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Coalition Warplanes Reportedly Strike ISIS in Syria in Support of Kurds Syria Border Town, Kobani, May Fall to ISIS, Turkey’s Leader Warns
(35 minutes later)
LONDON — Warplanes from the American-led coalition fighting militants of the Islamic State were reported on Tuesday to have struck targets in and around the Syrian town of Kobani near the Turkish border in support of Kurdish forces locked in street fighting with the militants. MURSITPINAR, Turkey — Kurdish fighters in Syria struggled to fight off Islamic State militants in Kobani on Tuesday, as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, warned that border town was about to fall, despite new United States-led airstrikes on the militants.
If confirmed, the reports could indicate an escalation in American-led efforts to help the Kurds resist, if not repel, an onslaught by the Sunni militants whose forces control portions of Syria and Iraq. Saying that aerial attacks alone may not be enough to stop the fighters’ advance, Mr. Erdogan called for more support for insurgents opposed to the group in Syria. In doing so, he was reiterating the key sticking point between Turkey and Washington: President Obama wants Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State, while Mr. Erdogan wants the American effort to focus more on ousting Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Turkey has long supported the armed opposition to Mr. Assad.
But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey suggested Tuesday afternoon that the strikes may have come too late, telling Syrian refugees at a camp in Gaziantep Province, near the border, that Kobani was about to fall, The Associated Press reported. “There has to be cooperation with those who are fighting on the ground,” he was quoted as saying, while adding that airstrikes might not be enough. “There has to be cooperation with those who are fighting on the ground,” Mr. Erdogan said, addressing Syrian refugees at a camp in Gaziantep, a border province west of Kobani.
The latest fighting is taking place in full view of Turkish forces who have massed tanks with their cannons pointing toward Syria but who have not opened fire or otherwise intervened. But to the Syrian and Turkish Kurds watching in increasing desperation from hilltops here on Tuesday, the ground force that needs immediate help is the Kurdish group fighting the Islamic State in the streets of Kobani, the People’s Protection Committees. They believe that given Turkey’s long history of tensions with its Kurdish population, Mr. Erdogan sees the group, known as the Y.P.G., as an enemy and an even greater threat than the Islamic State.
The United States Central Command did not immediately confirm the news about the coalition airstrikes. Its most recent statement on Monday listed earlier strikes in the area surrounding the beleaguered town, where two black flags have been raised by the attacking militants. Such complications are part of the tangled mix of alliances and enmities that have challenged the American effort to battle the Islamic State without wading deeper into the Syrian conflict.
Reporters close to the border said on Tuesday, however, that new attacks by allied warplanes hit militant positions west of Kobani. Reporters were said to have heard the sound of jet engines before two large plumes of smoke rose from the area. Not long after Mr. Erdogan spoke, an airstrike hit less than a mile to the southwest of Kobani, also known as Ain al-Arab, sending a black plume skyward. Residents said the target appeared to be an Islamic State tank that had been shelling the city for two days. Two more strikes followed in the same area in less than an hour.
Barwar Mohammad Ali, a coordinator with the Kurdish defenders inside Kobani, said street fighting continued Tuesday morning. While the new round of airstrikes appeared to make a difference, he said, they were still not enough to hold off a larger and better-armed Islamic State force. Several other airstrikes hit Islamic State positions overnight and Tuesday morning on the southern and eastern outskirts of the town, said Barwar Mohammad Ali, a coordinator with the Kurdish Y.P.G. force, who was reached by telephone inside Kobani.
Several airstrikes appeared to hit the southern and eastern outskirts of Kobani overnight and on Tuesday morning, he said. “It is the first time that people have the impression that the airstrikes are effective,” he said, referring to Kurdish fighters on the front lines with whom he said he was in touch. “But they need more.” “It is the first time that people have the impression that the airstrikes are effective,” Mr. Ali said, referring to Kurdish fighters on the front lines. “But they need more.”
Defenders had clashed with Islamic State militants on the eastern edge of Kobani, or Ayn al-Arab, as the town is called in Arabic, the main settlement in a farming district of the same name. Several dozen Islamic State fighters were killed and 20, including 10 foreigners, were taken prisoner, he said. He said street fighting had continued on Tuesday and that Y.P.G. fighters had killed numerous attackers and captured 20, including 10 foreigners.
Around 200 Kurdish civilians trying to flee the area crossed into Turkey along with several journalists, Mr. Ali said, and there were reports that they had been detained by the Turkish authorities. Tens of thousands of people have already fled the fighting around Kobani. The American military confirmed four new airstrikes on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL: one strike south of Kobani that destroyed three armed vehicles and damaged another; another strike to the southeast that hit antiaircraft artillery, and two to the southwest that damaged a tank and “destroyed an ISIL unit.”
