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Battle for Kobane Rages as Iraqi Fighters Arrive
[AnNahar] Fighting raged in the Syrian border town of Kobane on Saturday after jihadists launched a new assault on Kurdish militia bolstered by the arrival of heavily armed Iraqi peshmerga forces.

The roughly 150 Iraqi fighters, many of them chanting "Kobane", received a hero's welcome as they crossed the border from Turkey late Friday to join fellow Kurds trying to repel the 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 Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 (IS) group.

The town has become a key battleground whose capture would be a major prize for the jihadists, giving them unbroken control of a long stretch of Syria's border with Turkey.

Fierce festivities in and around Kobane have killed about 100 IS fighters in the past three days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

Fifteen Kurdish defenders also bit the dust on Friday, according to the Britannia-based monitoring group, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria.

It said in total 958 people had been killed since IS launched an assault on Kobane in mid-September -- 576 IS jihadists, 361 Kurdish fighters and 21 civilians.

Kobane's defenders have been pleading for reinforcements and the peshmerga armed with machineguns, heavy artillery and rocket launchers traveled through Turkey to Syria from Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

They stood atop their pick-ups, waving to onlookers and brandishing their rifles in the air as they crossed the frontier into Kobane. Turkish police lined the road holding anti-riot shields.

Ankara also allowed dozens of lightly armed Free Syrian Army
... the more palatable version of the Syrian insurgency, heavily influenced by the Moslem Brüderbund...
 rebels to cross into Kobane this week.

Intense fighting erupted late Friday in the town and continued during the night as Kurdish fighters fended off a new IS attack in the north of the city, the Observatory said.

Gunfire and kabooms were heard on Saturday morning although the peshmerga forces were not thought to have yet joined the fighting, it said.

U.S. hopes of creating and training a moderate rebel force as a counterweight to jihadists and Assad's forces suffered a blow after Al-Qaeda affiliated snuffies drove rebels of the Western-backed Syrian Revolutionary Front from their bastion in the northwestern province of Idlib.

The Al-Nusra
...the current nom de guerre of al-Qaeda in the Levant, which isn't to be confused with al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant...
 Front jihadist group captured the village of Deir Sinbel and seized arms and tanks from the SRF, the Observatory said Saturday after 24 hours of combat.

The moderate rebel group, backed by the West and various Arab countries, favors the establishment of a democratic state in a post-Assad Syria.

In Iraq, government forces Friday attacked the strategic jihadist-held town of Baiji, which has been out of Baghdad's control for months, regaining control of two areas, army officers said.

Baiji lies on the main highway to Iraq's IS-controlled second city djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
, and its recapture would also help to further isolate snuffies in the city of Tikrit, to the south.

U.S. officials meanwhile said Washington was drafting plans to deploy American military advisers to Iraq's troubled western province of Anbar and to help arm Sunni tribes to fight IS.

About 600 U.S. military advisers are already based in Baghdad and in the northern city of Arbil.

But as IS has steadily rolled back the Iraqi army in the west, U.S. and coalition officials have grown increasingly convinced of the need to station advisers in Anbar to assist the Iraqi troops.

"We're going to have to help stiffen their resistance and provide some help outside of those two cities, Baghdad and Arbil, and specifically to help them in Anbar province," a senior U.S. military officer said on condition of anonymity.
Posted by: trailing wife 2014-11-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=403332