World
US-led air strikes on the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane seem to have stalled an IS advance, as reports say the militants have lost ground. The BBC writes:
A senior local official said IS had been pushed back towards the edge of the town as a result of the strikes and advances by the town's defenders. Earlier reports said the militants had controlled almost one-third of Kobane, on the Turkish-Syrian border.
Turkey has ruled out a ground operation on its own against IS in Syria. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu renewed calls for the creation of a no-fly zone along the Syrian side of the border during talks in Ankara with new Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg.
Turkey - a Nato member - also wants co-ordinated action against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and has called for a buffer zone. A buffer zone would include preventing Syrian government aircraft from flying near the Turkish border. Turkey fears that Mr Assad's forces would be the main beneficiaries of an IS retreat.
But the BBC's defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus says creating such a zone would represent a significant military operation requiring the seizure of defendable terrain.
The US military on Thursday said it had carried out nine more air strikes near Kobane, damaging IS positions and destroying vehicles and buildings. In a statement, the US said it was monitoring the situation in Kobane closely.
"Indications are that Kurdish militia there continue to control most of the city and are holding out" against IS, it said. The UN's special envoy in Syria, Steffan de Mistura, said on Wednesday that everything possible had to be done to save Kobane, and the town's fall would threaten Turkey itself.
The effectiveness of the U.S.-led coalition effort in Syria is under scrutiny as Islamic State fighters try to overrun a strategic Syrian town on Turkey's border. Reuters reports:
The United States and its allies, including Gulf states, have conducted more than 130 airstrikes in Syria against Islamic state militants since Sept. 22, in the biggest show of Arab support for U.S.-led military action in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War.
Reuters interviews with current and former administration officials show that the coalition was still taking shape even as President Barack Obama approved the U.S. military's plan on Thursday, Sept. 18.
"It wasn't clear Thursday morning that you would have five countries flying with us," a senior Obama administration official told Reuters. "(Obama) explicitly wanted to have the biggest coalition possible. And that was part of the reason why it took several days to initiate strikes."
