Chiya Kobani, a 34-year-old guerrilla from the Syrian-Kurdish YPG group, was wounded in the ongoing battle for Kobani, a Syrian-Kurdish town near the border with Turkey. Now he’s stuck in Turkey, unable to return to his comrades.

But he had some good news for War Is Boring when I met him on the Turkish side of the border on Oct. 14. “Only five percent of Kobani is under Islamic State control,” he said.

It seems U.S.-led air strikes are finally helping the Kurds to turn the tide of the battle in Kobani, five weeks after militants first laid siege to the town.

Chiya told me that was injured while fighting militants on Moshtennor Hill near Kobani. His comrades brought him to Turkey on Oct. 4. He ended up at the hospital in Suruc.

“I stayed seven days in the hospital, then I ran away,” he said. “Kobani’s pain was in my heart.”

He said he has difficulty walking because of his wound. But he insisted he must return to the battle. “I promised my friends who had been martyred in front of my eyes that if I died, I would die defending Kobani.”

Some Turkish officials regard the YPG and the affiliated PKK as terrorist groups. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has publicly criticized the YPG, insisting it’s no better than Islamic State.

But it seems the Islamist menace has compelled Ankara to compromise. I asked Chiya how he was able to get treatment. “Turkey didn’t create any problems for us,” he said, “because our friends in North Kurdistan [Turkey] managed everything for us in the Suruc hospital.”

By “friends,” he meant the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party based in Turkey.