ISTANBUL — My generation of Turks grew up hating Kurdish separatists. Instead of questioning why Kurds weren’t allowed to speak their own language, live in their own villages or sing their own songs, we blamed the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., which had been waging a guerrilla war against Turkey since 1984, for all of Turkey’s woes.

Marieclaire.com | By Elizabeth Griffin

There's a group of 7,500 soldiers who have been fighting an incalculably dangerous war for two years. They fight despite daily threats of injury and death. They fight with weapons that are bigger and heavier than they are against a relentless enemy. And yet they continue to fight.

Theguardian.com

Kurds near Downing Street demand heavy weapons and antitank missiles from the UK government for fight against Isis

Theguardian.com | Reuters in Beirut

Isis’s latest attempt to take predominantly Kurdish town close to Turkey repelled with aid of Kurds crossing the borde.

Since June, Iraqi Kurdistan has been receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced people fleeing the massacres committed by the jihadists of the Islamic State. Among them are tens of thousands of Christians, Yezidis, Shabaks and members of other religious minorities who have been living in these lands of the Upper Mesopotamia for centuries and who, after having survived the massacres of the Ottoman Empire and Saddam Hussein’s bloody dictatorship, today find their very existence threatened.

Krg.org

Kurdistan region of Iraq (KR-I) most affected by recent wave of violence with over 850,000 displaced Iraqis this year.

Nytimes.com

John McCain and Lindsey Graham: Confront ISIS Now

AFTER more than three years, almost 200,000 dead in Syria, the near collapse of Iraq, and the rise of the world’s most sinister terrorist army — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has conquered vast swaths of both countries — President Obama’s admission this week that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with this threat is startling. It is also dangerous.

Nytimes.com

By John Kerry *

In a polarized region and a complicatedworld, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syriapresents a unifying threat to a broadarray of countries, including the UnitedStates. What's needed to confront its nihilistievision and genocidal agenda is aglobal coalition using political, humanitarian,economic, law enforcement andintelligence tools to support militaryforce.

The Yazidis are  a heterodox Kurdish religious minority living predominantly in northern Iraq, Syria, and southeast Turkey, with well-established communities in the Caucasus and a growing European diaspora.

International New York Times - BAGHDAD

BY TIM ARANGO AND SUADAD AL-SALHY

Iraq's leaders on Thursday selected Fouad Massoum, a longtime Kurdish politician and former guerrilla fighter who took up arms against Saddam Hussein's government, as the country's new president, an important step in forming a new government that the international community and Iraq's religious authorities have called for and that is described as crucial to confronting a growing Sunni insurgency.