BEIRUT – ISIL fighters on Sunday shelled a beleaguered Syrian Kurdish town near the border with Turkey, as Kurdish militiamen scrambled to repel the extremists' offensive, activists said.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has pushed to the outskirts of the town of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, as it presses its weekslong offensive against the town and its surrounding villages. The assault has forced some 160,000 people to flee across the frontier in one of the biggest single exoduses of Syria's civil war.
ISIL has continued to advance despite airstrikes against its fighters by the U.S. and its Arab allies.
Overnight, coalition strikes targeted ISIL positions around Kobani, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group.
The U.S. military said fighter aircraft conducted two strikes northwest of the city of Raqqa, hitting a large ISIL unit and destroying six militant firing positions. The statement did not specify the location, but Kobani is northwest of Raqqa.
The Observatory said that the airstrikes, combined with heavy clashes on the ground overnight, left at least 16 militants dead. At least 11 Kurdish militiamen were also killed in the fighting.
Authorities were evacuating two villages close to the border.
The fighting between the Islamic State group and the Kurds is one aspect of Syria's multilayered civil war, a conflict that has killed more than 190,000 people since the revolt against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011.
