Kurds hold off Islamic State fighters on Syrian border

Kurdish defenders held off Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria's border town of Kobani yesterday, but the fighters struck with deadly bombings in Iraq, killing dozens of Kurds in the north and assassinating a provincial police commander in the east.

The top US military officer suggested that Washington, which has ruled out joining ground combat in either Iraq or Syria, could nevertheless increase its role "advising and assisting" Iraqi ground troops.

A US-led military coalition has been bombing IS fighters who hold swathes of territory in both Iraq and Syria, countries involved in complex multisided civil wars in which nearly every country in the Middle East has a stake.

In Syria, the main focus has been on the mainly Kurdish town of Kobani near the Turkish border, where Kurdish defenders have been trying to halt an advance by fighters who have driven 200,000 refugees across the border.

The jihadists have laid siege to the town for nearly four weeks and fought their way into it in recent days, taking control of almost half of the town. A UN envoy has said thousands of people could be massacred if Kobani falls.

As night fell, the centre was under heavy artillery and mortar fire, Ocalan Iso, deputy head of the Kobani defence council, said by Skype from inside the town. Heavy clashes were under way in the east and southeast, he said, with neither side gaining ground.

Street ambush

Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister in the Kurdish administration for the Kobani district, said heavy fighting had begun around nightfall in the streets. Kurdish fighters had caught attackers in an ambush, he said from the town.

After days of IS advances, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said Kobani’s Kurdish defenders had managed to hold their ground. The observatory said 36 IS fighters, all foreigners, were killed the previous day, while eight Kurdish fighters had died. The figures could not be independently verified.

Gun battles took place yesterday near administrative buildings the jihadists had seized two days before, it said.

The fighting in Kobani was within view of Turkish tanks at the frontier, but Turkey has refused to intervene to help defend the city. This infuriates its own 15 million-strong Kurdish minority, which rose up in the past week in rioting in which 38 people were killed.

Threat to Turkey

Turkish Kurdish leaders have said their government’s failure to aid the defence of Kobani could destroy Turkey’s own peace process to end decades of insurgency which killed 40,000 people.

The White House says it will not allow US troops to be dragged into another ground war in Iraq, from which President Barack Obama withdrew forces in 2011.

Nevertheless, the highest-ranking US military officer, Gen Martin Dempsey, suggested in an interview yesterday that US troops would probably need to play a bigger role alongside Iraqi forces.

"Mosul will likely be the decisive battle in the ground campaign at some point in the future," Gen Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told ABC's This Week. Mosul is the main city in northern Iraq, which IS overran and the government has pledged to recapture. "My instinct at this point is that that will require a different kind of advising and assisting, because of the complexity of that fight," he said.

In neighbouring Iraq, yesterday saw a second day of bomb attacks that killed dozens. IS claimed a suicide bombing on a security headquarters in a Kurdish-controlled town in the north that killed at least 28 people and wounded 90.The previous day, bombs killed 45 in Baghdad and its western outskirts near Anbar. – (Reuters)