Airstrikes help Kurds push back IS in Kobani, but it may be too late

Smoke billows following an airstrike by the US-led coalition aircraft Tuesday in Kobani, Syria. Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images

ERBIL, Iraq — Two days of intensive US-led airstrikes against Islamic State fighters besieging the Syrian town of Kobani have helped Kurdish forces regain some ground lost to the militant group.

But the lightly armed defenders of the town on the border with Turkey worry their progress will be for nothing unless they receive greater support from the international community.

Fears that Kobani would fall into Islamic State (IS) hands were heightened last week when its fighters entered the city and raised its black flag on a hill overlooking the town.

On Tuesday, however, in addition to regaining territory in the west of Kobani, fighters with the People’s Protection Units (YPG) — the main Kurdish militia in Syria — won a symbolic victory by recapturing the hill and replacing the IS flag with its own.

But despite the gains, fighters in the town remain heavily outgunned and say they are running low on supplies. Meanwhile, analysts suggest while the stepped-up campaign appears to be helping push back IS militants, it may have come too late.

One Kurdish fighter reached by phone from the Turkish border described seeing the city of Kobani slowly encircled over the past month.

Asking that his name be withheld, he proudly described momentary gains, but said for the most part he has watched IS fighters steadily close in on the town — first reaching its outskirts, bringing the battle to the streets and then, pushing deeper into residential districts, taking up fighting positions on balconies and along narrow streets.

“The airstrikes, they have helped,” the fighter explains, “but they didn’t aim at the [IS] centers [of operation].”

Instead, he says, most of the strikes hit targets outside the city in the desert or in “empty lands.”

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From the ground, this fighter says, the prime IS targets are clear to him. “ISIS even puts flags up on all the buildings that are their centers [of operation], but still the US doesn’t hit them,” he said, using an alternate name referring to the Islamic State group.

But analysts say there is a limit to what the US-led airstrikes can achieve. Christopher Harmer, a retired US naval aviator and a senior naval analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, says coalition forces simply don’t have the kind of information that this fighter has; they don’t have their own forces on the ground pinpointing credible targets inside Kobani.

“Unfortunately for the US, and more unfortunately for the Kurds and the Iraqi security forces, the battle has evolved to the point where it’s really a mobile foot infantry conflict,” Harmer explains.

“Once ISIS gets into a city — like they’re fighting building to building in Kobani — once that happens, it’s very difficult, if not impossible for aircraft to effectively target that situation.”

The US-led coalition has attempted to overcome that difficulty, Harmer says, by ratcheting up the number of strikes, but he admits, that’s unlikely to turn the tide. With IS fighters embedded in the city, more strikes on the city’s outskirts won’t prevent Kobani from falling.

“Why are we getting these strikes now three weeks after the battle for Kobani started?” he asked. “If they had been launched prior they would have been much more effective.”

As the battle rages on, the humanitarian situation for the estimated hundreds of civilians trapped in the city is becoming worse by the day.

“The residents and the fighters have high moral,” explained Idris Nassan, a local Kobani official. “They believe they are going to defeat ISIS and they believe the YPG is strong enough to defend them in the coming weeks.”

But, Nassan warned, “the problem now, you know, is the food and the drinking water.”

While the relatively isolated town of Kobani has experience electricity and water shortages for more than a year now, residents report that food and drinking water are now becoming scarcer.

“There isn’t even water to drink inside the city, everything needs to be brought in,” explained one resident reached by phone who asked that her name not be used, “all that’s left is generator power.”

Warning of a massacre should Kobani fall to IS militants, the United Nations estimates that 500-700 mostly elderly people are still sheltering in the town.

“Our best chance to intervene was in the rearview mirror,” explains Harmer of ISW, “but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t intervene now, it just means it’s more difficult for us to do so.”

The fighter, speaking by phone from the Turkish border, says he doesn’t understand why the US hasn’t been able to do more.

“I know that every military and government in the world wants to end this war with ISIS in this region. But yet, they don’t. I don’t understand the reason for that.”