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 The coalition had conducted 21 attacks on the militants near the
Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani over Monday and Tuesday and appeared
to have slowed Islamic State advances there, the U.S. military said,
but cautioned the situation remained fluid.
U.S. President Barack Obama voiced deep concern on Tuesday about the
situation in Kobani as well as in Iraq's Anbar province, which U.S.
troops fought to secure during the Iraq war and is now at risk of
being seized by Islamic State militants.
"Coalition air strikes will continue in both of these areas," Obama
told military leaders from coalition partners including Turkey, Arab
states and Western allies during a meeting outside Washington.
The fight against Islamic State will be among the items on the
agenda when Obama holds a video conference on Wednesday with
British, French, German and Italian leaders, the White House said.
War on the militants in Syria is threatening to unravel a delicate
peace in neighboring Turkey where Kurds are furious with Ankara over
its refusal to help protect their kin in Syria.
The plight of the Syrian Kurds in Kobani provoked riots among
Turkey's 15 million Kurds last week in which at least 35 people were
killed.
Turkish warplanes were reported to have attacked Kurdish rebel
targets in southeast Turkey after the army said it had been attacked
by the banned PKK Kurdish militant group, risking reigniting a
three-decade conflict that killed 40,000 people before a ceasefire
was declared two years ago.
Kurds inside Kobani said the U.S.-led strikes on Islamic State had
helped, but that the militants, who have besieged the town for
weeks, were still on the attack.
"Today there were air strikes throughout the day, which is a first.
And sometimes we saw one plane carrying out two strikes, dropping
two bombs at a time," said Abdulrahman Gok, a journalist with a
local Kurdish paper who is inside the town.
"The strikes are still continuing," he said by telephone, as an
explosion sounded in the background.
"In the afternoon, Islamic State intensified its shelling of the
town," he said. "The fact that they're not conducting face-to-face,
close-distance fight but instead shelling the town from afar is
evidence that they have been pushed back a bit."
Asya Abdullah, co-chair of the dominant Kurdish political party in
Syria, PYD, said the latest air strikes had been "extremely
helpful". "They are hitting Islamic State targets hard and because
of those strikes we were able to push back a little. They are still
shelling the city center."
It was the largest number of air strikes on Kobani since the
U.S.-led campaign in Syria began last month, the Pentagon said. The
White House said the impact was constrained by the absence of forces
on the ground but that evidence so far showed its strategy was
succeeding.
CEASEFIRE THREATENED
The Turkish Kurds' anger and resulting unrest is a new source of
turmoil in a region consumed by Iraqi and Syrian civil wars and an
international campaign against Islamic State fighters.
The PKK accused Ankara of violating the ceasefire with the air
strikes, on the eve of a deadline set by its jailed leader to
salvage the peace process.
"For the first time in nearly two years, an air operation was
carried out against our forces by the occupying Turkish Republic
army," the PKK said. "These attacks against two guerrilla bases at
Daglica violated the ceasefire," the PKK said, referring to an area
near the border with Iraq.
Obama, who ordered the bombing campaign that started in August
against Islamic State fighters, told the meeting of military leaders
from 22 countries to expect a "long-term effort" in the battle
against Islamic State militants.
"There will be days of progress and there are going to be some
periods" of setbacks, he said.
A U.S. military official told Reuters after the talks there was an
acknowledgement that Islamic State was making some gains on the
ground, despite the air strikes. But there was also a sense that the
coalition, working together, would ultimately prevail, the official
said.
"In the short term, there are some gains that they have been able to
make. In the long term, that momentum will be reversed," the
official said, adding the coalition would adjust its tactics as
Islamic State fighters increasingly blend into the population and
become harder to target.
Washington has faced the difficult task of building a coalition to
intervene in Syria and Iraq, two countries with complex multi-sided
civil wars in which most of the nations of the Middle East have
enemies and clients on the ground.
In particular, U.S. officials have expressed frustration at Turkey's
refusal to help them fight against Islamic State. Washington has
said Turkey has agreed to let it strike from Turkish air base.
Ankara has said that is still under discussion.
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NATO-member Turkey has refused to join the coalition unless it also
confronts Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a demand that
Washington, which flies its air missions over Syria without
objection from Assad, has so far rejected.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday there was no
discrepancy between Ankara and Washington over the strategy for
fighting Islamic State in Kobani and that Ankara would define its
role according to its own timetable. The fate of Kobani, where the
United Nations says thousands could be massacred, could wreck
efforts by the Turkish government to end the insurgency by PKK
militants, a conflict that largely ended with the start of a peace
process in 2012.
The peace process with the Kurds is one of the main initiatives of
President Tayyip Erdogan's decade in power, during which Turkey has
enjoyed an economic boom underpinned by investor confidence in
future stability.
The unrest shows the difficulty Turkey has had in designing a Syria
policy. Turkey has already taken in 1.2 million refugees from
Syria's three-year civil war, including 200,000 Kurds who fled the
area around Kobani in recent weeks.
'PROVOCATIONS COULD BRING MASSACRE'
Jailed PKK co-founder Abdullah Ocalan has said peace talks between
his group and the Turkish state could come to an end by Wednesday.
After visiting him in jail last week, Ocalan's brother Mehmet quoted
him as saying: "We will wait until October 15. ... After that there
will be nothing we can do."
A pro-Kurdish party leader read out a statement from Ocalan in
parliament on Tuesday in which the PKK leader said Kurdish parties
should work with the government to end street violence.
"Otherwise we will open the way to provocations that could bring
about a massacre," Ocalan said in the statement, which the party
said he wrote last week.
Turkish attacks on Kurdish positions were once a regular occurrence
in southeast Turkey but had not taken place for two years. The PKK
said the strikes took place on Monday, although some Turkish news
reports said they happened on Sunday.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the Turkish military had
retaliated against a PKK attack in the border area, without
referring specifically to air strikes.
Hurriyet newspaper said the air strikes caused "major damage" to the
PKK. "F-16 and F-4 warplanes which took off from (bases in the
southeastern provinces of) Diyarbakir and Malatya rained down bombs
on PKK targets after they attacked a military outpost in the Daglica
region," Hurriyet said.
'TOO LATE FOR US'
The battle for Kobani has ground on for nearly a month, although
Kurdish fighters on Monday managed to replace an Islamic State flag
in the West of the town with one of their own. The fighters, known
as Popular Protection Units (YPG) want Turkey to allow them to bring
arms across the border.
In the Turkish town of Suruc, 10 km (6 miles) from the Syrian
frontier, a funeral for four female YPG fighters was being held.
Hundreds at the cemetery chanted: "Murderer Erdogan".
At least six air strikes, gunfire and shelling could be heard from
Mursitpinar on the Turkish side of the border on Tuesday, where
Kurds, many with relatives fighting in Kobani, have maintained a
vigil, watching the fighting from hillsides.
In Iraq, Kurdish forces and government troops have rolled back some
Islamic State gains in the north of the country in recent weeks, but
the fighters have advanced in the west, seizing territory in the
Euphrates valley within striking distance of the capital, Baghdad.
Members of Iraq's Shi'ite minority have been targeted by recent bomb
attacks in Baghdad, some claimed by Islamic State. On Tuesday, 25
people were killed by a car bomb, including a Shi'ite Muslim member
of Iraq's parliament.
(Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland, Roberta Rampton
and Phil Stewart in Washington; Writing by Peter Graff, Oliver
Holmes and Philippa Fletcher; Editing by David Stamp, Toni Reinhold
and Peter Cooney)
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