So this happened

Turkey mounted its largest military effort yet in the Syrian conflict on Wednesday, sending tanks, warplanes and special operations forces over the border in a United States-backed drive to capture an Islamic State stronghold in Syria.
The joint offensive on the city of Jarabulus, one of the last border strongholds of the Islamic State, began hours before Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, the Turkish capital. The timing seemed aimed at easing tensions between the two countries raised by the failed coup in Turkey last month.
The operation, clearing the way for a force of about 500 Syrian rebels to take the border town, represented a significant escalation of Turkey’s role in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. But it also seemed as much about containing the territorial ambitions of Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey sees as its primary enemy in the conflict and which were poised to move against Jarabulus.
Mr. Biden addressed those concerns at a news conference after his meeting with Mr. Erdogan, saying the Syrian Kurds, an American ally in the fight against the Islamic State militants, would have to withdraw to the eastern side of the Euphrates River.
“We have made it clear to Kurdish forces that they must move back across the river,” he said. “They cannot and will not get American support if they do not keep that commitment. Period.”

Not everyone is pleased

Syria condemned Wednesday's Turkish incursion into an Islamic State group-held border area as a "flagrant violation" of its sovereignty as Kurdish authorities said the action amounted to a "declaration of war".
The foreign ministry in Damascus said it "condemns the crossing of the Turkey-Syria border by Turkish tanks and armoured vehicles towards the Jarabulus area with air cover from the US-led coalition and considers it a flagrant violation of Syrian sovereignty".
The Syrian opposition in exile, however, welcomed the intervention....
"Syria demands the end of this aggression," the foreign ministry said.
"Any party conducting a battle against terrorism on Syrian soil must do so in coordination with the Syrian government and the Syrian army who have been fighting this war for five years.
"Chasing out IS and replacing them with terrorist groups backed by Turkey is not fighting terrorism."

The same

Some 1,500 Turkish-backed Syrian rebels have also gathered in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, poised for an offensive to drive IS out of Jarablus.
Turkey has also shelled Syrian Kurdish forces nearby, apparently to deter them from taking Jarablus themselves.

U.S. backs Turkey against Kurds

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called on Syrian Kurdish militants to retreat east of the Euphrates river, a demand that is likely to ease mounting tensions with Turkey -- a key ally in the war against Islamic State.
Standing next to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim in the Turkish capital of Ankara, Biden said on Wednesday that U.S. aid for the Kurdish militant group YPG would be stopped if it didn’t comply. Syrian Kurds have been seeking to link enclaves they control along the frontier with Turkey, which Ankara fears will embolden Turkey’s own restive Kurds.
“We’ve made it absolutely clear" to the YPG that “they must move back across the river,” Biden said. "They cannot — will not — under any circumstance get American support if they do not keep that commitment.”

Kurds essentially take over Hasakah

Kurdish militias took a major step toward full control of a northeast Syrian province on Tuesday, signing a cease-fire with the government that gave them all but a few blocks of the provincial capital.
The cease-fire, reached after days of deadly fighting with government forces in the province of Hasaka, brings the province closer to becoming the third to slip from the grasp of President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s five-year-old war.

It's not a no-fly zone, really

Reporters pushed press secretary Peter Cook to explain the distinction.
"Our warning to the Syrians is the same that we've had for some time, that we're going to defend our forces and they would be advised not to fly in areas where our forces have been operating," Cook said.
"It's not a 'no fly zone,'" he added. Later, he said, "You can label it what you want."

What's 700,000 assault rifles between friends?

In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. ...
As an illustration of how haphazard the supervision of this arms distribution often was, last week, five months after being asked by The New York Times for its own tally of small arms issued to partner forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon said it has records for fewer than half the number of firearms in the researchers’ count — about 700,000 in all. This is an amount, Overton noted, that “only accounts for 48 percent of the total small arms supplied by the U.S. government that can be found in open-source government reports.”

A huge war crime by our allies

More than 700 Sunni men and boys are still missing more than two months after the Islamic State stronghold fell. The abuses occurred despite U.S. efforts to restrict the militias' role in the operation, including threatening to withdraw American air support, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The U.S. efforts had little effect. Shi’ite militias did not pull back from Falluja, participated in looting there and now vow to defy any American effort to limit their role in coming operations against Islamic State.
All told, militia fighters killed at least 66 Sunni males and abused at least 1,500 others fleeing the Falluja area, according to interviews with more than 20 survivors, tribal leaders, Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats.
They said men were shot, beaten with rubber hoses and in several cases beheaded. Their accounts were supported by a Reuters review of an investigation by local Iraqi authorities and video testimony and photographs of survivors taken immediately after their release.