I will admit that the Western policy towards the Middle East has been an enigma for me for the last couple of decades. (That includes both the US and the EU); Either they know something others don’t, or their so-called Middle Eastern ‘experts’ have been feeding them the same cool-aid that they drank from their ‘progressive’ professors the likes of Edward Said and others sponsored by Arab Oil money.

Supporting the Jihadis in Syria was the ‘icing on the cake’ of Western idiocy. But in that bleak landscape of savagery, one people (aside from the Israel) stand out as the last best hope of the Middle East. Just look at northern Iraqi Kurdistan. It’s the least violent and the most prosperous area of the post war Iraq. It’s the closest one gets to a viable and functioning state in that neck of the desert. What sets the Kurds, who are Muslim too, lest we forget, apart from most other players in the region is their aversion to redicalization and productivity – the hallmarks of a healthy civil society.

The Kurds are the only people in that region that the West can actually rely on not to turn against them in the future. Also, empowering the Kurds means empowering moderation, religious tolerance and a functioning political entity – all very scarce commodities in that region. In addition, from a moral standpoint the Kurds deserve a state of their own, so it’s also the moral thing to do.

Obviously nothing will be achieved and they will simply be overrun by Jihadis or massacred by neighboring countries unless our support is backed up by tangible collateral in the forms of arms and other supplies. Who knows, with the oil fields in Kurdistan, we might even stand to gain some financial benefits from it.

Dear Stefania…like too many Italians it seems you are lost in too much theory and “should-be’s”. You should take a look at the facts instead. The following is an article from a major Italian daily newspaper ‘La Stampa’ dated 17th August:

If on August 20th, as expected, the Parliament will give its assent to the special plan of the government to send weapons to Kurdish militias, already on the 24th or 25th August the first Italian aircraft could participate in a hypothetical airlift to Erbil, the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan. So far mainly the Americans have supported the war effort where the Kurds have received 15 million ammunition in a month. And now the question is what would be the Italian or European aid.

The Kurdish President Massoud Barzani has explicitly requested, even to the papal envoy in recent days, “modern weaponry” and “air cover”. The Kurds, from the West, want especially small arms, shoulder-rockets and ammunition. They must equip hastily a people who are rushing to arms against the aggression of the Islamists Isis.

There may be technical problems, though. “The Kurdish peshmerga have always fought using weapons of Soviet manufacture,” says Gianandrea Gaiani, an expert on military matters. The problem is that NATO standards are different from those of the former Soviet bloc. Even the ammunition is incompatible. From Italy, therefore, may come more easily helmets, flak vests and laser targeting systems, bomb protection, night vision goggles.

If Kalashnikov’s are really needed, however, Italy would know where to pick them up. It has been 20 years since the Italian Defense jealously guards a former Soviet arsenal of weapons, the result of a seizure operated at sea in 1994 in the midst of war in the Balkans, during which the Italian and British intelligence kept watch. A transport ship, the ‘Jadran Express’ which departed from Ukraine destined for Split (Croatia), was intercepted at sea and taken to the port of Taranto. Inside the ship’s hold there were crates with 30,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 400 Fagot missiles with launch-ramps, 5,000 Katyusha rockets, 11,000 anti-tank rockets, 32 million ammunition. On that occasion the organizer of the traffic, the Russian oil magnate Alexander Zukhov: a billionaire with a villa in Sardinia and grandson of the legendary marshal Zukhov of the Red Army.

After ten years of trials, Mr. Zukhov and the other defendants were acquitted because the defense argued that the load had never entered our territorial waters and the Supreme Court recognized that Italy did not have criminal jurisdiction over a foreigner in foreign arms trafficking .

The load, estimated at 2000 tons of weapons, however, was confiscated and though the judiciary had ordered its destruction in 2011, the arms of Mr. Zukhov were still stored in underground storage in the island of La Maddalena.

From there they were taken away in the spring of 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of war in Libya, and probably some cache of guns also reached the Benghazi rebels, disguised in various loads.

Some containers were found to be on board civilian ferries and when this reached the ears of two Democratic Party deputies, Gianpiero Scanu and Giulio Calvisi, their parliamentary questions were dropped by the Berlusconi government of the time. The judiciary then decided that the investigation had to immediately stop because those Kalashnikov’s had fallen under state secret.

Since then, the rest of the arsenal is stored in some cranny of the Armed Forces. But obviously, if they served to arm the Kurdish militias, those thousands of rifles, rockets, missiles, and ammunition – kept religiously since 1994 – might finally come in handy and it would explain the secrecy on the part of governments that have governed to the present day.

…I would like to see if ISIS memebers showed-up at your house and killed your father, raped your mother and then took you away to be sold. I wonder if you would try to negotiate with them by mentioning article 11 of the Italian constitution. Clearly this does not justify gratuitous violence but do try to keep things in their right context as I don’t think the victims of ISIS, in this case the Kurds, have the luxury of ‘farsi una pizza con gli amici’. They are fighting for survival and if you ever create a chance for yourself maybe you should visit those parts of the world and live there for a while to see the difference between theories and reality.

God, thank you! Finally someone who understands something. It amazes me how the media keep quite of this little fact. If there ever was a force deserving of our support in that region it would be the Kurds. The only non-radical, non-jihadi and civil force in all of the middle east. Hell, they’re better than Erdogan’s Turkey (let alone Iran). If there was justice in the worlds, the Kurds would annihilate IS and declare a state on all their territories including those of turkey and Iran.