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 The commander of Kobani's heavily outgunned Kurdish defenders said
Islamic State controlled a slightly smaller area. However, he
acknowledged that the militants had made major gains in the
culmination of a three-week battle that has also led to the worst
streets clashes in years between police and Kurdish protesters
across the frontier in southeast Turkey.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the
country's civil war, said Islamic State - still widely known by its
former acronym of ISIS - had pushed forward on Thursday.
"ISIS control more than a third of Kobani. All eastern areas, a
small part of the northeast and an area in the southeast," the
Observatory's head, Rami Abdulrahman, said.
Esmat al-Sheikh, head of the Kurdish militia forces in Kobani, said
Islamic State fighters had seized about a quarter of the town in the
east. "The clashes are ongoing - street battles," he told Reuters by
telephone from the town.
An explosion was heard on Thursday on the western side of Kobani,
with thick black smoke visible from the Turkish border a few
kilometers (miles) away. Islamic State hoisted its black flag inside
the town overnight and a stray projectile landed 3 km (2 miles)
inside Turkey.
The sound of a jet flying overhead and sporadic gunfire from the
besieged town was audible.
The United Nations says only a few hundred inhabitants remain in
Kobani but the town's defenders say the battle will end in a
massacre if Islamic State overruns the town, giving it a strategic
garrison on the Turkish border.
They complain that the United States is giving only token support
through the air strikes, while Turkish tanks sent to the frontier
are looking on but doing nothing to defend the town.
Twenty-one people died in Istanbul, Ankara and the mainly Kurdish
southeast Turkey on Wednesday in the clashes between security forces
and Kurds demanding that the government do more to help Kobani.
In Washington, the Pentagon cautioned on Wednesday that there are
limits to what the air strikes can do in Syria before
Western-backed, moderate Syrian opposition forces are strong enough
to repel Islamic State.
Islamic State has also seized large areas of territory in
neighboring Iraq, where the United States has focused its air
attacks on the militants.
President Barack Obama has ruled out sending American ground forces
on a combat mission, and Secretary of State John Kerry offered
little hope to Kobani's defenders on Wednesday. "As horrific as it
is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani ... you have to
step back and understand the strategic objective," he said.
TURKISH UNREST
In Turkey, the fallout from the war in Syria and Iraq has threatened
to unravel the NATO member's delicate peace process with its own
Kurdish community.
Following Wednesday's violence in Turkey, streets have been calmer
since curfews were imposed in five southeastern provinces,
restrictions unseen since the 1990s when Kurdish PKK forces were
fighting the Turkish military in the southeast.
Ankara has long been suspicious of any Kurdish assertiveness which
puts itself in a tough position as it tries to end its own 30-year
war with the outlawed PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party).
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Kurdish leaders in Syria have asked Ankara to help establish a
corridor which will allow aid and possibly arms and fighters to
cross the border and reach Kobani, but Ankara has so far been
reluctant to respond positively. Saleh Muslim, co-chairman of the
Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria, met Turkish officials
last week, Kurdish sources said, but the meeting was not fruitful.
The PYD annoyed Turkey last year by setting up an interim
administration in northeast Syria after Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad lost control of the region. Ankara wants Kurdish leaders to
abandon their self-declared autonomy.
PYD's co-chairwoman Asya Abdullah told Reuters earlier this week
that this demand was not acceptable to Kurds. "We told Turkey that
it is not possible for us to take a step back," she said by
telephone from Kobani.
President Tayyip Erdogan says he also wants the U.S.-led alliance to
enforce a "no-fly zone" to prevent Assad's air force flying over
Syrian territory near the Turkish border and create a safe area for
an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey to return.
Turkey has also been unhappy with the Kurds' reluctance to join the
wider opposition to Assad.
On the Turkish side of the frontier near Kobani, 21-year-old student
Ferdi from the eastern Turkish province of Tunceli said if Kobani
fell, the conflict would spread to Turkey.
"In fact it already has spread here," he said, standing with a group
of several dozen people in fields watching the smoke rising from
west Kobani.
Turkish police fired tear gas against protesters in the town of
Suruç near the border overnight. A petrol bomb set fire to a house
and the shutters on most shops in the town were kept shut in a
traditional form of protest against state authorities.
Kurdish anger over Kobani has also revived long-standing grudges
between the PKK sympathizers and Turkish Islamist groups that are
linked to the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and which now appear to
be siding with Islamic State.
In Diyarbakir, Turkey's biggest Kurdish city, five people were
killed in clashes on Monday and Tuesday between Islamist groups and
PKK supporters, a senior police officer said.
(Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Beirut and Humeyra Pamuk in
Istanbul; Editing by David Stamp)
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