American-led forces sharply intensified air strikes against Islamic State fighters threatening Kurds on Syria's Turkish border on Monday and Tuesday after the jihadists' advance began to destabilise Turkey. The coalition had conducted 21 attacks on the militants near the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani over the past two days and appeared to have slowed Islamic State advances there, the US military said, but cautioned that the situation remained fluid.
War on the militants in Syria is threatening to unravel a delicate peace in neighbouring Turkey where Kurds are furious with Ankara over its refusal to help protect their kin in Syria. The plight of the Syrian Kurds in Kobani provoked riots among Turkey's 15 million Kurds last week in which at least 35 people were killed. Turkish warplanes were reported to have attacked Kurdish rebel targets in south-east Turkey after the army said it had been attacked by the banned PKK Kurdish militant group, risking reigniting a three-decade conflict that killed 40,000 people before a cease-fire was declared two years ago.
Kurds inside Kobani said the US-led strikes on Islamic State had helped, but that the militants, who have besieged the town for weeks, were still on the attack. "Today there were air strikes throughout the day, which is a first. And sometimes we saw one plane carrying out two strikes, dropping two bombs at a time," said Abdulrahman Gok, a journalist with a local Kurdish paper who is inside the town. "The strikes are still continuing," he said by telephone, as an explosion sounded in the background.
"In the afternoon, Islamic State intensified its shelling of the town," he said. "The fact that they're not conducting face-to-face, close distance fight but instead shelling the town from afar is evidence that they have been pushed back a bit." Asya Abdullah, co-chair of the dominant Kurdish political party in Syria, PYD, said the latest air strikes had been "extremely helpful". "They are hitting Islamic State targets hard and because of those strikes we were able to push back a little. They are still shelling the city centre."
The White House said the impact of the air strikes on Kobani was constrained by the absence of forces on the ground. The Turkish Kurds' anger and resulting unrest is a new source of turmoil in a region consumed by Iraqi and Syrian civil wars and an international campaign against Islamic State fighters. The PKK accused Ankara of violating the cease-fire with the air strikes, on the eve of a deadline set by its jailed leader to salvage the peace process.
"For the first time in nearly two years, an air operation was carried out against our forces by the occupying Turkish Republic army," the PKK said. "These attacks against two guerrilla bases at Daglica violated the cease-fire," the PKK said, referring to an area near the border with Iraq.
US President Barack Obama, who ordered the bombing campaign against Islamic State fighters that started in August, was to discuss the strategy on Tuesday with military leaders from 20 countries, including Turkey, Arab states and Western allies. Washington has faced the difficult task of building a coalition to intervene in Syria and Iraq, two countries with complex multi-sided civil wars in which most of the nations of the Middle East have enemies and clients on the ground. In particular, US officials have expressed frustration at Turkey's refusal to help them fight against Islamic State. Washington has said Turkey has agreed to let it strike from
Turkish air base; Ankara says this is still under discussion. Nato-member Turkey has refused to join the coalition unless it also confronts Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a demand that Washington, which flies its air missions over Syria without objection from Assad, has so far rejected. The fate of Kobani, where the United Nations says thousands could be massacred, could wreck efforts by the Turkish government to end the insurgency by PKK militants, a conflict that largely ended with the start of a peace process in 2012.
The peace process with the Kurds is one of the main initiatives of President Tayyip Erdogan's decade in power, during which Turkey has enjoyed an economic boom underpinned by investor confidence in future stability. The unrest shows the difficulty Turkey has had in designing a Syria policy. Turkey has already taken in 1.2 million refugees from Syria's three-year civil war, including 200,000 Kurds who fled the area around Kobani in recent weeks.
Jailed PKK co-founder Abdullah Ocalan has said peace talks between his group and the Turkish state could come to an end by Wednesday. After visiting him in jail last week, Ocalan's brother Mehmet quoted him as saying: "We will wait until October 15. After that there will be nothing we can do."
A pro-Kurdish party leader read out a statement from Ocalan in parliament on Tuesday in which the PKK leader said Kurdish parties should work with the government to end street violence. In Iraq, Kurdish forces and government troops have rolled back some Islamic State gains in the north of the country in recent weeks, but the fighters have advanced in the west, seizing territory in the Euphrates valley within striking distance of the capital Baghdad. Members of Iraq's Shia minority have been targeted by recent bomb attacks in Baghdad, some claimed by Islamic State. On Tuesday, 25 people were killed including a Shia Muslim member of Iraq's parliament in a car bomb attack at a checkpoint entrance to the Shia neighbourhood of Kadhimiya in Baghdad.
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