Turkey And The U.S. Are Now Facing Some Hard Decisions On What To Do In Syria

New York Times: Kurdish Role in Fighting ISIS in Syria Is Crucial to U.S., but Is Alarming Turkey

HASAKA, Syria — Green drapes were drawn against the sun, cloaking the room where members of a Syrian Kurdish militia huddled around walkie-talkies, assiduously taking down GPS coordinates.

Talal Raman, a 36-year-old Kurdish fighter, worked on a Samsung tablet, annotating a Google Earth map marked with the positions of the deserted apartment buildings and crumbling villas from where his colleagues were battling Islamic State fighters south of this northern Syrian town. He pinpointed in yellow the positions where his men were hunkered behind a wall, and highlighted in red the coordinates of a building next to a mosque where Islamic State fighters had taken cover.

“Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” he wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a United States military operations room. Then he waited for the American warplanes to scream in.

Update: Turkey and the U.S. in Syria: Time for Some Hard Choices -- Noah Bonsey, International Crisis Group

WNU Editor: The problem for both countries has always been the same .... the U.S. is focused on the Islamic State .... Turkey is more focused on the Kurds .... and both are not going to change their agenda to accommodate the other "partner" right now.

Update #2: Kurdish leaders are now saying that Turkey is protecting the Islamic State .... PKK leader: Turkey is protecting IS by attacking Kurds (BBC).