MURSITPINAR: Intensified air strikes helped Kurdish militia push back Islamic State jihadists fighting for Kobane as pressure mounted for more international action to save the key Syrian border town.
France threw its weight behind calls for a buffer zone on the Syrian-Turkish frontier. The US and Britain said they were willing to “examine” the idea of a safe haven.
A new strike by the US-led coalition hit near Kobane early yesterday after a flurry of raids the day before. The strike sent a cloud of thick black smoke billowing from the eastern side of the town, where Kurdish militia were reported to have forced IS fighters out of several neighbourhoods in heavy overnight fighting.
The jihadists pierced Kobane’s defences this week, sparking fierce street battles that continued yesterday with the sounds of heavy gunfire and mortar shells falling on the town.
A Kobane official, Idris Nahsen, said fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had managed to push IS militants out of key areas after “helpful” air strikes by the US-led coalition. “The situation has changed since yesterday. YPG forces have pushed back ISIS forces,” he said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, also said IS fighters had withdrawn overnight from several areas and were no longer inside the western part of Kobane. Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a network of sources inside Syria, said the withdrawal came after coalition air strikes hit IS positions “causing casualties and damaging at least four of their vehicles.”
The Observatory said at least 32 IS fighters were killed in and around Kobane on Tuesday, including at least 20 in coalition air strikes. It says about 400 people, more than half of them jihadists, have been killed in and around Kobane since IS began its assault in mid-September.
The three-week IS assault on Kobane has sent about 200,000 people flooding across the border into Turkey, but some residents said hundreds more remained two days after jihadists breached the town’s defences. “There are 1,000 civilians who refuse to leave,” said Kobane activist Mustafa Ebdi. “One of them, aged 65, said to me: “Where would we go? Dying here is better than dying on the road’.”
An IS fighter carried out a suicide truck bombing in east Kobane yesterday, but there was no immediate news of casualties. Rahman said IS forces had advanced around 100 metres towards the town centre yesterday evening, but that fighting had subsided slightly. But he added that IS group reinforcements were heading for Kobane from Syria’s Raqa province.
Kobane, also known as Ain Al Arab, would be a major prize for the jihadists, giving them unbroken control of a long stretch of Syria’s border with Turkey.
The United States along with Arab, European and other allies have launched nearly 2,000 air raids against jihadists in Iraq and Syria. Amid warnings of Kobane’s imminent fall, the UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, joined calls for the international community to take urgent action.
“The world, all of us, will regret deeply if (IS) is able to take over a city which has defended itself with courage but is close to not being able to do so. We need to act now,” he said. “The international community needs to defend them. The international community cannot sustain another city falling under (IS)”.
AFP
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon warned yesterday that US air power on its own could not prevent Islamic State jihadists from capturing the Syrian border town of Kobane.
US-led aircraft were hitting the IS group at every opportunity but without a competent force on the ground to work with, there were limits to what could be accomplished by bombing from the air, spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters. “Air strikes alone are not going to do this, not going to fix this, not going to save the town of Kobane,” Kirby said. “We know that. And we’ve been saying that over and over again.”
Ultimately, “capable” ground forces — rebel fighters in Syria and Iraqi government troops — would have to defeat the IS group, but that would take time, he said. Kirby said that “we don’t have a willing, capable, effective partner on the ground inside Syria right now. It’s just a fact.” Other towns could also fall to the IS group until local ground forces could find their footing, he added.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said coalition aircraft were bombing the IS group whenever possible but tracking the militants presented a challenge. “We have been striking when we can,” Dempsey told ABC News in an interview.
IS fighters are “a learning enemy and they know how to manoeuvre and how to use populations and concealment,” the general said. He indicated the IS extremists were more difficult to track as they were staying off of mobile phones or other devices that could be monitored.
“They’re becoming more savvy with the use of electronic devices,” he said. “They don’t fly flags and move around in large convoys the way they did... They don’t establish headquarters that are visible or identifiable.”
AFP
