Kurds oust ISIS from Kobane

Kurdish forces drove Islamic State group fighters from the flashpoint Syrian border town of Kobane on Saturday, after a killing spree by the jehadis left more than 200 civilians dead.Fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) stormed ISIS’s last remaining position, taking full control of Kobane, a powerful symbol of Kurdish resistance.

As they combed the streets looking for fugitive jihadists, the Kurdish fighters found more bodies, taking the civilian death toll to 206, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.local journalist Rudi Mohammad Amin told AFP that more civilians were still unaccounted for.The jihadists made their last stand in a boys’ high school building.

“The YPG detonated explosives outside of the school, then stormed it,” Amin said, speaking via the Internet from a position near Kobane, on the border with Turkey.This military operation was carried out after ensuring that there were no civilians left in the school.”Amin said he believed all the ISIS fighters inside were killed.The jihadists had entered Kobane at dawn on Thursday disguised in YPG uniforms and seized several buildings in the south and southwest of the town.

The YPG soon surrounded the buildings but it took two days to re-establish control.Some of the civilians were felled in the streets by rocket or sniper fire, others were executed in their homes.Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the bodies found today bore bullet marks and appeared to include entire families.

“The bodies were found littered in homes and in the streets, laying here and there,” he said.The IS operation was widely seen as vengeance for a series of defeats at the hands of Kurdish militia, particularly the jihadists’ loss of Tal Abyad, another border town further east, on June 16.