Peshmerga, Syrian rebels battle Islamic State in besieged Kobani
Kobani has become a symbolic test of the U.S.-led coalition's ability to halt the advance of Islamic State, which has poured weapons and fighters into its bid to take the town in an assault that has lasted more than a month.
The battle has also deflected attention from significant gains elsewhere in Syria by Islamic State, which has seized two gas fields within a week from President Bashar al-Assad's forces in the center of the country.
The arrival in Kobani of the peshmerga and additional Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters in recent days marks an escalation in efforts to defend the town after weeks of U.S.-led air strikes slowed but did not reverse the Islamists' advance.
White smoke billowed into the sky as peshmerga and FSA fighters appeared to combine forces, raining cannon and mortar fire down on Islamic State positions to the west of Kobani, a Reuters witness said.
An estimated 150 Iraqi Kurdish fighters crossed into Kobani with arms and ammunition from Turkey late on Friday, the first time Ankara has allowed reinforcements to reach the town.
"(Their) heavy weapons have been a key reinforcement for us. At the moment they're mostly fighting on the western front, there's also FSA there too," said Meryem Kobane, a commander with the YPG, the main Syrian Kurdish armed group in Kobani.
She said fierce fighting was also continuing in eastern and southern parts of the city.
The peshmerga - formally part of the Iraqi army - have deployed behind Syrian Kurdish forces and are supporting them with artillery and mortar fire, according to Ersin Caksu, a journalist inside Kobani. The fiercest fighting was taking place in the south and east, areas where the newly arrived reinforcements were not deployed, he said.
Despite weeks of air strikes, the radical Sunni group has continued to inflict heavy losses on Kobani's defenders. Late last week hospital sources in neighboring Turkey reported a jump in the number of Kurdish fighters being brought across the border for treatment, many of them already dead.
"PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR"
The fight for Kobani within sight of the Turkish frontier has heaped pressure on Ankara, which has been reluctant to intervene, accusing the town's defenders of links with Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants, who have fought a decades long insurgency against the Turkish state.
President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday decried what he called the "psychological war" being waged by the international media against Ankara, rebuffing criticism of its Syria policy.
"Turkey is not a country that will bow either to domestic treason networks or to perception operations abroad," the Hurryiet Daily News reported Erdogan as saying during a speech at an Istanbul university.
A survey by pollster Metropoll appeared to show sympathy for Erdogan's stance, with a majority of respondents saying the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Europe and the United States, posed a greater threat to Turkey than Islamic State.
A peace process aimed at disarming the PKK has appeared increasingly troubled in recent weeks, rocked by deadly Kurdish pro-Kobani protests, Turkish air strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq and attacks on Turkish security forces.
With the world's attention on Kobani, Islamist forces have continued to gain ground elsewhere in Syria.
The Islamic State seized a gas field in the central province of Homs, according to the SITE jihadist website monitoring service, the second gas field reported captured in a week from Assad's forces.
On Monday, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a Western-backed Syrian opposition group, the Hazzm movement, had lost positions and equipment including heavy weapons after being overrun by al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front fighters in Idlib province, near the Turkish border.
On Saturday, Nusra fighters seized the bastion of another western-backed group, also in Idlib.
Reuters
