IS ‘3 kilometers from Ain al-Arab’ despite losses in Iraq to Kurdish forces

ENDGAME: The Islamic State continues to creep closer to the Kurdish city of Kobani near the Turkish border in northern Aleppo, even after as fresh Kurdish attacks and coalition airstrikes on IS positions Tuesday. 

“IS continues to advance and is now only three kilometers from the city,” Adnan Hussein, a Kurdish journalist based on the Turkish side of the Syrian border, told Syria Direct Tuesday. 

“In the past few days we have seen hundreds of of young men return to defend [Kobani].”

Also on Tuesday, a car bomb exploded along the Turkish border close to Kobani, reportedly rocking the unsuspecting area, said pro-opposition news agency Sham News Network.  

Perhaps sensing the precariousness of the Kurdish position in Kobani, Turkey stepped up its security in the area by positioning 10 tanks on the border near the town, reported Kurdish news agency Rudaw. 

Meanwhile, the US-led international coalition reportedly bombed IS positions in two villages to the east and west of Kobani, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday. The attacks could not be verified by a second source.  

“The Kurds view the international coalition as the best ally against the IS attack,” said Hussein.

 Elsewhere in the region, Iraqi Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga, worked with Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the YPG, to capture a number of strategic positions in northwestern Iraq from IS Tuesday in order to ease the pressure on Ain al-Arab. 

“Rabia [an Iraqi-Syrian border town] is under the control of Kurdish forces,” peshmerga commander Ahmad Mohammad told Rudaw. “We are leaving their [IS fighters] bodies behind and picking up their abandoned weapons.”

In addition to Rabia, Kurdish forces also attacked IS forces in Sinjar in northwest Iraq, where thousands of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis fled when IS drove the peshmerga out in early August. 

-September 30, 2014

-Photo courtesy of @alalam_news.

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