Kurdish forces triumphed over Isis in Kobani but the Syrian town is devastated. Emma Graham-Harrison was one of the first reporters on the scene

The concrete eagle in what used to be Freedom Square still surveys Kobani imperiously. But around it almost nothing stands. Buildings have vanished during months of heavy shelling, replaced by snarls of steel and rubble, and the yawning craters left by US air strikes.

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One side street is blocked by the bodies of Isis fighters, rotting where they fell – a pile of bones marked only by a foul smell. On the muddy track that marks where another road led, a series of tattered sniper screens veils the destruction of the schools and homes where sharpshooters had sheltered.

Everywhere there are bullet and shell casings, the twisted metal of spent mortar rounds and, often, the alarming outline of an unexploded shell, bulbous nose to the ground and tail fins spiking into the air.

The Kurdish forces’ unexpected victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable in their rampage across the region.

But the mountains of ruins, the shells and booby traps, the decaying corpses and shattered power and water systems means that while Kobani has been freed, it is no longer a town in anything but name. Salvation from Isis came at the price of Kobani itself.

“There are no words coming back to a destroyed city that was your home,” said Shamsa Shahinzada, an architect who fled Kobani days before Isis arrived and who was our guide to the shattered remains – still off-limits to most of its former inhabitants.

“This was the main square where people crowded every week to ask for freedom,” she said, eyes filling with tears as she surveyed what was left of Kobani’s centre. “This was our friend’s home, we used to stay there. Oh God. Beside there, there was a school – my high school.”

Over half the city was destroyed, officials say. Entire blocks are pancake flattened, as if an earthquake had struck. Even in quieter areas, no building seems to have escaped unscathed – those still standing are missing windows, doors, whole sections of walls, scorched black by fire or looted during the fighting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People walk past destroyed buildings in Kobane in June 2015. Photograph: Ahmet Sik/Getty images

Some things that inexplicably survived only highlight the devastation around them: an unsold tray of snacks sat in one shop window like a perfectly preserved museum exhibit on a street littered with jagged metal, piles of rubble and the twisted bodies of cars used for suicide bombs.

Even on the streets that still look like streets, there is an eerie silence – broken only by the crackle of distant gunfire, the pop of a nearby shot from training grounds and the echoing blast of air strikes and attacks by Isis tanks – a constant reminder that while the militants have been kicked out of the city the frontline is still just a few kilometres away.

“The battle is not over yet,” said Anwar Muslim, a former lawyer and head of Kobani’s government who stayed in the town through the whole campaign and has already brought his wife and children back to camp amid the devastation. His joy at driving Isis out of his home is tempered by concern for the rest of the district; most of it is still under Isis control.

“As you can hear our villages are still fighting, and we will only have finished our work after we free all our countryside,” he told the Observer.

“We, here in Kobani, are on the frontline, fighting against terrorists on behalf of all the people of the world … you can see here the cost of asking for freedom.”

The battles and the devastation inside Kobani mean that tens of thousands of civilians huddled in freezing refugee camps across the Turkish border, who celebrated victory last week in the hope of returning, may not be back in Syria for months.

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Many no longer have homes to return to, and the town is far too dangerous and unsanitary to house them all. “We know people are waiting for us but we can’t bring them back here because there will be disease – because of the bodies – and because there is no kind of service,” Anwar Muslim said.

Turkish authorities are also noting down the names of any Syrians who cross, warning them that they cannot return. With Isis still just 10km away, and likely smarting at their defeat, that is a gamble that even those whose houses survived are reluctant to make.

Certainly Kurdish officials are not taking their victory for granted, at a time when there is still a steady flow of casualties into the field hospital from the nearby frontline.

Soldiers keep a wary guard on all tall buildings and main junctions, huddled round improvised braziers for warmth in driving winter rain. Many are caught between elation at their victory and grief at its cost.

“We are so happy, as if we were flying through the sky. As if God had created us again,” said 35-year-old Mahir Hamid. “But we can’t celebrate because we had so many martyrs.”

Isis lost more than 1,000 fighters, but hundreds of Kurds were also killed in the initially lopsided battle. It pitted hundreds of militants armed with heavy weapons plundered from Iraqi arsenals against the ageing Kalashnikovs and ancient Russian machine guns of the Kurds. At one point, officials warned that food stocks were dwindling dangerously low as well.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thick smoke and flames rise in Kobani in October 2014 after an airstrike by the US-led coalition in support of Kurdish forces defending the city. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

The victory was as epic as it was unexpected – to everyone except perhaps the Kurdish fighters themselves. Kobani had been all but written off by the outside world last autumn. The US came to its aid with air strikes in late September but officials in Washington warned the bombs were not enough to save it, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also forecast collapse.

