Reuters, Beirut :Islamic State fighters have seized more than a third of the Syrian border town of Kobani despite US-led air strikes targeting them in and around the mainly Kurdish community, a monitoring group said on Thursday.The commander of Kobani’s heavily outgunned Kurdish defenders said Islamic State controlled a slightly smaller area. However, he acknowledged that the militants had made major gains in the culmination of a three-week battle that has also led to the worst streets clashes in years between police and Kurdish protesters across the frontier in southeast Turkey.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s civil war, said Islamic State – still widely known by its former acronym of ISIS – had pushed forward on Thursday.”ISIS control more than a third of Kobani. All eastern areas, a small part of the northeast and an area in the southeast,” the Observatory’s head, Rami Abdulrahman, said.Esmat al-Sheikh, head of the Kurdish militia forces in Kobani, said Islamic State fighters had seized about a quarter of the town in the east. “The clashes are ongoing – street battles,” he told Reuters by telephone from the town.An explosion was heard on Thursday on the western side of Kobani, with thick black smoke visible from the Turkish border a few kilometers (miles) away. Islamic State hoisted its black flag inside the town overnight and a stray projectile landed 3 km (2 miles) inside Turkey.The sound of a jet flying overhead and sporadic gunfire from the besieged town was audible.
