Kurd fighters win battle for key militant-held city

BEIRUT — Backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, Kurdish fighters fought their way Friday into a northeastern Syrian town that was a key stronghold of Islamic State militants, only days after the group abducted dozens of Christians in the volatile region, Syrian activists and Kurdish officials said.

The victory marks a second blow to the extremist group in a month, highlighting the growing role of Syria’s Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State. In January, Kurdish forces drove Islamic State militants from the town of Kobani near the Turkish border after a months-long fight.

But it is also tempered by this week’s abductions by the militants of more than 220 Christian Assyrians in the same area.

The town of Tel Hamees in Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh province is strategically important because it links territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The province, which borders Turkey and Iraq, is predominantly Kurdish but also has populations of Arabs and predominantly Christian Assyrians and Armenians.

Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the Kurdish fighters, known as the People’s Protection Units, said the town was a key stronghold for the Islamic State and had served as a staging ground for the group’s operations in the Iraqi town of Sinjar and the city of Mosul.

Dislodging the group from Tel Hamees cuts a supply line from Iraq, Khalil said.

The push on the town’s eastern and southeastern edges came after the Kurdish troops, working with Christian militias and Arab tribal fighters, seized dozens of nearby villages from the Islamic State extremists. U.S.-led coalition forces provided cover, striking at Islamic State infrastructure in the region for days.

More than 200 militants died in the fighting, as did at least eight troops fighting alongside the Kurds, including an Australian who has been with the Kurdish forces for three months, Khalil said.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on information from a network of activists inside Syria, said Islamic State defenses collapsed and the militants fled after Kurdish fighters broke into Tel Hamees from the east and south.

The human-rights group’s director, Rami Abdurrahman, said the Kurds seized more than 100 villages around Tel Hamees and that ground battles and airstrikes around the town have killed at least 175 militants in the past several days.

Some 15,000 villagers have fled the fighting, he added.

The Kurds have emerged as the most effective force fighting the Islamic State, which controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. In Syria, they have teamed up with moderate rebels for territorial gains against the group.

Elsewhere in Hassakeh province, Islamic State fighters this week captured dozens of mostly Christian villages to the west of Tel Hamees — taking at least 220 Assyrian Christians hostage, activists said. The fate of those abducted was still unknown Friday.

On Thursday, video emerged of militants smashing ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in a museum in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Irina Bokova, the head of the United Nations cultural agency, denounced the destruction of ancient statues and artifacts as “cultural cleansing” and a war crime that the world must punish.

From Paris, where the agency is based, Bokova said she could not watch to the end the Islamic State video posted Thursday that shows men using sledgehammers to smash Mesopotamian artworks in Mosul. She called the video “a real shock.”

The Louvre Museum in Paris said the destruction “marks a new stage in the violence and horror, because all of humanity’s memory is being targeted in this region that was the cradle of civilization, the written word, and history.”

French President Francois Hollande also condemned the “barbarity” of the destruction.

“What the terrorists want is to destroy all that makes humanity,” he said Friday during a visit to the Philippines.

Elsewhere in Syria, at least eight civilians were killed in a car-bomb explosion outside the Bilal Mosque in the rebel-held town of Dumeir, east of Damascus. Many others were wounded in the blast, which occurred as worshippers were leaving the mosque after Friday prayers.

Another car bomb went off outside a mosque in Nasseriya, near Dumeir, also causing multiple casualties. It was not immediately clear who was behind the bombings.

Information for this article was contributed by Ashraf Khalil and Angela Charlton of The Associated Press.

 

 

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