One of the detainees, Mustafa Bali, was reached by phone in a basketball hall in a Turkish border village called Ali Kor. He said that he and about 200 other civilians crossed the border into Turkey on Monday after the Kurdish forces known as the People’s Protection Committees, or Y.P.G., urged everyone but fighters to evacuate. Buses took them to the hall, where they are still locked in, he said. But there was little joy among the crowds of Kurdish men watching the battle unfold just across the border fence, many of whom had only recently fled the town or had relatives there.
Young men in the group, which also included women and children, were interrogated and asked about Y.P.G. leaders and their relations with them. One spectator, Mahmoud Nabo, 35, a Syrian Kurd who left his home in Kobani after Y.P.G. fighters urged civilians to evacuate on Monday, said airstrikes would have a limited effect since Islamic state militants move in small groups. They would work, he said, only if Kurdish fighters were given weapons and ammunition.
“Now I can see the shelling is getting closer to my neighborhood,” he said, pointing to the western side of the city. “We thought everything would stop after the first airstrike on ISIS, but now it is closer and more frequent.”
Another spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from the nearby Turkish town of Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids.
He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the Y.P.G. and listening to warplanes circling overhead. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said.
Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey for the delay in stronger American-led strikes. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.”
Kobani is cut off from the east, west and south by the well-armed Islamic State fighters. To the north, refugees and fighters face the border fence with Turkey – a barrier to resupplying the Y.P.G. The Turkish authorities have refused to allow the group to receive supplies and weapons unless it meets a set of demands that are virtually impossible politically.
Turkey wants the group to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him, and to dismantle its semiautonomous zone inside Syria. But the Y.P.G. and its affiliated political party, the P.Y.D., accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government.
Turkey also wants the P.Y.D. to distance itself from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which the Turkish government and the United States consider a terrorist group.
That impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities when border crossings are closed.
Turkish soldiers have stood by and watched the fighting from their armored vehicles, and have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State.
Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, one of many instances in which Turkish security forces have used it against crowds of demonstrators, journalists, and would-be fighters and refugees. Tensions were also higher, with Kurdish men packing the streets of Suruc to show their displeasure with Turkish policy.
More than 180,000 people have already fled the fighting around Kobani, which in addition to its own population had hosted tens of thousands of displaced Syrians. Turkey is already hosting more than 1.5 million Syrians, shouldering an enormous economic and political burden.
But on Monday, about 200 civilians who crossed into Turkey from Kobani were detained by Turkish authorities, according to one of the detainees, Mustafa Bali, reached by phone in a Turkish border village called Ali Kor. Buses took them from an official border crossing to a gymnasium, where they are still being detained, he said.
Young men in the group, which also included women and children, were interrogated and asked about Y.P.G. leaders and their relations with them, he said.
“I was locked alone in a room for four hours,” said Mr. Bali, a Syrian Kurdish activist. “They checked my phone and text messages and asked me questions about specific names in the Y.P.G. in a very insulting way. They told us we will be released when they are done with our procedure, but I don’t know what kind of procedure a refugee receives.”“I was locked alone in a room for four hours,” said Mr. Bali, a Syrian Kurdish activist. “They checked my phone and text messages and asked me questions about specific names in the Y.P.G. in a very insulting way. They told us we will be released when they are done with our procedure, but I don’t know what kind of procedure a refugee receives.”
The battle has coincided with deepening concerns about the impact of Western involvement on the fate of hostages held by the militants, who claimed to have beheaded four of them — two Americans and two Britons — and to have threatened a fifth, a 26-year-old American convert to Islam, Abdul-Rahman Kassig.
The most recent decapitation came last week when video images by the Islamic State purported to show the death of Alan Henning, a British cabdriver abducted last December.
Britain has committed warplanes to attack Islamic State targets in Iraq, but it has said it will not immediately join the United States in bombing targets in Syria.
The British authorities’ handling of the crisis drew criticism on Tuesday from both the Henning family and a British former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was released in Britain last week from a pretrial detention lasting seven months. He had been held on suspicion of helping militants in Syria, but the authorities freed him after abruptly withdrawing terrorism-related charges days before he was to stand trial.
Reg Henning, the brother of Alan Henning, challenged Prime Minister David Cameron’s insistence that Britain, like the United States, would not commit ground forces to the fight against Islamic State.
In an interview with the BBC, he spoke of the need to “send ground forces in to find out where these monsters are,” referring to his brother’s captors. “The sooner we do it, the sooner the killing stops,” he said.
Separately, Moazzam Begg, the former detainee, said he had offered to intervene with fighters in Syria to secure Mr. Henning’s release, but the authorities rejected the idea. He said he had played a role in the past to free captives.
“I intervened by getting some other groups who could pressurize them to release those individuals, and I got them released,” he told the BBC. “The problem is that the government in its attempts to demonize and criminalize me simply refused to look at anything to do with what I was about.”