Kurdish fighters pushed forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria from the crucial Syrian border city of Kobani on Saturday, a monitoring group said, after two days of bloody fighting in which at least 145 civilians were killed.
It’s the latest in a wave of successes by independence-minded Kurdish fighters in northern Syria that prompted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to warn late Friday that his country would prevent a Kurdish state there “at any cost.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, said Kurdish fighters were still combing the city searching for Islamic State militants dressed in the uniform of the Kurdish YPG, the main group defending Kobani.
The YPG is the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union party, which is allied with the PKK, a Kurdish militant group in Turkey that has conducted a 30-year guerrilla war against government forces for Kurdish autonomy and is considered a terrorist group by the United States.
The YPG and its allies, backed by U.S. and coalition airstrikes, have been gaining ground in northern Syria in recent days, even threatening the Islamic State’s stronghold of Raqqah, sparking fears in Ankara that their military victories may lead to a declaration of independence and inspire Turkey’s Kurds to do the same. Those concerns were reinforced by the success of a Kurdish nationalist party in elections earlier this month — the party won 80 seats in the 550-member parliament as Erdogan’s ruling Islamist AKP lost its majority for the first time since 2002.
“We will continue our struggle to stop [a Kurdish state] at any cost,” Erdogan said at an event marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Erdogan’s warning may cause more problems in Syria for the United States, which has consistently tried to prod a reluctant Turkey to take a stronger hand against the Islamic State over the past year while it struggles to build an effective coalition of opposition forces to fight the militant group. Turkey — a NATO member — hosts more Syrian refugees than any other country, and is a key partner in the U.S. strategy to fight the group in Syria.
But Ankara also has been dogged by allegations, which it denies, that it turns a blind eye to the flow of Islamist militants into Syria to join the Islamic State. Increased Turkish hostility toward Syria’s Kurds will likely further complicate the situation, since they are the most effective of limited ground forces available to fight the Islamist group.
