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Kurds advance against Islamic State in Syria’s Kobani
[IsraelTimes] Kurdish fighters advanced Saturday in the contested northern Syrian town of Kobani after heavy festivities with 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....
group, a Kurdish official and an activist group said.

Nawaf Khalil, a front man for the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, said Kurdish fighters advanced in six neighborhoods and have besieged the IS-held cultural center east of town. He added that Kurdish fighters captured the Yarmouk school, southeast of Kobani where eight bodies of IS fighters were found.

The Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the main Syrian Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, killed several IS fighters.

According to an Al-Jazeera
... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula, as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS...
TV report, American ground troops also engaged Islamic State fighters in Iraq’s Anbar province. The US Central Command was looking into the reports of US soldiers fighting IS for the first time since Arclight airstrikes against the jihadist group began earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.

The IS group began its Kobani offensive in mid-September, capturing parts of the town as well as dozens of nearby villages. Hundreds of fighters on both sides have been killed since.

Kurdish forces have gradually pushed the krazed killer group back in recent weeks with the help of US-led coalition Arclight airstrikes.

The push in Kobani came a day after YPG fighters opened a corridor between their positions in northeastern Syria and Mount Sinjar in neighboring Iraq where Iraqi peshmerga fighters have been on the offensive as well. Earlier this week, Iraqi peshmerga fighters were also able to open another corridor to Mount Sinjar.

Iraq’s Kurdistan Region Security Council said peshmerga fighters launched a new offensive on Saturday toward Mount Sinjar and were able to capture the nearby area of Mushrefa.

The statement said that early Saturday, 32 truckloads of food, water and other aid departed from the northern Iraqi city of Erbil to Mount Sinjar through the “corridor established by the courageous Peshmerga forces.”

The Islamic State group captured almost a third of Iraq and Syria earlier this year, plunging the region into deep crisis.

In early August, the gunnies captured Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Zumar, prompting tens of thousands of people from the Yazidi minority to flee to the mountain, where they became trapped. Many were eventually airlifted by a passageway through Syria back into Iraq, where they found refuge in Iraq’s northern Kurdish semi-autonomous region.
Posted by: trailing wife 2014-12-21
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=406688