MURSITPINAR: Kurdish fighters backed by a flurry of US-led air strikes were holding out yesterday against jihadists in Kobane, as an Islamic State offensive on the Syrian border town entered its second month.
The Kurds claimed to have pushed IS back in parts of Kobane, but the Pentagon warned the multinational strikes may not prevent the town’s fall even though hundreds of jihadists are thought to have been killed.
Mortar and heavy machinegun fire rang out later as IS appeared to have relaunched its bid to cut the town off from the Turkish border, witnesses said.
Despite intensified strikes on Kobane this week by the United States and its Arab allies, the Kurds are calling for increased firepower in the battle for the strategic town.
“We need more air strikes, as well as weaponry and ammunition to fight them on the ground,” said Idris Nassen, a Kurdish official in Kobane.
An estimated 200,000 mainly Kurdish Syrians have fled the IS onslaught for the relative safety of Turkey. A grocer who had escaped to Turkey from Kobane offered insight yesterday into those fighting for IS, saying that one they had captured, an Azerbaijani in his 20s, had even asked to be killed. “He begged us to kill him so he could go to paradise and be rewarded,” said Cuneyt Hemo, adding that the jihadist was held for a day and ultimately shot dead by his captors.
IS is also battling to control other parts of Syria, including Hasakeh province, where Kurdish fighters killed 20 jihadists yesterday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Kurdish forces have suffered heavy losses since IS launched its offensive on the Kurdish enclave around Kobane in mid-September, but so too have the jihadists. As of Wednesday, ground clashes alone had killed 662 people since September 16, including 20 civilians, the Observatory said.
IS lost 374 of its militants, while 268 people have been killed fighting on the Kurdish side, according to the Britain-based monitor, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria.
In its latest update, US Central Command said American warplanes struck 14 times near Kobane on Wednesday and yesterday, including “successful” raids on 19 IS-held buildings and two command posts. American-led forces have now carried out more than 100 air strikes near Kobane since September 27.
The Pentagon said the raids had killed “several hundred” jihadist fighters. US military officials say Kobane may eventually fall but insist the town is not a “strategic” location and that other areas carry more importance, particularly in western Iraq and the suburbs of Baghdad.
Nato member Turkey has stationed troops, tanks and artillery just over the border — in some cases only a few hundred metres from the fighting — but has not intervened. It has yet to allow US jets to mount attacks from its territory.
US President Barack Obama told military chiefs from more than 20 allies this week they are facing a “long-term campaign” — now dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve — against the Islamic State group.
Obama has expressed special concern for Kobane and about halting the IS advance in Iraq’s western Anbar province.
Meanwhile, the new UN human rights chief told his first press briefing yesterday that IS was the “antithesis of human rights”. “It kills, it tortures, it rapes,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
“It is a diabolical, potentially genocidal movement, and the way it has spread its tentacles into other countries, employing social media and the Internet to brainwash and recruit people from across the globe, reveals it to be the product of a perverse and lethal marriage of a new form of nihilism with the digital age.”
Hussein also promised an updated UN assessment of the death toll in the more than three-year-old conflict in Syria, saying it would certainly be well over 200,000.
Six children were among 14 people killed yesterday in air raids carried out by the Syrian regime in Jisrin, east of Damascus, and along the highway linking the capital to the northern city of Aleppo, said the Observatory.
AFP
LONDON: More than 12,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq so far this year, mainly by Islamic State (IS), and minorities facing ethnic cleansing are the principal victims, according to a report published yesterday.
Minority Rights Group International (MRG) said several minority communities, including Christians, Yazidis and Turkmen, had been subjected to assassinations, kidnappings and sexual violence and were in danger of extinction in Iraq.
The civilian death toll almost doubled to 12,618 in the January-September period from 6,676 a year earlier, according to the report, which cited the Iraq Body Count database.
At least half a million people have been forced to flee their villages in Ninewa province, home to minority communities for thousands of years, according to the report From Crisis to Catastrophe: The situation of minorities in Iraq.
Fighters of IS, a militant Sunni group, have seized control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq this year, attacking Shia districts in Baghdad and taking over surrounding farmland where Iraqi security forces and Shia militias try to push them back.
MRG executive director Mark Lattimer said the Iraqi government had shown that it was “either unable or unwilling to protect the safety of minorities”.
“Since minorities generally do not have their own militias or tribal protection structures like the majority groups in society, they are especially vulnerable,” Lattimer said in a statement accompanying the report.
“In the vast majority of cases, investigations are not properly conducted and the perpetrators of attacks go unpunished, often with indications of official complicity.”
MRG said that Iraq’s minorities had faced summary exeuctions, armed robberies, torture and bombings for years.
Members of minorities who have not fled the country live in constant fear for their safety, as their religious sites are the target of attacks and they are afraid of openly displaying their religious identities, the report said.
The government has done nothing to compensate victims or to rebuild infrastructure damaged in IS attacks on minority communities, who have little access to clean water, electricity, housing and health care, according to the report.
The report also called for measures to provide refuge in foreign countries to Iraqis fleeing persecution and to prevent the transfer of financial support to IS and other armed groups responsible for gross abuses.
MRG works to secure rights for ethnic, national, religious and linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples around the world.
Reuters
