FRI 29 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Jan 16, 2015
Source: The Daily Star
ISIS loses ground in symbolic battle for Ain al-Arab
Bassem Mroue| Associated Press
BEIRUT: With more than a thousand militants killed and territory slipping away, the jihadi group ISIS is losing its grip on the Syrian border town of Ain al-Arab under intense U.S.-led airstrikes and astonishingly stiff resistance by Kurdish fighters.

It is a stunning reversal for ISIS in the town, known widely by its Kurdish name Kobani. Just months ago, the militants stood poised to conquer Ain al-Arab – and could pierce a carefully crafted image of military strength that helped attract foreign fighters and spread horror across the Middle East.

“An ISIS defeat in Kobani would quite visibly undermine the perception of unstoppable momentum and inevitable victory that ISIS managed to project, particularly after it captured Mosul [in Iraq],” said Faysal Itani, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, using the acronym of the group’s latest name, the Islamic State.

It would also rob the group of a “psychological edge that both facilitated recruitment and intimidated actual and potential rivals, as well as the populations ISIS controlled,” Itani said.

In September, ISIS fighters began capturing some 300 Kurdish villages near Ain al-Arab and thrust into the town itself, occupying nearly half of it. Tens of thousands of refugees spilled across the border into Turkey.

By October, ISIS control of Ain al-Arab was so widespread that it even made a propaganda video from the town featuring a captive British photojournalist, John Cantlie, to convey its message that ISIS fighters had pushed deep inside despite U.S.-led airstrikes.

The town, whose capture would give the jihadi group control of a border crossing with Turkey and open direct lines between its positions along the border, quickly became a centerpiece of the U.S.-led air campaign in Syria. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared it would be “morally very difficult” not to help Ain al-Arab.

The U.S.-led air assault began on Sept. 23, with Ain al-Arab the target of about a half-dozen airstrikes on average each day, and often more. More than 80 percent of all coalition airstrikes in Syria have been in or around the town.

Analysts, as well as Syrian and Kurdish activists, credit the air campaign and the arrival of heavily armed Kurdish peshmerga fighters from Iraq, who neutralized the artillery advantage of ISIS, for bringing key areas of Ain al-Arab under Kurdish control. These include a cultural center on a strategic hill overlooking several neighborhoods east and southeast of the town, which was captured in December, as well as a neighborhood that houses government buildings and a police station.

“The U.S.-led coalition airstrikes turned the balance. ... Without airstrikes, most likely the city would have been much more difficult to defend,” said Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an expert on Kurdish politics who writes for The Jamestown Foundation, a U.S.-based research center. “The peshmerga did play a role, but it was mostly the airstrikes.”

In the past month, the Kurdish fighters have made more advances, leading to a remarkable battlefield shift. Rami Abdel-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, estimates the Kurds now control roughly 80 percent of Ain al-Arab. Kurdish forces offer similar estimates. Four months after barreling into the town, the extremists barely hold Ain al-Arab’s southern and eastern edges, activists and residents say, despite weekly reinforcements to protect what it clearly views as a major strategic prize.

Since mid-September, the battle has killed some 1,600 people, including 1,075 ISIS members, 459 Kurdish fighters and 32 civilians, according to the Observatory.

“Kobani is on the verge of being free of the Islamic State group,” Abdel-Rahman said. The militant group’s “death toll is very high and they are not able to advance.”

That doesn’t mean that ISIS is leaving without a fight.

The extremists have carried out more than 35 suicide attacks in Ain al-Arab in recent weeks, Abdel-Rahman and other activists said.

An ISIS video released last week via social media, apparently to boost morale, showed jihadis fighting street battles as coalition warplanes flew overhead. It showed a truck loaded with explosives being detonated by a suicide bomber inside the town. The footage could not be independently authenticated, but it corresponded with Associated Press reporting on the situation there.

In the video, a Tunisian fighter among the large contingent of foreign jihadis fighting in Kobani, was shown wearing sunglasses and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. He made a pledge to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that militants in Ain al-Arab were willing to fight to “the last drop of blood.”

“We are not scared by their warplanes,” the fighter said.

An ISIS member based in central Syria, speaking to the AP via Skype, also insisted militants in Ain al-Arab faced no setbacks. 

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the campaign.

It is not clear how long the battle might last. ISIS brought in some 400 fighters, including many well-trained foreign recruits, during the first week of January, an Ain al-Arab-based Kurdish activist, Mustafa Bali, said.

Van Wilgenburg, the analyst, said losing the town would be a symbolic as well as strategic defeat for ISIS. 

But he cautioned: “This doesn’t mean it is the beginning of their defeat in Syria.”

Shorsh Hasan, a spokesman for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG – the Syrian Kurds fighting alongside the Iraqi peshmerga in Ain al-Arab – praised the will of his fighters to battle the far-better-armed ISIS militants while losing “dozens of martyrs and wounded fighters.”

“This is a price that we are happy to pay to liberate Kobani,” he said.



 
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