ISIL ‘locked in war of attrition’ in Kobani

Two months after the Islamist militant group launched a major offensive to try to capture the strategic prize on the Turkish frontier, the militants have failed to defeat the town’s Kurdish defenders.

Smoke rises after an explosion following an airstrike in central Kobani on Saturday. Osman Orsal / Reuters

BEIRUT // ISIL is locked in a war of attrition in the Syrian border town of Kobani, where Kurdish fighters backed by US-led airstrikes are mounting fierce resistance.

Two months after ISIL launched a major offensive to try to capture the strategic prize on the Turkish frontier, the militants have failed to defeat the town’s Kurdish defenders.

“Several weeks ago, it looked like Kobane would fall, but it is now clear that it will not,” said Romain Caillet, a French expert on Islamist militant movements.

“[ISIL] controls more than half of the town but is unable to advance further,” he said. Buoyed by a string of victories in Syria and Iraq, ISIL launched a major offensive on September 16 to seize Kobani and expand its self-proclaimed Islamic “caliphate”.

The militants believed they would quickly conquer the small town in northern Syria, which was little known to the outside world before the deadly fighting broke out.

The US and Turkey warned in October that the town was teetering on the brink.

ISIL took over dozens of villages surrounding Kobani, besieging the town’s Kurdish fighters.

On October 6, the militants reached the gates of Kobani, triggering panic among civilians.

Tens of thousands fled across the border into Turkey in fear of the reputed brutality of the ISIL fighters.

The militants, equipped with advanced weaponry seized from Iraqi and Syrian troops, then fought their way into central Kobani.

But their advance has since faltered in the face of fierce Kurdish resistance and US-led bombings on ISIL targets.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 600 militants and nearly 370 Kurdish fighters have died in the battle for Kobani.

The fighting also killed around 24 civilians in Koban1, which used to be home to around 150,000 people, most of them Kurds.

ISIL “now faces a war of attrition that is costing it more than its Kurdish adversaries”, said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Observatory.

Kobani has become a major symbol of resistance against ISIL, which has committed widespread atrocities.

The town’s capture would be a major prize for the militants, giving them unbroken control of a long stretch of Syria’s border with Turkey.

But after ISIL seized dozens of Kurdish villages and broke the defences of Kobani in mid-October, “then it fell into a terrible trap”, said Mr Caillet.

Initially, the US said it did not consider Kobani to be strategic, but then “US warplanes went into action” launching strike after strike against [ISIL] positions, he said.

Every time ISIL seized a building, positioning dozens of fighters inside, the US-led coalition warplanes would bombard them, killing a large number of militants.

Mr Caillet said that foreigners, including French, Uzbek and Chechens, have been battling alongside Syrian combatants.

“There were even five French [militants] killed in a single strike,” he said.

Abdel Rahman said the two sides had remained deadlocked, even since about 150 heavily armed Iraqi peshmerga forces entered Kobani at the end of October to reinforce their Syrian Kurdish comrades.

Kobani has become the scene of “urban warfare in a town divided into two”, he said.

* Agence France-Presse