Reuters/Mursitpinar, Turkey

Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters and moderate Syrian rebels bombarded Islamic State positions in Kobane yesterday, but it remained unclear if their arrival would definitively turn the tide in the battle for the besieged Syrian border town.
Kobane has become a symbolic test of the US-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 centre of the country.
The arrival in Kobane 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 US-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 Kobane, a Reuters witness said.
An estimated 150 Iraqi Kurdish fighters crossed into Kobane 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 Kobane.
She said fierce fighting was also continuing in the 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 Kobane. 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, Islamic State has continued to inflict heavy losses on Kobane’s defenders.
The fight for Kobane 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 Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday 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 organisation 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-Kobane protests, Turkish air strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq and attacks on Turkish security forces.
With the world’s attention on Kobane, 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 militant website monitoring service, the second gas field reported captured in a week from Assad’s forces.