MURSITPINAR, Turkey — Intensified U.S.-led airstrikes and a determined Kurdish military force on the ground appear to have had some success in halting advances by Islamic State fighters on a strategic Kurdish town near Syria’s border with Turkey — at least for now.
On Wednesday, the Kurdish militiamen were fighting street battles with the Sunni extremists in Kobane and making advances on some fronts, hours after the U.S.-led coalition stepped up its aerial campaign.
“People underestimate the power of determination,” said Farhad Shami, a Kurdish activist in Kobane. “The Kurds have a cause and are prepared to die fighting for it.”
They also have the advantage of fighting on familiar ground.
“Islamic State fighters have far more superior weapons, but they lack knowledge of the terrain,” said Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Kurdish fighters, on the other hand, know “every street, building and corner” of Kobane and have the powerful “will of resistance,” he said.
Some of them are experienced fighters who have fought alongside rebels of the affiliated PKK in Turkey as they battled for autonomy for Kurds during a three-decade insurgency.
The Islamic State group launched its offensive on Kobane in mid-September, capturing dozens of nearby Kurdish villages and a third of the town in lightning advances that sent massive waves of civilians fleeing across the border into Turkey.
Days later, the U.S. and its allies began bombing Islamic State targets in Syria, but the strikes were slow to take off in Kobane and appeared largely ineffective. Expectations were that the town would fall to the militants within days.
The Kurdish fighters, however, have put up a formidable fight, despite feeling a deep sense of abandonment by an international community that they think has failed to come to their rescue as it did with their brethren and other minorities in Iraq threatened by Islamic State militants.
The fighting in and around Kobane has killed more than 550 people, the majority of them Islamic State fighters, according to the Observatory.
Abdurrahman and other Syria observers say the Kurds have shown much more tenacity and resilience than other Syrian rebel factions who ended up making “tactical retreats” or fled jihadi onslaughts in other areas of Syria.
Equally important in the past few days has been more concentrated airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition in and around Kobane targeting Islamic State infrastructure and positions.
The U.S. military says it has launched 39 airstrikes near Kobane in the past 48 hours, designed to disrupt Islamic State reinforcements and resupply, and to prevent the extremist fighters from massing combat power on the Kurdish-held sections of Kobane.
Smoke rising from the strikes were visible across the border in Turkey.
Capitalizing on those strikes, fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, made some progress against the militants Wednesday, said Asya Abdullah, a Syrian Kurdish leader.
Speaking by telephone from Kobane, Abdullah, co-president of Syria’s powerful Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD, said the Kurdish fighters had advanced near the hill of Tel Shair that overlooks part of the town.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency said the Kurdish forces planted two flags on the hill after retaking it from the Islamic State group and removing the black flag the extremists had hoisted earlier in the week.
