IS militants routed from city
Extremists ejected fromSyria border town after attacks
CAIRO — Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border city of Kobani, backed by U. S.led airstrikes, said Saturday that they expelled Islamic State militants who went on a killing spree months after having been routed by Kurdish forces.
The Sunni extremists blasted their way into Kobani, just south of the Turkish border, on Thursday with a series of car bombs, seizing a school and using it as a springboard for apparent revenge attacks. More than 200 people were killed, many of them civilians including women and children, according to activists.
Kobani assumed outsized significance last year when Islamic State besieged it for months before being driven back in January. Along the way, the city became a symbol of Kurdish defenders’ determination to fight off the jihadi, and of the Kurds’ role as the most reliable ground fighters allied with the U. S.- led coalition confronting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Activist Mustafa Ebdi, speaking by phone from Kobani, said that on Saturday, the main Kurdish militia, known as YPG, blew up the school where Islamic State fighters had been holed up, and ejected them from five other areas.
The YPG, also known as the People’s Protection Units, is a militia tasked with protecting the Kurdish minority amid Syria’s multisided civil war. But its presence along the Turkish frontier has infuriated Turkey. The Turkish government considers the force a close cousin of what it deems “terrorists” of the Kurdish Workers’ Party or PKK, which battled the Turkish state for decades.
In September, the U. Sled military coalition, in coordination with YPG fighters on the ground, launched withering airstrikes to roll back Islamic State’s presence in wide swaths of Iraq and Syria. U. S. planes kept up an intense barrage as the group pressed its attack on Kobani.
In January, with Kobani reduced to little more than rubble, Islamic State withdrew. But its renewed raid on Kobani may have been meant to surprise and demoralize Kurdish forces, who were buoyed by victory earlier this month in another border town, Tal Abyad.
That battle helped Kurds unite territory under their control and cut off an important supply route Islamic State had used between the Turkish border and its de facto capital, Raqaa, 50 miles to the south.