New US-led airstrikes hit besieged Syrian town

The US-led coalition pounded positions of the Islamic State group in the Syrian border town of Kobani on Thursday in some of the most intensive strikes in the air campaign so far, a Kurdish official and an activist group said. But despite the airstrikes overnight and into Thursday morning, the Islamic State fighters managed to capture a police station in the east of the town, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The militants now control more than third of the strategic border town, said the Observatory, a group that tracks Syria's civil war through a network of activists on the ground. The Islamic State group launched its offensive on Kobani in mid-September, capturing several nearby Kurdish villages and bringing Syria's civil war yet again to Turkey's doorstep. It has since steadily been tightening its noose around the town. The fighting has forced at least 200,000 town residents and villagers from the area to flee across the frontier into Turkey. However, Idriss Nassan, an official with the town's Kurdish government, denied the militants were in control of a third of the town on Thursday, according to AP.