The Pentagon said on Saturday that it had conducted its first strikes against Islamic State targets in a besieged Kurdish area of Syria along the Turkish border, destroying two armored vehicles in an area that has been the subject of a week-long onslaught by the Islamic State.
The action around Kobani, where at least 150,000 refugees have crossed into Turkey, appeared to signify the opening of a new front for US airstrikes in Syria, and came on a day when several other strikes took place in Raqqa, the de facto headquarters of the Islamic State’s forces, and other sites in the eastern part of the country.
Symbolically, the modest strikes around Kobani demonstrated some US and Arab commitment to the direct defense of the Kurds in an area that, village by village, has been falling to forces of the group formelry known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
After days of pleading for air cover, Kurds watching the fighting from across the Turkish border west of Kobani were gleeful as jets roared overhead and two columns of smoke could be seen from the eastern front kilometers away. They hoped it meant that US warplanes had finally come to their aid.
“Without [US] President [Barack] Obama, we would all lose our heads,” Syrian Kurd Sheik Mohammad Bozan said.
Nearby, Syrian and Turkish Kurds cheered from hilltops dotted with fig and olive trees and army foxholes as Kurdish fighters scaled a ridge and fired a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck at an Islamic State position less than 3km from them. Islamic State fighters could be seen moving from a nearby village, moving one vehicle at a time rather than as a convoy.
On the eastern front, a Kurdish activist, Mustafa Ebdi, said from Kobani that an Islamic State command post, a tank and a cannon had been hit by the US strike. Still, hours later, Islamic State shelling hit Kobani’s main town for the first time, killing at least two people.
In a statement, the US Central Command said strikes around the country had been carried out with forces from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — it did not specify which aircraft hit which areas — and that “all aircraft exited the strike areas safely.”
The administration has been eager to show that those three Arab countries, all dominated by Sunnis, are part of the effort against the Islamic State.
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