IS seizes one third of Syrian town Kobani

KOBANI, Oct 9 (Reuters): The Islamic State (IS) 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 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.
The United Nations says only a few hundred inhabitants remain in Kobani but the town's defenders say the battle will end in a massacre if Islamic State overruns the town, giving it a strategic garrison on the Turkish border.
They complain that the United States is giving only token support through the air strikes, while Turkish tanks sent to the frontier are looking on but doing nothing to defend the town.
Twenty-one people died in Istanbul, Ankara and the mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey on Wednesday in the clashes between security forces and Kurds demanding that the government do more to help Kobani.
In Washington, the Pentagon cautioned on Wednesday that there are limits to what the air strikes can do in Syria before Western-backed, moderate Syrian opposition forces are strong enough to repel Islamic State.