BEIRUT, Lebanon (AFP) — Kurdish forces backed by Arab rebel groups captured a strategic air base and the adjacent town in northern Syria from rival anti-government factions overnight, a monitoring group said early Thursday. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and its Arab allies expelled Islamist and other rebel fighters from the Minnigh air base and adjacent town, north of Syria’s second city Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP. The advance comes […]
Tag: kurds
Islamic State attacks Kurdish outposts in Kirkuk
Islamic State militants struck at Kurdish forces in the northern province of Kirkuk on Friday (January 30). Police said Islamic State launched mortars and attacked positions of Kurdish fighters in four districts southwest of Kirkuk city. Militants later detonated a car bomb at a disused hotel in Kirkuk city centre and clashed with peshmerga forces. Kurdish forces later found the body of a militant in the hotel and threw the body over a balcony down […]
Renewed assault on Kobani; 21 dead in Turkey as Kurds rise
By Daren Butler and Jonny Hogg MURSITPINAR Turkey/ANKARA Wed Oct 8, 2014 8:39pm EDT (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters launched a renewed assault on the Syrian city of Kobani on Wednesday night, and at least 21 people were killed in riots in neighbouring Turkey where Kurds rose up against the government for doing nothing to protect their kin. Heavily outgunned defenders said Islamic State militants had pushed into two districts of the mainly Kurdish border […]
About 60,000 Syrian Kurds flee to Turkey from Islamic State advance
(Reuters) – About 60,000 Syrian Kurds fled into Turkey in the space of 24 hours, a deputy prime minister said on Saturday, as Islamic State militants seized dozens of villages close to the border. Turkey opened a stretch of the frontier on Friday after Kurdish civilians fled their homes, fearing an imminent attack on the border town of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani. A Kurdish commander on the ground said Islamic State had advanced to […]
Battle for Iraq refinery as U.S. hesitates to strike
(Reuters) – Iraqi government forces battled Sunni rebels for control of the country’s biggest refinery on Thursday as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki waited for a U.S. response to an appeal for air strikes to beat back the threat to Baghdad. The sprawling Baiji refinery, 200 km (130 miles) north of the capital near Tikrit, was a battlefield as troops loyal to the Shi’ite-led government held off insurgents from the Islamic State of Iraqand the Levant and […]





