AFP/Arbil, Iraq
Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers agreed yesterday to send much-needed reinforcements to fellow Kurds battling to stop the key Syrian border town of Kobane from falling into the hands of the Islamic State group.
The approval came as Turkey criticised US air drops of ammunition and weapons to Kobane’s Kurdish defenders, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying some of the deliveries had fallen into the wrong hands.
Backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition, Kurdish militia have been defending Kobane against a fierce IS offensive for more than a month.
The town on the Turkish border has become a crucial battleground in the fight against IS, an extremist group that has seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq.
Turkey said this week it would allow Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters to travel to the town to relieve Kobane’s defenders and the Iraqi region’s parliament approved the move yesterday.
“The Kurdistan parliament decided to send forces to Kobane with the aim of supporting the fighters there and protecting Kobane,” speaker Yusef Mohamed Sadeq said.
Mustafa Qader, responsible for the Kurdish peshmerga forces, said a decision will be made in the coming days about the number to be sent.
He did not say when the forces would arrive in Syria, but did say “they will remain there until they are no longer needed”.
Iraqi Kurdistan has its own borders, government and security forces, which have played a leading role in northern Iraq in combating IS.
After initially losing ground, the Kobane Kurds have fought back hard, with the US military saying on Tuesday they had halted the IS advance and still held most of the town.
They got a boost this week by the first US air drop of weapons and other supplies.
But the Pentagon confirmed reports that one of 28 bundles had drifted off course and was likely in the hands of IS forces after another one had missed and was destroyed by an air strike.
Earlier, an IS video showed a masked fighter opening wooden boxes filled with rockets and grenades.
Erdogan said some of the weapons had ended up with IS militants and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) - a Syrian Kurdish group Ankara does not support.
Ankara sees the PYD as the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) whose battle for self-rule in Turkey’s southeast has left 40,000 people dead over three decades.
“Some of the air drops have fallen into the hands of the PYD and ISIS,” he said, using a different name for IS. “It’s impossible to achieve results with such an operation.”
Fighting continued in Kobane yesterday, with at least six US-led air strikes reported to have hit IS positions.
An AFP reporter across the border said heavy fighting broke out in the early evening in parts of the city, in what appeared to be a new IS offensive.
Most of the coalition raids have focused on Iraq, and Washington said yesterday that a dozen air strikes had helped fend off an assault by IS on the country’s strategic Mosul dam.
“There was an offensive action by the enemy in the vicinity of Mosul dam, a combination of US air strikes and Iraqi forces were able to repel that,” said Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren.
Meanwhile, Syria claimed to have destroyed two of three jet fighters reportedly seized by IS fighters in the north of the country.
The militants were reported to have taken the MiG-21s and MiG-23s from Syrian military airports now under IS control in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Raqa.
They “were flying three old planes but our aircraft immediately took off and destroyed two of them as they were landing. The third plane was hidden” by the militants, Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi was quoted as saying by state news agency Sana.
Zohbi downplayed the threat from the remaining plane, saying it was “unusable” and that Syrian forces would eventually track it down and destroy it.
A man standing on the Turkish side of the border watches as smoke rises after an apparent US-led coalition air strike on Kobane, Syria, yesterday.
