Tuesday, October 21, 2014

ISIS Fight for Kobani Strains Jihadists

Islamic State’s protracted battle for the Syrian city of Kobani against an expanding U.S.-led military campaign and Kurdish militia is straining the insurgency, Syrian opposition activists, Kurdish politicians and U.S. officials said.
The militant group’s monthlong siege on Kobani has overstretched its supply lines, thinned its ranks of experienced fighters, and pressured the insurgency’s overall expansion strategy, these people said.
American military officials also have begun using intelligence provided by Kurdish forces to better target positions of Islamic State fighters, Pentagon officials said Friday. The new area of cooperation signaled a higher degree of coordination with Syrian Kurdish fighters—but not any broader alliance with them, one U.S. defense official cautioned.
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Mosques in Raqqa, the group’s home base in Syria, are appealing daily for blood donations for wounded fighters that are filling hospitals there, as Islamic State recruits new fighters as young as 12 years old, activists said.
“We’ve seen a remarkable number of young kids being recruited and sent immediately to the battle,” a Syrian activist in Raqqa said by phone. “They used to train their new fighters in a military camp for a month before taking them to the fronts, but now you join and in two hours they give you a rifle and ammunition and send you to the front-line.”
Kobani is the first major test of Islamic State’s military resolve as it tries to consolidate control over large parts of Iraq and Syria it has seized since May and project an image of invincibility that has been a crucial tool to recruit new fighters.
U.S. officials have sought to portray Kobani as an unimportant outpost in a much bigger fight against Islamic State, and on Friday Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of U.S. Central Command, said the American-led airstrikes might not be enough to protect the city from falling.
But the recent increase in coalition strikes suggests an American acknowledgment of the battle’s importance. And Gen. Austin said that stepped-up strikes by the U.S. and its Western and Arab allies, including six on Thursday and Friday, had disrupted Islamic State communications and forced the extremists to alter their battlefield logistics, slowing their advance.
Read the rest of the story HERE and view a related video below:

General Lloyd Austin III talks about America's campaign to destroy ISIL, and the military's efforts in Iraq and Syria:



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