Warplanes believed to have been sent by the US-led coalition on Tuesday struck positions held by Islamic State (Isis) militants near a Syrian border town that beleaguered Kurdish forces have been struggling to defend.

The air strikes began late on Monday and came as Kurdish forces pushed Isis militants out of the eastern part of Kobani, where the jihadists had raised their black flag over buildings hours earlier.

On Tuesday morning journalists on the Turkish side of the border heard the sound of warplanes before two large plumes of smoke billowed just west of Kobani.

The US-led coalition has launched several air strikes over the past two weeks near Kobani in a bid to help Kurdish forces defend the town, but the sorties appear to have done little to slow Isis, which captured several nearby villages in a rapid advance that began in mid-September.

Hours after two Isis flags were raised on the outskirts of Kobani on Monday, the militants punctured the Kurdish front lines and advanced into the town itself, said the local co-ordination committees activist collective.



“They’re fighting inside the city. Hundreds of civilians have left,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director, Rami Abdurrahman. “Islamic State controls three neighbourhoods on the eastern side of Kobani. They are trying to enter the town from the south-west as well.”

The centre of the town was still in Kurdish hands, Abdurrahman said. The two Isis flags were still flying in the east of the city on Tuesday, with a Kurdish flag flying in the centre.

Since it began its offensive in mid-September, Isis has barrelled through one Kurdish village after another as it closed in on its main target: Kobani. The assault has forced 160,000 Syrians to flee and put a strain on Kurdish forces, who have struggled to hold off the extremists.

Capturing Kobani would give Isis a direct link between its positions in the Syrian province of Aleppo and its stronghold of Raqqa to the east. It would crush a lingering pocket of resistance and give the group full control of a large stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border.

After initially setting up positions to the east, south and west of the town, Isis shelled Kobani for days to try to loosen up its defences. Just across the frontier in Turkey artillery, gunfire and smoke testified to the intensity of the fight all day on Monday.

“Isis is advancing further toward Kobani day by day,” said Ismet Sheikh Hassan, the defence chief for Kurdish forces in the area. “Isis is fighting with tanks and heavy weapons and they are firing randomly at Kobani. There are many civilian casualties because of the shelling.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 20 Islamic State fighters managed to sneak into the eastern part of Kobani but were ambushed and killed by Kurdish militiamen.

Syrian Kurdish forces have long been among the most effective adversaries of Isis, keeping the extremists out of the Kurdish enclave in north-eastern Syria even as the militants routed the armed forces of both Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

But in recent weeks the Kurds have struggled to counter the increasingly well-armed militants, who have been strengthened by heavy weapons looted from captured Syrian and Iraqi military bases.

As fighting raged on Monday within sight of the Turkish border, the country’s defence minister, Ismet Yilmaz, said Nato had drawn up a strategy to defend Turkey, a Nato member, in the event of attack along the frontier with Syria. The Nato move came at Turkey’s request, said Yilmaz.

On Monday at least 14 Turkish tanks took up defensive positions on a hilltop on Turkish soil near the beseiged town, while a shell from the fighting struck a house and a grocery store inside Turkey but no one was wounded.

Kurds have come from all over Turkey to witness the fight for Kobani. Huseyin Icin, who works in human rights in the city of Izmir, said he had come to the border to see what he can do to help.



“We have a lot of relatives there: uncles, grandmothers, children, so we have to help each other. Isis is a very wild and strong terrorist organisation,” he said.

Icin echoed a common belief that Turkish security forces are supporting Isis, if only by preventing Kurdish fighters from crossing the border to fight.

“My relatives are there coming under fire from bombs, from tanks, from war, and here is the Turkish tanks and army and they’re not letting us do anything. They only want us to go there to take their corpses,” he said.

One Kurdish woman from the town of Suruç said: “If Isis takes Kobani, all of us will die. If they take that city, they will come here. And if Kobani is taken we will have just two options: we will kill them or they will kill us.”

Monday’s heavy clashes followed a particularly bloody Sunday, when more than 45 fighters on both sides were killed, according to the Observatory and a statement from the Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.

The dead included a Kurdish female fighter who blew herself up, killing 10 jihadists, said Abdurrahman. A YPG statement identified the suicide attacker as Deilar Kanj Khamis, better known by her military name, Arin Mirkan.

Khamis was a member of the Women’s Protection Units, a branch of the main Kurdish militia. The force has more than 10,000 female fighters who have played a major role in the battles against Isis, said Nasser Haj Mansour, a defence official in Syria’s Kurdish region.

Material from the Associated Press and AFP was used in this report