BBC Online :
Kurdish fighters are engaged in fierce gun battles with Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian border town of Kobane, as US-led coalition air strikes continue.
A BBC correspondent near the fighting says dozens of weapons are firing, with regular grenade explosions.
In its latest report, the US Central Command said six air strikes had destroyed IS weaponry around Kobane.
The UN envoy for Syria has urged the international community to act now to prevent IS from seizing the key town.
Staffan de Mistura told the BBC that the fall of Kobane would be “a massacre and a humanitarian tragedy”.
Seizing the entire town would give the IS jihadists full control of a long stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border, which has been a primary route for foreign fighters getting into Syria, as well as allowing IS to traffic oil from oilfields it has captured.
Three weeks of fighting over Kobane has cost the lives of 400 people, and forced more than 160,000 Syrians to flee across the border to Turkey.
Two days after fighters from Islamic State entered Kobane, a battle is raging for the town’s eastern streets.
We reached the border, within a few hundred yards of the fighting, and I have rarely heard anything quite like it.
At times, it seems dozens of weapons are firing at once, and there are regular grenade explosions too. Thick black smoke is rising from buildings on fire.
US-led coalition air strikes have been concentrated on the western reaches of the city, where the IS advance seems to have been halted.
IS fighters are trying to retake areas in the east that they have lost control of as a result of coalition air strikes, says the head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.
Rami Abdel Rahman, quoted by AFP, said IS had earlier retreated from parts of the eastern and south-western edges of the town and was no longer present on the western front.
Our correspondent says Kurdish fighters feel emboldened a day after witnessing coalition air strikes on Kobane that brought the IS advance to a halt.
The US Central Command listed the damage done by six coalition air strikes south and south-west of Kobane over Tuesday and Wednesday.
It said an armoured personnel carrier, four “armed vehicles” and two artillery pieces were destroyed.
There were three further air strikes on IS in other parts of Syria and five in Iraq.
Correspondents reported at least four more air strikes around Kobane on Wednesday afternoon.
A senior official in Kobane, Idriss Nassan, told Reuters news agency the IS militants had suffered “their biggest retreat since their entry into the city”.
“They are now outside the entrances of the city of Kobane. The shelling and bombardment was very effective and as a result of it, IS have been pushed from many positions.”
