do so. So if the US were to provide weapons and training to the Kurds rather then the Arab groups it would speed up the defeat of ISIL bringing the entire operation to a rapid conclusion. Also if the US declines to help the Kurds then there is a risk that they may lose the battle against ISIL in northern Syria. This will end up making the operation all the more difficult by increasing the amount of territory that ISIL holds while reducing the number of enemies it has has to fight against. Also we should all now be well aware of the type of horrors such as rape, torture and extermination that ISIL bring with them as they advance.

Within Iraq itself government forces are continuing to make steady progress to liberate the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah which are both in Anbar province and are around 100km (60miles) and 50km (30miles) west of the capital Baghdad respectively. On Sunday (21/9/14) the Iraq military succeeded in pushing back ISIL forces who had laid siege to a military base on the northern outskirts of the city. Now the battalion there has been relieved the base can be used by the Iraqi military to co-ordinate their efforts to liberate the city itself.

One interesting thing is that the US has stopped giving out details of the air-strikes it is carrying out. So for example we know from local sources that the US did act in support of Iraqi forces in the re-taking of the army base on Sunday but we can't confirm what level of support was provided. We also know from local sources that the US did carry out a substantial air-strike against an ISIL logistics depot close to Mosul on Saturday but again we can't tell what type of ordinance was used and how much damage was done although the ISIL death-toll is said to be in the hundreds.

I think that primarily this new found silence from the US is simply them being difficult in an effort to annoy people like me. However if they have moved towards more intense strikes against ISIL it would highlight how suspiciously ineffective their operations have been up until now because a large strike that kills hundreds makes a small strike against the odd truck look almost harmless. Also the US and other coalition aircraft have been flying reconnaissance missions over Iraq for more then a month now which means that they should have a very good picture of where all of ISIL's bases and logistics depots are.

Once you have that level on intelligence what you would normally do is then try and destroy as many of those key targets as quickly as possible in order to cripple ISIL making it easier for ground forces to defeat them. The fact that the US is declining to do that provides further indication that rather then trying to defeat them the US is in fact trying to keep ISIL as a viable fighting force for as long as possible. That is a very strange way to treat a supposed enemy.

14:55 on 22/9/14 (UK date).