Heavily armed Iraqi peshmerga forces reached the Turkish border Thursday and a first group entered the town of Kobane as they prepared to join fellow Kurds battling the Islamic State group. The group of 10 fighters briefly entered Kobane to co-ordinate with local Kurdish militia who have been holding off an assault by IS jihadists for six weeks, a monitoring group said.
Turkey's Firat news agency said they returned to the town of Suruc on the Turkish side of the border after discussions over the logistics of the peshmerga and the weapons crossing the frontier.
A peshmerga convoy reached Suruc Thursday after travelling through south-eastern Turkey along roads clogged with flag-waving Kurds, an AFP photographer said. There it linked up with a second group of peshmerga who had flown in Wednesday, but it was unclear when the main force would cross into Kobane.
Officials have said there are about 150 peshmerga fighters in total, armed with machineguns, heavy artillery and rocket launchers.
The IS jihadists were pounding northern areas of Kobane along the border with mortars and heavy artillery, a monitoring group said, in an apparent bid to prevent the peshmerga from crossing.
And they attacked a northern neighbourhood overnight but were pushed back by Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"The bombardment of the border area will likely delay the entry of the peshmerga" into Kobane, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, who relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria.
Kobane has become an important symbol of the battle against IS, an extremist Sunni Muslim group that has seized swathes of Syria and Iraq, committing atrocities and declaring an Islamic "caliphate".
A US-led coalition carrying out air raids against IS has intensified attacks near Kobane, and the Pentagon said its warplanes made 10 strikes in the area on Wednesday and Thursday.
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