Kobani One of Many Targets Under Attack by ISIS Right Now

Pentagon officials say that the imminent ISIS takeover of the Kurdish border town of Kobani, despite getting a lot of publicity, won’t actually change the US military strategy against ISIS in Syria.

“Kobani is horrible but right now there’s a lot of horrible in Iraq and Syria,” the unnamed official said, saying Kobani was just one of many targets of the ISIS offensive across the nation.

Though Kurdish officials have tried to present the loss of Kobani as a humanitarian calamity leading to some sort of slaughter, virtually the whole population had already fled to Turkey in the past weeks.

Indeed, with the attacks on Hasakeh yesterday, Kobani isn’t even the largest Kurdish city being sieged by ISIS in Syria. The US airstrikes around Kobani clearly aren’t changing the situation on the ground, but US officials don’t seem to have any alternate strategies anyhow, and are seemingly attacking ISIS for the sake of attacking ISIS.

While Pentagon officials are likely to be criticized for their unwillingness to change strategies in Syria, the absence of a real end-game strategy for what some are now calling a “thirty-year war” is a problem well beyond the fate of Kobani, and reflects the new conflict’s status as an unwinnable war.