MURSITPINAR, Turkey: Kurdish fighters backed by US-led air strikes battled the Islamic State group for a key Syrian town yesterday, with one woman defender blowing herself up using militants’ own tactic.
IS fighters seized part of a strategic hill overlooking the town of Kobane late on Saturday, a monitor said, but their progress was slowed by new strikes from the coalition of Washington and Arab allies.
A Kobane local official, Idris Nahsen, said IS fighters were just one kilometre (less than a mile) from the town and that air strikes alone were not enough to stop them.
He complained of a lack of coordination between the coalition and Kurdish fighters on the ground.
In a sign of the Kurdish defenders’ determination to keep the jihadists at bay, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a woman suicide bomber blew herself up at an IS position east of Kobane.
“The operation caused deaths, but there is no confirmed number,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He said it was the first reported instance of a female Kurdish fighter employing a tactic often used by IS itself.
The border town of Kobane has become a crucial battleground in the international fight against IS, which sparked further outrage this weekend with the release of a video showing the beheading of Briton Alan Henning.
The video — the latest in a series of on-camera beheadings of Western hostages — included a threat to another hostage, US aid worker Peter Kassig.
Fighting raged around Kobane as the jihadists pressed their nearly three-week siege of the town, said the Britain-based Observatory.
“IS succeeded on Saturday night in taking the southern part of the Mishtenur hill,” Abdel Rahman said.
He said there were seven new coalition strikes against IS positions late Saturday and that the air raids were hindering the jihadist advance.
In a statement, US Central Command said the US military carried out three air strikes in Syria on Saturday, while fighter jets, bombers and helicopters were used in six assaults against IS in Iraq yesterday.
The sound of shelling echoed from the town — also known as Ain Al Arab — as warplanes roared overhead yesterday, a reporter just across the border in Turkey said.
One mortar round hit a house on Turkish territory just a few kilometres (miles) from Kobane, wounding five people, medical sources said. The source of the fire was unclear, but residents of two small border villages were ordered evacuated as a precaution.
Tear gas was fired to clear the border zone around the Mursitpinar crossing, the main vantage point for watching the fighting for reporters and Kurds.
Yesterday’s toll was not known, but the Observatory, which relies on a network of local sources, said at least 33 IS fighters and 23 of the town’s Kurdish defenders were killed on Saturday.
IS began its advance on Kobane on September 16, seeking to cement its grip over a long stretch of the Syria-Turkey border.
The offensive prompted a mass exodus from the town and surrounding countryside, with some 186,000 fleeing into Turkey.
After first launching strikes against IS in Iraq in August, Washington has built a coalition of allies to wage an air campaign against the group.
Britain and France have joined the strikes in Iraq and five Arab nations — Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have taken part in the Syria raids.
Turkey’s parliament last week authorised the government to join the campaign, but so far no plans for military action have been announced.
Turkish media reported Sunday that the leader of the main Syrian Kurdish political party — Democratic Union Party (PYD) chief Salih Muslim — was in Turkey for secret talks with intelligence officials.
Reports said Muslim was told the PYD should distance itself from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which waged a deadly insurgency in Turkey for the past three decades.
Elsewhere, the Observatory said Syrian rebels on Sunday seized a strategic hilltop in the southern province of Daraa after a two-day battle in which 30 regime forces and 29 rebels were killed.
AFP
BAALBEK, Lebanon: Lebanon’s Shia movement Hezbollah said yesterday that at least two of its fighters were killed along with “dozens” of gunmen in clashes in the Syria-Lebanon border area. A Hezbollah official said the clashes occurred on Syrian territory, just over the border from Lebanon.
But a Hezbollah source on the ground and local residents said the clashes erupted outside the town of Nabi Sbat, in Lebanese territory, after gunmen from Syria attacked Hezbollah posts.
“Hezbollah posts in the mountains around Nabi Sbat, east of Baalbek, were attacked by armed groups who came from Qalamun” in Syria, the Hezbollah source in the region said. “Hezbollah returned fire, inflicting heavy losses among the attackers.”
Lebanon’s official National News Agency also reported the clashes took place in Lebanon, saying they began after an attack launched by gunmen from Asaal Al Ward in Syria’s Qalamun province.
AFP
