Battles continue outside Syria’s Kobani after Kurdish forces claim victory

BEIRUT — Kurdish forces battled Islamic State (IS) fighters outside Kobani on Tuesday, a monitoring group said, a day after Kurds said they had taken full control of the northern Syrian town following a four-month battle.

Known as Ayn Al Arab in Arabic, the mainly Kurdish town close to the Turkish border has become a focal point in the international fight against IS, an Al Qaeda offshoot that has spread across Syria and Iraq.

There were clashes to the southeast and southwest of Kobani, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, although it added the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) had managed to recapture a village outside the town.

The YPG said on Monday Kobani had been "completely liberated" from IS, which it referred to using the pejorative Arabic acronym "Daesh".

"The defeat of Daesh in Kobani will be the beginning of the end for the group," a statement on its website said.

IS still has fighters in hundreds of nearby villages. The observatory reported air strikes around Kobani on Tuesday, and on Monday the Pentagon said the fight for the town was not yet over. IS supporters denied the group had been pushed out.

Television footage aired on Tuesday from Kobani showed entire blocks levelled by bombardment, tangled steel and chunks of cement sprawled along muddy streets. Roads were littered with unexploded ordnance and mortar casings.

The militant group launched an assault on Kobani last year using heavy weapons seized in Iraq and forcing tens of thousands of locals over the border into Turkey. US-led air strikes and Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters have backed up the YPG, which called for international help during the siege.