BEIRUT: Islamic State group jihadists battling for control of the Syrian town of Kobani have suffered some of their heaviest losses yet in 24 hours of clashes and US-led air strikes.
At least 50 jihadists were killed in the embattled border town in suicide bombings, clashes with Kobani’s Kurdish defenders and the air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.
The Britain-based monitor also reported that the US-led coalition battling the IS group hit at least 30 targets in and around Raqa, the jihadists’ de facto capital.
There were no immediate details of a toll in the Raqa strikes, which the Observatory called one of the larger waves of raids by the coalition since it began its campaign in Syria in September.
In southern Daraa province, regime strikes killed at least 19 civilians, among them seven women and two children.
The deaths in Kobani came on Saturday after IS jihadists launched an unprecedented attack against the border crossing separating the Syrian Kurdish town from Turkey.
Kurdish officials and the Observatory alleged the attack was launched from Turkish soil, a claim dismissed by the Turkish army as “lies.”
IS began advancing on Kobani on September 16, hoping to quickly seize the small border town and secure its grip on a large stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border, following advances it made in Iraq.
At one point it looked set to overrun the town, but Kurdish Syrian fighters, backed by coalition air strikes and an influx of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, have held back the group.
Impaled in Kobani
In Raqa province, the coalition carried out strikes against at least 30 IS targets on the northern outskirts of Raqa city and struck Division 17, a Syrian army base jihadists captured earlier this year.
Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the strikes had caused casualties, but there was no immediate toll available.
“We can’t say it’s the largest set of raids they have carried out, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen this number of targets hit,” he said.
The coalition began carrying out air strikes against the Islamic State group on September 23, and stepped up raids in Kobani in a bid to prevent it falling to IS.
On Thursday, the coordinator of the coalition said at least 600 IS fighters had been killed in air strikes and that the group had made easy targets of its fighters by pouring them into Kobani.
“ISIL has in so many ways impaled itself on Kobani,” said retired US general John Allen, using a variant of the name for IS.
Syria: air strikes has little effect
But Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, speaking from Russia after meeting key regime ally President Vladimir Putin, said the air strikes were having little effect.
“Is Daesh weaker today after two months of coalition strikes? All the indicators show that it is not,” he told the pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen news channel.
He said unless Turkey closed its border to jihadists, the group would be unharmed by the air strikes.
Damascus has regularly accused Turkey of supporting “terrorism” because of its support for the Syrian opposition.
Turkey denies the allegations, but has made no secret of its backing for the opposition, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling for Syria’s President Bashar Assad to step down.
Despite their differences, Erdogan is set to receive Putin in Ankara on Monday for talks about the conflict, which began in March 2011 and has killed nearly 200,000 people.
The regime has kept up its deadly strikes, including raids that killed 19 civilians including seven women and two children in Jassem in southern Daraa province on Sunday.
Turkey also hosted Pope Francis this week, who used his visit to urge protection of the Middle East’s Christian population against threats by jihadists.
“The terrible situation of Christians and all those who are suffering in the Middle East calls not only for our constant prayer, but also for an appropriate response on the part of the international community,” the Pope said in a joint statement with Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
IS jihadists suffer heavy losses in Syria’s Kobani
