Airstrikes, street battles rock Syrian city of Kobani

Islamic State militants have captured about one-third of the city of Kobani in the last 24 hours, but Kurdish defenders are fighting fiercely to prevent their advance, Syrian opposition activists said Thursday.

Islamic State forces captured a police station and a secondary school in the eastern part of the city, while fighters from the People’s Protection Units – the Kurdish group known as the YPG, which has controlled the city since the middle of 2012 – were still in control of the city center and the city’s west.

U.S. aircraft launched five airstrikes against Islamic State positions south of Kobani, the military’s Central Command said Thursday. Centcom described the targets as a training camp, a support building, two vehicles and two units of Islamic State fighters, one large and one small. It gave no estimate of casualties, though fighters inside the city said at least 11 Islamic State fighters and six members of the Kurdish militias had died in the fighting.

“Indications are that Kurdish militia there continue to control most of the city and are holding out against ISIL,” Centcom’s statement said, using the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

Abu Issa, the leader of the Thwar al Raqqa Brigade of the Free Syrian Army, which is fighting inside Kobani, told McClatchy that he believed the fall of the city was only hours away. He said the Islamic State had deployed at least three car bombs in its effort to seize the city.

Other reports indicated that the Islamic State had set fire to tires in Kobani in an effort to obscure the vision of U.S. drone aircraft, which journalists reported were a nearly constant presence over the city.

The battle for Kobani has become one of the most closely watched fights in the war against the Islamic State, though the strategic value of the city is disputed.

At least part of the interest in what is taking place there come from its visibility – journalists can watch the fighting from hillsides inside Turkey. That has made Kobani a dramatic backdrop for reports on many of the war’s major themes: Islamic State military prowess, the persistence of outgunned Kurdish fighters, the effectiveness of U.S. airstrikes, Turkey’s ambivalence toward joining the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, and its long-running battle against its own Kurdish separatists.

Despite calls for it to intervene to save Kobani, Turkey has made clear it won’t. An estimated 160,000 Kurdish civilians have fled into Turkey in recent weeks, and Turkey dispatched armored vehicles to the border last week. But the only hostile action came when Turkish security forces fired tear gas against Kurdish civilians demanding that Turkey intervene. In recent days, clashes in Turkish cities between security forces and Kurdish demonstrators have killed as many as 24 people.

Indeed, the fact that the city has been ruled for two years by Kurdish factions linked to the Kurdish Workers Party, or PYD, which has fought the Turkish government for three decades to establish an autonomous zone in Turkey, is a major factor in Turkey’s decision not to intervene. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said one of the conditions for Turkish intervention would be the PYD’s agreement to surrender its autonomous structure inside Syria.

“The Turkish policymakers don’t like what they see in Rojava, essentially,” Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar in the Brussels offices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told reporters in a conference call Thursday, referring to the Kurdish area of Syria by its local name. “They don’t like ISIS, either, so the fact that the two are fighting each other is not necessarily a bad outcome for Turkey.”

This story was originally published October 9, 2014 at 8:10 PM with the headline "Airstrikes, street battles rock Syrian city of Kobani."