Kurdish fighters regain control of 80 per cent of Syrian town Kobani - Polidicks

[video=youtube;uATVc5VKYeA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uATVc5VKYeA[/video] [QUOTE](CNN)Kurdish fighters are claiming progress in their fight against ISIS and now control at least 80% of the embattled Syrian city of Kobani, a monitoring group said Monday. Fighters belonging to the People's Protection Units, known as YPG, captured the city's government square area, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based opposition group. Fourteen ISIS militants were killed in clashes, the SOHR said. It was not immediately clear whether any Kurdish fighters were killed. ISIS, the Sunni Muslim extremist militant group, has been fighting for Kobani for months, hoping to add it to the territory it has already controls in parts of Syria and Iraq for what it calls its new independent Islamic nation. Syria has been embroiled in a more than three-year civil war, with government troops battling ISIS and other rebels elsewhere, leaving Kobani's ethnic Kurds to defend the city.[/QUOTE] [url]http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/05/middleeast/syria-kobani-fighting/[/url] This is great news.

That took forever

[QUOTE=Arkadan;46871796]That took forever[/QUOTE] Even small towns can be hard as hell to take when you're facing an enemy who would rather strap a bomb to their chest and throw themselves at the people they're fighting than retreating or surrendering, imagine what it would be like taking a major city from those fucks.

[QUOTE=Bbarnes005;46873845]Even small towns can be hard as hell to take when you're facing an enemy who would rather strap a bomb to their chest and throw themselves at the people they're fighting than retreating or surrendering, imagine what it would be like taking a major city from those fucks.[/QUOTE]Good thing ISIS completely wrecked their most trained and dedicated fighters in Kobani though. They did a great job sending them into bitter urban combat and then failing to realize that the Kurds had their shit together and they should have probably backed off a bit. Looks like the Stalingrad analogy is quite appropriate, considering the loss of momentum that ISIS is facing.

ISIS should consider itself lucky that they aren't facing anyone with logistical capabilities like the US directly. Most of their strategies are reliant of blitzkrieg style attacks with as few dozen or couple hundred soldiers. While their ability to actually attack,overwhelm, and secure areas is fairly impressive for a militant group their ability to hold ground is considerably less than stellar. Even reading tweets out of areas like Baji,Deir Ezzor,Ramadi,Kobane,Sinjar and Peshmerga reports tend to report that ISIS looses around 5-20 men in most of their attacks on the defenders and even more when there's an advancing force.

[QUOTE=Bbarnes005;46873845]Even small towns can be hard as hell to take when you're facing an enemy who would rather strap a bomb to their chest and throw themselves at the people they're fighting than retreating or surrendering, imagine what it would be like taking a major city from those fucks.[/QUOTE] They're not fearless. An untrained wannabe may be willing to strap a bomb to himself and perform a political attack, dying painlessly and instantly with the promise of religious reward, but that doesn't mean he'll willingly fight to the end in pitched battle or risk being captured. Most of ISIS are untrained militia. But most of the Syrian rebels are untrained militia, and most of the Kurdish fighters are untrained militia too. When multiple ideologically-motivated but largely incompetent forces meet it tends to turn into a slow, grinding affair as neither side is willing or capable of decisive action. This happens all the time in Africa; the Chad-Libyan war took something like six years before a competent Chadian general used innovative tactics to strike a decisive blow against a Libyan airfield and force political negotiation. If you look up some of the combat footage on Liveleak it's clear that very few people involved in this conflict are professional soldiers, when ISIS combatants provoked a small garrison of US soldiers a few weeks ago they got utterly wrecked. Unless we see intervention by a developed nation, this conflict will probably be a slow stalemate driven by ideological battle as much as force of arms.