The Islamic State group is casting a captive British photojournalist in the role of war correspondent for its latest propaganda video. In the video, made public this week, John Cantlie calmly stands before a camera in what he identifies as the embattled Syrian town of Kobani and asserts that Islamic State fighters have pushed deep into the town despite airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition. Although it was unclear exactly when the video was recorded, Cantlie mentions specific news reports and statements by Western officials from as recently as last week. “The battle for Kobani is coming to an end,” Cantlie says. “The mujahedeen are just mopping up now, street to street and building to building.”
— Associated Press
A convoy of heavy weapons and ammunition set off from Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, bound to reach Kobani on an overland route that would pass through Turkey. Separately, about 150 members of the KRG’s peshmerga militia boarded an Iraqi military aircraft in Irbil to be flown to an airfield in southern Turkey, from which they will cross into Syria.
The dispatch of fighters and weapons marked the conclusion of weeks of debate about what, if anything would be done to help the beleaguered defenders of Kobani, a Kurdish town along the Turkish border that has been under assault by Islamic State for months. But it was hardly the end of the battle for the town.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected entreaties first that he allow Turkish Kurds to cross into Syria to join the town’s defenders, and then that Turkish troops intervene. Erdogan said the town’s defenders were linked to a Kurdish separatist group, which has waged a three-decade war for Kurdish autonomy, that Turkey considers a terrorist organization.
But Erdogan reversed his position after the United States, ignoring Turkey’s objections, began an air assault on Islamic State positions, and then dropped weapons and ammunition to resupply the town’s defenders.. The battle for Kobani has become the single biggest action of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State; U.S. aircraft have struck the city nearly 170 times in the past month, according to the U.S. Central Command.
Still, there was no guarantee that the amount of aid and men likely to reach Kobani would be decisive.
Idriss Nassan, a spokesman for the Kobani canton, the Kurdish administrative unit that governs the city, said local officials were expecting about 150 members of a peshmerga counterterrorism unit to arrive in Kobani.
They are both outnumbered and outgunned by Islamic State, which is besieging the town with as many as 9,000 fighters equipped with tanks, armored U.S.-made Humvees, heavy artillery, mortars and anti-tank rocket systems that the group looted from the Iraqi military when it overran much of northern and central Iraq in June. Since then, Islamic State has supplemented its supplies with extensive stocks of military ordnance seized when it captured Syrian military bases.
Halgord Hekmat, a peshmerga spokesman, suggested in a statement that the men deployed Tuesday would not engage in combat. He said they would be in a “support capacity” and would deliver and oversee the use of mortars, artillery and rocket launchers.
The U.S. Central Command said it conducted four airstrikes overnight on Islamic State targets in and around Kobani. Witnesses watching the fighting from the Turkish side of the border said at least three more airstrikes had taken place by late Tuesday afternoon and that fighting continued across much of the city.
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