Dusty and remote, the Syrian city of Kobani has become an unlikely spoil in the war against Islamic State militants — and far more of a strategic prize than the United States wants to admit.
Perched on Turkey’s border, the city of about 60,000 has been besieged for weeks by IS fighters. Kobani is now a ghost town: the UN estimates that fewer than 700 of its residents remain as its people flee to safety in Turkey.
The Obama administration has declared Kobani a humanitarian disaster, but not a factor in the overall strategy to defeat the Islamic State group.
“Kobani does not define the strategy of the coalition with respect to Daesh,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Cairo earlier this week, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. “Kobani is one community, and it’s a tragedy what is happening there, and we don’t diminish that.” But, Kerry said, the primary US military focus is in neighboring Iraq.
But this week, the US dramatically upped its air power strikes against IS in and around Kobani, including 53 strikes over the last three days alone. Several hundred IS fighters were killed, the Pentagon said. Now, the US cannot afford to lose Kobani, said Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria. That means the city’s fate is tied, in part at least, to the success of the US-led strategy against the Islamic State.
“The most important thing about Kobani now is that if it falls to the Islamic State, it would be seen as a defeat for the Americans, and thus would touch on the credibility of the American policy to contain and degrade the Islamic State,” said Ford, now at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
A kurdish appeal
Despite the barrage of airstrikes, the US so far has been unable to help Kurdish defenders break the siege. The US and its allies have said that airstrikes alone will not be enough to beat back the extremists. That requires ground troops, both in Syria and Iraq.
Since President Barack Obama is adamant that American troops will not join the fight on the ground, the US has been working to help arm, equip and revamp training programs for national and Kurdish Peshmerga security forces in Iraq and moderate rebel fighters in Syria. The Peshmerga and other Kurdish forces have been key in containing — if not defeating — IS across much of northern Iraq. Making sure they keep up that front is a top priority for the US
Irbil, the Kurdish capital in Iraq, asked the Obama administration to increase airstrikes in Kobani, said Mahma Khalil, a Kurdish lawmaker from northern Iraq. While there’s no formal link between the government in Irbil and the Kurdish population in Syria, both dream of an independent nation for ethnic Kurds.
Where’s turkey?
Kobani also has become a symbol of Turkey’s reluctance to fight the Islamic State — even in a city right across its border.
If Kobani falls, the Islamic extremists will have a border way-station for militants to slip in and out of Turkey. Already, Turkey is grappling with how to tighten its borders against thousands of foreign fighters, mostly from Western and Eastern European nations, who have traveled through Turkey to join the insurgency.
The US has tried for months to coax Turkey into providing more assistance, including border security, to the global coalition against the Islamic State group. So far, Turkey has provided sanctuary to an estimated 200,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees, and recently agreed to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel fighters trying to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.
But Turkey is not expected to send troops or aid to the Kurdish fighters who are defending Kobani due to a decades-long dispute it has waged against a Kurdish guerrilla group linked to the city’s defenders.
The propaganda battle for kobani
The US isn’t sure why IS is fighting so hard for control of Kobani, a city with few resources and far removed from any capital. But like the US with Kobani, a loss to a ragtag group of Kurdish fighters would be a propaganda loss for IS.
Much of the daily fighting in Kobani is caught on camera, where TV crews and photographers on the Turkish side of the border have captivated the world’s attention with searing pictures of refugees, black plumes of smoke from explosions, and the sounds of firefights on the city’s streets. In video after video, refugees just across the border can be seen and heard cheering as US airstrikes pound the extremists.
Last week, in pictures and Tweets, the militants’ supporters declared Kobani as theirs, and changed the city’s name to Ayn al-Islam, or Spring of Islam. The online jeering has quieted considerably after the airstrikes of the last several days.
