KOBANI: Rubble strewn streets, gutted buildings: The ferocious battle for the Syrian border town of Kobani has wrought massive destruction, according to a team of AFP journalists who arrived on the scene Wednesday.
Kurdish forces recaptured the town on the Turkish frontier from the Islamic State group on Monday in a symbolic blow for the terrorists who have seized swathes of territory in their brutal onslaught across Syria and Iraq.
After more than four months of fighting, the streets — now patrolled by Kurdish militiamen with barely a civilian in sight — were a mass of rubble and gutted buildings, the journalists said.
Kurdish fighters armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles greeted the journalists with a hail of celebratory gunshots into the air and made the “V” for victory sign.
In one street, a mortar shell lay on the pockmarked tarmac. In another, a bright yellow car was left abandoned in the rubble, riddled with bullet holes, as a couple of men walked by to inspect the damage.
On Tuesday, Kurdish forces battled IS militants in villages around Kobani, warning that the fight was far from over.
The recapture of Kobani appeared however to be a major step in the campaign against the IS militants who had seemed poised to seize the town after they began their advance in September.
But analysts said airstrikes by the US-led coalition had been key to the YPG’s success, taking out some of the IS’ heavier weaponry and hitting their supply routes.
A minister in the regional Kobani government said Tuesday that at least half of the town had been destroyed.
The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had announced the “liberation” of Kobani on Monday, depriving the IS group of a prize to add to its territory in Syria and Iraq.
“Our forces fulfilled the promise of victory,” the militia said, but cautioned that fighting was not over yet.
The United States had said on Tuesday that Kurdish fighters were in control of about 90 percent of the town.
“ISIL is now, whether on order or whether they are breaking ranks, beginning to withdraw from the town,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
But he warned that the militants, also known as ISIL, were “adaptive and resilient” and no one was declaring “mission accomplished” yet.
Observers say IS lost nearly 1,200 fighters in the battle, of a total of 1,800 killed, despite outgunning YPG forces with sophisticated weaponry captured from Iraqi and Syrian military bases.
The combat also sparked a mass exodus of local residents, with some 200,000 fleeing across the border into Turkey.