Scenes of Devastation in Kobani
Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
KOBANI, Syria — Lasheen Abdulla steered her white minivan through the streets of her hometown, past the charred husks of bombed cars, the shattered storefronts, the unexploded mortar shells. Across the gray of destruction were streaks of color: the purple sheets hung to hide the Kurdish snipers who, for months, defended this city from the extremists of the Islamic State.
She pointed to the spots where her city’s martyrs fell — five over there, near the bullet-pocked wall of a girls school, six at a heap of rubble that used to be an open-air vegetable market. In recent days, the ruins have yielded corpses of Kurdish fighters, their heads severed. Even children’s dolls were found decapitated, a symbol, Ms. Abdulla said, of the cruelty of their enemy.
“When you see your hometown destroyed like this, you feel destroyed from within,” said Ms. Abdulla, 43, who remained in Kobani for the entire siege. She has washed many bodies of Kurdish fighters for burial, and said she had three in the house where she was staying.
The devastation of this city, wrought by the Islamic State siege and the American-led air campaign that ultimately expelled the militants, is so thorough that it manages to feel unreal, like a movie set.
Even so, now that the city has been liberated, pride in victory outweighs grief over the losses for the Kurds who live here. Even as the battle unfolded with its outcome uncertain, Kobani took on mythic status — Kurds called it their Stalingrad — as a place from which the Kurds hoped to carve a homeland from the turmoil of the Middle East.
“All I can feel now is happiness because of this victory,” said Anwar Jarmesh, 33, who lost two brothers in the fighting. He had escaped to Turkey at the height of the conflict but returned to make his own contribution: washing the bodies of fighters. “We don’t care about money or buildings, only victory. We were not broken by ISIS.”
The battle for Kobani, a border outpost that abuts Turkey, began in September. Almost by accident, the city, of little obvious strategic value to the American-led coalition, took on outsize importance as the signature test of President Obama’s strategy for defeating the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL: American air power combined with local forces on the ground.
More than 700 airstrikes from the American-led coalition pounded this city for nearly five months — more than in any other place in Syria or Iraq, where the Islamic State controls a vast territory that straddles the border between the two countries.
American officials said Kobani became important to them only because it became important to the Islamic State, which rushed reinforcements to the city — providing a steady stream of targets for coalition fighter pilots — and used the battle as a recruiting pitch for foreign jihadists.
In a statement released Friday, the Islamic State acknowledged its retreat from Kobani, saying it was “because of the bombardment and because some of the brothers were killed.”
TURKEY
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Kobani
Aleppo
Raqqa
Antakya
Euphrates
Mediterranean
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Homs
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The message continued: “They flattened the land with their rockets, so we were forced to retreat. Then those rats advanced.”
Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday that the Islamic State had “said all along that Kobani was a real symbolic and strategic objective. They said so themselves; they defined it as such. So pushing them out of there is a big deal.”
Nearly 400 Kurdish fighters died in Kobani, local officials said, but the Islamic State took more losses, more than 1,000 fighters, many of them jihadists from abroad, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
The body of one of those fighters arrived at the city’s border gate with Turkey on Friday afternoon, in a brown coffin on the back of a white truck.
A Kurdish man lifted the lid of the coffin and unzipped the body bag to show a bearded man dressed in camouflage. A Kurdish officer said the dead man was a Turk who had been living in Germany, and the body was being delivered to his relatives, who live in Konya, a conservative Turkish city.
“He came here to behead our people,” the Kurdish officer, Ismet Hassan, said to reporters as photographers and fighters snapped pictures of the body.
At a traffic circle here on a Friday, a Kurdish fighter stood and looked around, as gunfire and shelling from combat in nearby villages could be heard.
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“Barbarians,” said the man, Zagros Mohammed, who used to be a house painter in a quiet village outside Kobani, as he pointed to a hospital destroyed by an Islamic State car bomb.
Still, he said, “regardless of all of this, we are victorious and they are on the run.”
Despite the destruction and the dangers of unexploded bombs and booby-trapped buildings, there were small signs that Kobani was awakening. Down the street and around the corner from the traffic circle, a handful of children played in a doorway. Their aunt, Fayhaa Hamza, was watching them and said she and the children had returned a few weeks ago, and she wanted to thank Mr. Obama for helping to liberate her city.
“ISIS has been attacking Syrians everywhere,” she said, “and it was only the Kurds who could defeat them.”
A constellation of Kurdish forces, backed by American air power, defended Kobani. Many of them were local Syrian Kurds, but some were Turkish Kurds with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., who have waged an insurgency against the Turkish state for decades. Iraqi Kurdish forces, known as pesh merga, were also dispatched here, and on Friday a truck full of Iraqis drove through the main streets. Kurds also came from Europe, including Sweden and Germany, to fight in Kobani.
Even some Syrian Arabs, with the moderate Free Syrian Army, which rose in 2011 after a peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad of Syriaturned violent, joined the fight.
“There is no difference between Arabs and Kurds,” said a Free Syrian Army fighter who declined to give his name because his family lives in the Islamic State-controlled city of Manbij in Syria.
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Video by Quynhanh Do on December 13, 2014.
The scenes of destruction in Kobani provide a haunting panorama of what may lie ahead, as the war against the Islamic State unfolds in other places, especially in Iraq. There, in cities like Mosul and Falluja, where the Islamic State is entrenched, a campaign to oust the extremists will likely be more difficult, and perhaps more destructive.
Acknowledging this, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said of the victory in Kobani: “Nobody’s doing touchdown dances here. This is going to be long and hard.”
From the start, the battle for Kobani put the Turks in an awkward position. The Syrian Kurdish group that was the dominant fighting force is an offshoot of the P.K.K., an avowed enemy of Turkey. As the battle raged at its doorstep, Turkey refused entreaties from the United States and other Western allies to intervene directly against the Islamic State.
Turkey did take in nearly 200,000 people fleeing the fighting in Kobani, and even as the city was being liberated, the refugee crisis was taking on a sense of permanence. In recent days, Turkey opened its largest refugee camp, in Suruc, a border town near Kobani.
Local Turkish authorities enticed a group of journalists on Friday to tour the new camp by promising them that afterward they would facilitate entry to Kobani for the afternoon.
So far, there are about 4,000 refugees from Kobani in the camp, a number that will soon swell to 35,000, highlighting the reality that despite the liberation of the city it could be a long time before its residents can return.
“Soon it will be filled up, and it will be the biggest refugee camp in Turkey,” said the camp’s director, Mehmet Han Ozdemir.
Regardless of how long it takes to repopulate Kobani, the Kurds say they will never again accept dominion by outsiders — neither the Arabs of Syria, who treated them as second-class citizens, nor the Turks, who ruled them during the days of the Ottoman Empire. There are already plans to open a school in Kobani, where lessons will be taught in the Kurdish language, something that had long been prohibited.
Standing just inside the gate that separates Kobani from Turkey, Mohammed Jarada, a fighter guarding the post, savored the recent victory and shrugged off the costs.
“This means that the Kurds exist,” he said. “We exist.”
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