====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
From the late edition of today's Washington Post, encouraging news which could mark a decisive turn in the battle for Kobane. I don't give a rat's ass if US air power has made the difference, as the YPG has itself acknowledged in several reports. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/kurds-claim-to-have-turned-tide-against-islamic-state-in-kobane/2014/10/15/af9b5726-547f-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html [...] "Kurdish fighters and activists on the ground said that two days of relentless attacks have turned the tide in their favor. "Ihsan Naasan, the deputy foreign minister of Kobane’s self-proclaimed government, saidKurdish defenders had pushed the jihadists back more than four miles from the western edge of the town by nightfall Wednesday and were advancing into the eastern and southern neighborhoods of the city. "He claimed that Kurdish fighters with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, now control 80 percent of Kobane after losing more than half of it in heavy fighting in past days. “The YPG now have the initiative,” Naasan said, speaking from inside the town. “They are on the counteroffensive against the Islamic State.” "If the Kurdish fighters manage to retake Kobane, it would be the first time that U.S. strikes have helped eject the Islamic State from territory in Syria since the air war was expanded to include the northern and eastern parts of the country a little over three weeks ago. "The border town, nestled amid rolling farmland in a remote part of north-central Syria, has limited strategic significance. Islamic State fighters had advanced toward it unimpeded, capturing scores of tiny villages across a large swath of territory along the way and sending more than 200,000 people fleeing in panic into Turkish territory. "Although daily U.S. airstrikes had begun in Kobane over a week earlier, it was only on Tuesday, as militant reinforcements were said to have arrived, that coalition sorties sharply escalated. On Wednesday, the U.S. Central Command said it had carried out 18 strikes in the previous 24 hours, on top of 21 reported the previous day. "Ground-shaking explosions reverberated repeatedly across the countryside spanning the Syria-Turkey border Wednesday, sending plumes of smoke billowing from the town. Kurdish activists said that the bodies of “tens” of Islamic State fighters lay strewn around the streets of bombed neighborhoods that they said were subsequently retaken by defenders. "The Islamic State, which typically boasts about its conquests in videos and statements on social media, has fallen silent on the Kobane battle, amid unconfirmed reports that some of its more senior commanders have been killed. Among those mentioned are leaders known as Abu Khattab al-Kurdi, from the town of Halabja in Iraq’s Kurdish region, and Abu Mohammed al-Amriki, a Chechen who was said to have lived in the United States for a decade before leaving to fight in Syria." ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
