...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....
makes progress near Kobani as two air strikes hit the area and sporadic gunfire was reported.
Warplanes believed to have been sent by the US. led coalition struck positions held by Islamic State Death Eaters near a Syrian border that beleaguered Kurdish forces have been struggling to defend.
The
The US-led coalition has launched several
Islamic State fighters advanced into the south west of Kobani overnight, a monitoring group said on Tuesday, taking several buildings to gain attacking positions from two sides of the city.
From across the nearby Turkish border two Islamic State flags could be seen flying over the eastern side of Kobani. Two air strikes hit the area and sporadic gunfire could be heard.
Islamic State fighters were using heavy weapons and shells to hit Kobani, senior Kurdish official Asya Abdullah told Rooters from inside the town, which has been under siege for three weeks.
"Yesterday there was a violent clash. We have fought hard to keep them out of the town," she said by telephone.
"The festivities are not in the whole of Kobani, but in specific areas, on the outskirts and towards the centre."
The al-Qaeda offshoot has ramped up its offensive in recent days against the mainly Kurdish border town, despite being targeted by US-led coalition led air strikes aimed at halting its progress.
The group wants to take Kobani to consolidate a dramatic sweep across northern Iraq and Syria, in the name of an absolutist version of Sunni Islam, that has sent shockwaves through the Middle East.
"There were festivities overnight. Not heavy but ISIS is going forward from the southwest. They have crossed into Kobani and control some buildings in the city there," said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group that monitors the conflict with a network on the ground. ISIS is a former name for Islamic State.
"They are about 50 metres inside the southwest of the city," Abdulrahman said.
An estimated 180,000 people have fled into Turkey from the Kobani region following the Islamic State advance. More than 2,000 Syrian Kurds including women and kiddies were evacuated from the town after the latest fighting, a member of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) said on Monday.
Before the offensive, Kobani, known as Ayn al-Arab in Arabic, was home to refugees from the civil war which pits rebels against
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Light of the Alawites...
and has tanked into hundreds of localized battles between different factions.
The most powerful of the myriad militias fighting against Assad, Islamic State has boosted its forces with imported muscle and defectors from other rebel groups. It gained additional heavy weaponry after its fighters swept through northern Iraq in June, seizing arms from the fleeing Iraqi army.
The group released a video showing dozens of men said to be from Ahrar al-Sham
...a Syria jihadi group made up of Islamists and salafists, not that there's that much difference, formed into a brigade. They make up the main element of the Islamic Front but they don't profess adoration of al-Qaeda and they've been fighting (mainly for survival) against the Islamic State. Their leadership was wiped out at a single blow by a suicide kaboom at a crowded basement meeting in September, 2014...
, a rival Islamist group which has clashed with it in the past, pledging allegiance to its leader His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
, SITE monitoring service said on Monday.