BEIRUT: Kurdish forces and their Syrian rebel allies have seized a belt of villages around Kobani from Daesh militants, a senior official said on Tuesday, days after they drove the extremists from the Syrian border town.
Daesh militants overran large parts of Kobani and surrounding areas in mid-September, forcing tens of thousands of Kurds to flee to neighbouring Turkey.
For months Kurdish forces fought to retake Kobani, assisted by airstrikes from the US-led coalition. The battle was seen as a major test of whether the airstrikes could halt the extremists’ advance across Syria and neighbouring Iraq. The ISIS group has blamed coalition airstrikes for its defeat in Kobani.
“Most of the villages close to Kobani have been liberated,” said senior Kurdish official Anwar Muslim.
“The rest will be liberated soon,” he said.
Muslim said Kurdish forces and their allies had secured a diameter of 10km to 15km around Kobani.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported similar information.
Kurdish officials meanwhile asked for international funds to rebuild Kobani.
“We liberated the city but most of it is destroyed,” Muslim said.
In an appeal sent to media outlets, Muslim and other Kurdish officials asked the United Nations to “actively take part in reconstruction of the province” and to open a “humanitarian corridor” to allow displaced Syrians to return.
US and allied forces staged airstrikes on 14 Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria in a 24-hour period, the Combined Joint Task Force said on Tuesday.
Two of the strikes hit Daesh tactical units near the Syrian city of Kobani, where Kurdish militia have been pushing out the group with the help of the coalition. Two strikes near Al Hasaka targeted Daesh oil equipment and another near Raqqa destroyed vehicles and a building, the task force said in a statement.
In Iraq, attacks near the cities of Bayji, Tal Afar, Falluja and Mosul hit tactical units and vehicles. The airstrikes came between Monday morning and Tuesday morning, the task force said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday, Kurdish fighters’ success in recapturing Kobani from mmilitants was a “big deal.”
Kerry, speaking during a trilateral meeting with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts in Boston, noted that the Daesh group has been “forced to acknowledge its own defeat.” “We have a long way to go in the overall campaign, but Daesh has said all along that Kobane was a real symbolic and strategic objective,” Kerry said, referring to the IS group. “So pushing them out of there is a big deal. And make no mistake, we will also use the same tools that we used to get there — the tools of cooperation and support — to defeat violent, transnational criminal organisations, and ensure that the rule of law thrives for all of our people.”
He called violent extremist acts of terror “an aberration, a distortion, a hijacking of a great faith.” Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird pressed for allies to “do what we can to stop the cancer of terrorism,” saying these violent acts represented an “outrageous affront to our values and an outrageous affront to humanity.”
