Courageous
Kurdish fighters have thwarted an advance by the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIL) into the heart of the besieged Syrian town of
Kobane, a monitoring group has said.
Syrian
Kurdish fighters reportedly pushed back an ISIL attempt to storm the
centre of the town on Saturday, sparking 90 minutes of heavy clashes,
the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.
The Kurdish
People’s Protection Unit, known by its Kurdish initials YPG, told Al
Jazeera that clashes were still raging in the eastern and southern parts
of Kobane with no major advance from either side.
Al
Jazeera’s Stefannie Dekker, reporting from Buyuk Kendirli on the
Turkey-Syria border, said the fighting had evolved into guerrilla
warfare, sparking street-to-street battles between the Kurds and ISIL.
ISIL’s
pre-dawn attack on Saturday came a day after the armed group overran the
Kurdish headquarters in the border town, sparking fears they would cut
off the last escape route to neighbouring Turkey.
US-led
coalition jets also carried out six air strikes on ISIL positions on
Friday and Saturday, destroying a staging building, two small units,
three trucks and damaging a command and control facility, the US Central
Command said.
The
strikes, which are aimed at rolling back gains by the ISIL, appear to
have done little to blunt its onslaught on Kobane that began in
mid-September.
Since ISIL
launched their offensive on Kobane, at least 500 people have been killed
and more than 200,000 have been forced to flee across the border into
Turkey.
On Friday,
the UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, warned that around
12,000 civilians were still in or near Kobane and were at risk of being
“massacred”.
The number included around 700 mainly elderly people in the town centre.
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