The Kurdish Pesmerga have been warriors all their lives.

The Kurds have never had a modern day country. As a result violent extremists grew and have become known as the PKK. Turkey knows they are vicious fighters. They have been guarding the boundaries of the invisible Kurdistan all their lives.

January 31, 2015
By The Associated Press
 
Members of the Islamic State (click here) group have acknowledged for the first time that they were defeated in the Syrian town of Kobani. 
 
In a video released by the pro-ISIS Aamaq News Agency late Friday, two fighters said airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were the main reason why they were forced to withdraw from Kobani. 

On Monday, activists and Kurdish officials said the town was cleared of ISIS fighters, who once held nearly half of the town. Jubilant Kurdish fighters raised their flag on a hill that once flew the Islamic State group's black banner. On Kobani's war-ravaged streets, gunmen fired in the air in celebration, male and female fighters embraced, and troops danced in their baggy uniforms....

The Kurds have been ready to take their lands back for decades if not centuries. They were a regular topic in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. To read about them, their ethnic roots and culture was to know them. Their own struggle for land and the right to be only brought an endemic compassion for other ethnicities in their own struggle. The Kurds under the Northern No Fly Zone in Iraq became strong and the defenders of the land.

The Peshmega Kurds and the defense of land and people is simply a natural state for them. Both men and women understand their place in protecting life and land as a great ally.

This is not the enemy. This is the PKK. The wrist watch is interesting. Prayer time no doubt.

...In recent weeks, (click here) fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who’ve waged guerrilla war in Turkey for generations and been branded terrorists by much of the world community, have overcome differences with the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq that is heavily supported by the United States, several European countries and, indeed, by Turkey. Along with the PKK’s Syrian-Kurdish offshoot, the Democratic Union Party, they have joined forces to fend off an ISIS advance threatening Kurdish territory; they have come to the rescue of thousands of Yazidi refugees, besieged by ISIS fighters in the nearby Sinjar Mountains; and they are helping defend the many Americans in the Iraqi Kurdish capital....

The PKK can no longer be considered a terrorist group. They are among the best allies The West has in the Middle East whether anyone wants to realize it or not. I can't help but believe the NYTimes kept them alive to be the victors in a land where no other authority can last.

May 1, 2013
Recent comments from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) (click here) leader Abdullah Öcalan puzzled groups that have long been allied with his party. In a letter that was read out to crowds gathered for the Kurdish New Year in Diyarbakır a few weeks ago, Öcalan emphasized the role of Islam as forming a strong bond between Kurds and Turks: “Turkish people who know ancient Anatolia as Turkey should know that their coexistence with Kurdish people dates back to a historical agreement of fraternity and solidarity under the flag of Islam.” His proclamations threw off some groups in the Turkish Left and the liberal Left, Armenians and Alevis that sympathized with the PKK and supported its progressive-secular agenda.

How did Islam rise as a way of organizing resistance around the world.  The USSR fell and no longer was a guiding belief to bring about loyalists. Not only did Islam provide a basis for common belief, it also carries with it a judicial system.
 
Originally founded as a Marxist organization in 1978, the PKK had to revise its ideology in the early 1990s. Like many other Marxist–Leninist organizations in the world, the PKK lost its main source of ideological legitimacy when the Soviet bloc disintegrated and capitalism appeared to have won an absolute victory. Furthermore, Öcalan, as well as others within the PKK leadership, gradually came to the conclusion that Islam was too important for a Kurdish party to ignore, given that many Kurds are devout Muslims....

How did IS take hold? The Ba'athists that were ostracized in Iraq became invisible in Syria, until the their strength and organization grew and they were ready. The Ba'athists were quite used to thinking as a nation and not just a group. They would also become ready with hostages for ransom.

September 11, 2014
By Reuters

Sometimes they came pretending to buy things. (click here) Sometimes they texted, sometimes they called, but the message was always the same: "Give us money."

Months before they took control of the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, Islamic State militants were already busy collecting money to finance their campaign of setting up a 7th century-style caliphate.

The owner of a Mosul grocery store recounted how, when he hesitated to pay, militants exploded a bomb outside his shop as a warning. "If a person still refused, they kidnapped him and asked his family to pay ransom," he said....

The Kurdish leadership need to find a way to recruit rebels to a purpose that will provide a greater stability to the region.

January 30, 2015

INJAR, Iraq (AP) — Kurdish forces (click here) in recent weeks have retaken parts of the strategic Iraqi town of Sinjar, whose Yazidi population was driven out in a humanitarian disaster last year that triggered U.S. intervention. But sniping among Kurdish factions makes the hold on the town seem shaky and is threatening the wider fight against Islamic state militants.

 Overlooking the strategic northern Iraq town of Sinjar, peshmerga fighters representing the recognized authorities of Iraqi Kurdistan fume against what they see as the recklessness of their supposed allies in militias drawn from neighboring Syria and Turkey....