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Kurds Continue To Thwart IS In Kobani
[IsraelTimes] Attacking Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... jihadists met firm Kurdish resistance Sunday in the Syrian battleground town of Kobani. In Kobani, a pall of black smoke hung over the strategic town as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported heavy jihadist losses. IS poured in reinforcements and later fired at least 11 rocket-propelled grenades into the town center, said the Britannia-based monitoring group. The Kurds managed to advance 50 meters towards their headquarters, two days after the jihadists captured it, but failed to deliver a knockout blow. "They (IS) are sending fighters without much combat experience," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said. "They are attacking on multiple fronts but they keep being repulsed, then countering and being pushed back again." IS has earned worldwide infamy for committing atrocities -- often videotaped and posted on the Internet -- since it seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in lightning offensives earlier this year. But it has also gained prestige among Islamist snuffies that has helped it recruit thousands of imported muscle, a reputation now on the line.
"It's a decisive battle for them," said Abdel Rahman. "If they don't pull it off, it will damage their image among jihadists around the world." The US military said it and its Saudi and Emirati allies conducted four air strikes in Syria Sunday, all but one in Kobani. Despite such raids, Pentagon officials have said there is a limit to what they can do without ground forces they can work with. But the top US officer said American military advisers were likely to take a more direct role once Iraqi forces are ready to fight to retake the country's second city djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... , which IS overran in June. "My instinct at this point is that will require a different kind of advising and assisting because of the complexity of that fight," General Martin Dempsey said on ABC's "This Week". Despite deep concern about the plight of Kobani in Syria, Washington has vowed to stick to its overall strategy of prioritizing the Iraq campaign. Speaking in Cairo at a Gazoo donors' reconstruction conference, US Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State... called the IS offensive on Kobani a "tragedy", but it "does not define the strategy of the coalition with respect to Daesh", the Arabic acronym for IS. Kerry also said the Iraqis themselves will have to win back their country. Posted by: trailing wife 2014-10-13 |
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