Why isn't the U.S. doing more to help the Kurds' heroic stand against ISIS?

With its big guns vulnerable to air attack, the Islamic State adapts its tactics, piercing Kurdish lines with suicide attacks in primitively armored vehicles. One Kurdish commando near the Mosul Dam showed us, on his smartphone, a video of the approach of a steel-hardened vehicle. No amount of rifle fire or rocket-propelled grenades could stop the attack, which killed 23 and wounded 40.

Yet the United States insists that the Kurds obtain permission, grudging and often denied, from the central government in Baghdad for essential equipment to counter these and better weapons that the Islamic State seized from the Syrian and Iraqi Armies.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State won’t quit. Their wounded fighters often booby trap their bodies rather than be captured, and face down fire to recover dead comrades’ bodies. The leaders they call emirs, who are chosen because of their religious devotion and fearless effectiveness, and their foreign fighters, are especially fierce. The Westerners often die in suicide attacks; seasoned fighters from North Africa and the Middle East, and particularly from former parts of the Soviet Union (like Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Dagestan), are prominent as operational leaders and snipers. Foreign fighters return to their countries only if they escape or are sent home, because the punishment for defection is death.