Iraqi Kurds to fight for Kobane
Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers yesterday agreed to send much-needed reinforcements to fellow Kurds battling to stop the key Syrian border town of Kobane from falling into the hands of the so called Islamic State group.
The approval came as Turkey criticised US air drops of ammunition and weapons to Kobane's Kurdish defenders, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying some of the deliveries had fallen into the wrong hands.
Backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition, Kurdish militia have been defending Kobane against a fierce ISIS offensive for more than a month.
Turkey said this week it would allow Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters to travel to the town to relieve Kobane's defenders and yesterday the Iraqi region's parliament approved the move. It was not immediately clear how many peshmerga fighters would be deployed or when they might be expected to arrive in Kobane.
After initially losing ground to the jihadists in Kobane, the Kurds have fought back hard, with the US military saying Tuesday they had halted the ISIS advance and remained in control of most of Kobane.
They were given a boost this week by the first US air drop of weapons and other supplies, though one of the 27 parachuted bundles was reported to have fallen into jihadist hands, with an ISIS video showing a masked fighter opening wooden boxes filled with rockets and grenades.
Erdogan said some of the weapons had ended up with jihadists and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) -- a Syrian Kurdish group that Ankara does not support.
Ankara sees the PYD as the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) whose battle for self-rule in Turkey's southeast has left 40,000 people dead over three decades.
Meanwhile, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday told Iraq's visiting premier that the Baghdad government is capable of defeating the jihadists without foreign troops being deployed.
"We stand beside you and will seriously defend your government like the previous government," Khamenei, quoted by state television, said in a meeting in Tehran with Iraq's Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.
"Iran recognises the security of Iraq, (our) neighbour and brother country, as its own security."
Fighting continued in Kobane yesterday, with at least six US-led air strikes reported to have hit ISIS positions.
An AFP reporter across the border in Turkey said heavy fighting broke out in the early evening in parts of the city, in what appeared to be a new IS offensive.
ISIS fighters are reported to have suffered heavy losses in Kobane, especially after the coalition dramatically increased strikes on their positions last week.
Most of the coalition raids have focused on Iraq, and Washington yesterday said that a dozen air strikes had helped fend off an assault by ISIS on the country's strategic Mosul dam.
Syria meanwhile claimed to have destroyed two of three warplanes reportedly seized by ISIS fighters in the north of the country.
The jihadists were reported to have taken the three planes, believed to be MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets, from Syrian military airports now under IS control in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Raqa.
The minister downplayed the threat from the remaining plane, saying it was "unusable" and that Syrian forces would eventually track it down and destroy it.
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