ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Islamic State (ISIS) fighters have advanced to within a kilometer of Kobane, the beleaguered Syrian border town whose Kurdish defenders face being outgunned.
Anwar Salim, president of the self-declared Kurdish autonomous zone just across the Turkish border, said the attackers were closing in on the town and were only a kilometer to the east, two kilometers to the south and three from the west.
As observers just inside Turkish territory on Sunday watched explosions, apparently from incoming fire crashing into the near-deserted Kobane, Salim said the town remained in control of Kurdish forces but was in urgent need of support.
Most of the residents have long fled, and the town’s defence is in the hands of the relatively lightly-armed People’s Protection Units (YPG), the military wing of the ruling Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
Salim said Turkey had so far given no support, either military or humanitarian. “If Turkey does not want Kobane to fall to ISIS, then it must take urgent action and help the YPG,” he said.
The Kurdish force, opposed by Ankara because of its links to Turkey’s own outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been holding out for two weeks against ISIS, without any military backup.
Salim said US airstrikes in the vicinity had helped fend off the ISIS advance, but that the raids had to be sustained. Kobane’s defenders have complained that airstrikes have struck too far behind the battlefront, without hindering the jihadi forward fighters.
A Rudaw correspondent reported that only about 10 percent of the town’s civilian population had remained in Kobane and surrounding villages. Salim said more than a thousand young people had stayed behind to fight alongside the militia.
Reuters reported from the Turkish side of the border that Kurdish forces had battled overnight to try to prevent ISIS from capturing a strategic hill that overlooks Kobane.
A PYD translator inside Kobane told Reuters ISIS was using tank and mortar fire as its fighters tried to seize Mistanour hill, a landmark whose capture would give the militants easy access to the town, but that Kurdish forces had succeeded in holding them off.