Kurdish vows to hold on to their base were dismissed as poignantly, but tragically, naive. Isis was well-armed, and its fighters eager to die in battle. They poured resources and men into taking the town, and even took hostage John Cantlie there to make a propaganda video claiming that Isis was just “mopping up” the last Kurdish fighters.

Instead they were being slowly driven back by outnumbered, outgunned but disciplined forces whom the city’s leader compared to heroes of ancient Greece in their ingenuity and bravery.

They even devised a homemade version of an armoured truck to face off against Isis tanks. Steel plates and half-pipes welded to a flatbed lorry created a safe area, gun turrets and a battering ram to attack. It looked more Mad Max than modern military, and still reversed with the warning beeps of the original humble lorry, but was part of their slow slog to victory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The improvised tank that helped defeat Isis

“We bow down before these fighters, who were like the legions of ancient Sparta, holding off terrorism, fighting Daesh against the odds,” said the city president Anwar Muslim, using another name for Isis.

He has set up a committee of architects, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other experts to look at the massive task of clearing and then rebuilding Kobani, which will take years, perhaps decades. For now, they cannot even get heavy moving equipment across the Turkish border and fear a simple clearance of the ruins would be too risky.

“We have unexploded mortars, rockets, bombs, and maybe some traps for explosion the terrorists left behind to surprise us, to kill our civilian people or fighters when they clear up or check the destruction of their houses,” said Idriss Nassan, deputy head of the government.

“There is no food, no medicine, no children’s milk. If our people come back now, there will be a humanitarian crisis on this victory ground.”

Rebuilding will inevitably be slow because even if the military campaign is entirely successful, it will stop at Kobani’s borders, so Isis will still surround its people on three sides.

The Turkish border is the only route with safe passage, so the government is lobbying for a humanitarian corridor, and the creation of new refugee camps inside Syria, where they can help with rebuilding.

They are hoping for help from the allies who sent military aid, and benefited indirectly from the blow dealt to Isis. The priority is funds for reconstruction, experts in bomb clearance to help dismantle the ruins, and pressure on Turkey to open up a humanitarian corridor into Syria.

The damage is so bad that some have questioned whether Kobani should be rebuilt on a new site, but Nassan said that would be emotionally devastating.

“Unfortunately the city is destroyed, but people have memories here and this is our land. We don’t want to move everything from here,” he told the Observer near the ruins of an institute where he once taught English, before Syria’s convulsions propelled him into another life.

“We have to just clear it, but maybe keep some parts as a museum for foreign people to come here to see how Kobani resisted the terrorists.”

The city is still full of evidence of lives dramatically interrupted by the speed of Isis’s ferocious advance; tiny children’s clothes hanging to dry on a washing line months after their owners fled to Turkey, shelves stacked with food in areas where Kurdish discipline stopped looting.

The front wall of a nearby house was ripped off by an explosion, but a display cabinet in one of the rooms sat pristine – with television and a wedding photo in pride of place and untouched stacks of china tea cups and plates, as if the owner had just popped out. Some civilians are starting to filter back despite the risks. Most are fed up with terrible conditions across the border.

“I was in Turkey four months but, for me, it felt like four years. I am taking my family and coming back,” said Fatima, queueing in the dusk to pass through the Kurdish border gates with her five children. “If we have to die here that’s OK.”

Their house had gone, she has been warned, but they were fed up with sleeping on the floor of a shop in the Turkish border town. “I will find somewhere, even if I have to sleep in the street I will come back.”

There are perhaps 400 families in the western part of town, estimates Azad, a cook for the Kurdish YPG – People’s Protection U – fighters. His home survived undamaged apart from a hole torn in one wall to allow food deliveries without risking Isis snipers in the street.

He brought his family back a month ago, including 10-month-old son Fouad. With a well, a generator and rations distributed by the military, he says they are living well, even though Kobani is a virtual ghost town without shops, neighbours or any communal life.

Two ducks, rescued from an abandoned village, quack happily in their small yard and the soundtrack of battle no longer bothers even the baby.

“He is used to it now,” he says. “My wife was frightened at first but now it’s normal for her, too. We are upset about the destruction but happy we got Isis out. At least we have that.”

The only person leaving Kobani permanently was a Turkish member of Isis, returning to his family in a coffin after dying on the front line.

“We are telling the world those people came to kill our children, take our women. But if they ask for their bodies, we will give them,” said Kobani defence minister Ismet Sheikh Hasan as the coffin was carried through the steel border gate into Turkey.

It passed beside a crowd of fresh-faced recruits for the Kurdish forces, shuffling with nervous excitement. They clapped and sang until the door swung open, then raced into their battered home town with shouts of joy.

They had come from refugee camps to carry on the fight against Isis, and must have known that many of them would fall in battle, but just then, elated with victory, no one seemed to care.