Kobani: Rubble strewn streets, gutted buildings: the ferocious battle for the Syrian border town of Kobani has wrought massive destruction, according to a team of AFP journalists who arrived on the scene Wednesday.
Kurdish forces recaptured the town on the Turkish frontier from Daesh on Monday in a symbolic blow for the militants who have seized swathes of territory in their brutal onslaught across Syria and Iraq.
After more than four months of fighting, the streets - now patrolled by Kurdish militiamen with barely a civilian in sight - were a mass of rubble and gutted buildings, the journalists said.
Kurdish fighters armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles greeted the journalists with a hail of celebratory gunshots into the air and made the “V” for victory sign.
In one street, a mortar shell lay on the pockmarked tarmac. In another, a bright yellow car was left abandoned in the rubble, riddled with bullet holes, as a couple of men walked by to inspect the damage.
On Tuesday, Kurdish forces battled Daesh militants in villages around Kobani, warning that the fight against the militants was far from over.
The recapture of Kobani appeared however to be a major step in the campaign against Daesh militants who had seemed poised to seize the town after they began their advance in September.
But analysts said air strikes by the US-led coalition had been key to the YPG’s success, taking out some of the militants’ heavier weaponry and hitting their supply routes.
A minister in the regional Kobani government said Tuesday that at least half of the town had been destroyed.
The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had announced the “liberation” of Kobani on Monday, depriving Daesh of a prize to add to its territory in Syria and Iraq.
“Our forces fulfilled the promise of victory,” the militia said, but cautioned that fighting was not over yet.
The United States had said on Tuesday that Kurdish fighters were in control of about 90 percent of the town.
“ISIL (Daesh) is now, whether on order or whether they are breaking ranks, beginning to withdraw from the town,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
But he warned that the militants were “adaptive and resilient” and no-one was declaring “mission accomplished” yet.
Observers say Daesh lost nearly 1,200 fighters in the battle, of a total of 1,800 killed, despite outgunning YPG forces with sophisticated weaponry captured from Iraqi and Syrian military bases.
The combat also sparked a mass exodus of local residents, with some 200,000 fleeing across the border into Turkey.
Thousands of Kurds flocked to the Turkish border after the Daesh defeat, but Turkish security forces on Tuesday fired tear gas and water cannon to push back people approaching the barbed wire fence.
The border remained closed on Wednesday.
“We won’t let any refugees cross until further notice,” an official from Turkey’s disaster management agency AFAD told AFP.
Turkish authorities were working on Wednesday to move hundreds of refugees from Kobani to a new camp in the southeastern border town of Suruc which is able to accommodate up to 35,000 people.
It is the biggest-ever refugee camp opened by Turkey, which has taken in 1.7 million Syrian refugees since the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011 as a popular uprising against President Bashar Al Assad.
Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister for the Kobani regional government, said Tuesday the authorities were urging people not to return to their homes yet.
“There is massive destruction. At least 50 percent of the city is destroyed,” he said.
“We are asking them to wait and not come immediately because we don’t have basic necessities for them. There is no food, no medicine. We don’t have electricity or water.”
The US official said that many foreign fighters - including Australians, Belgians, Canadians and Chechens - were among the dead militants, but declined to give exact figures other than to say “it was hugely, hugely significant.”
With the eyes of the international media watching, the militants “wanted to raise the largest flag they ever made over Kobani,” the official said.
“Kobani shows that you’re not going to be part of something great’... so the whole narrative that ISIL (Daesh) is trying to put out, Kobani really puts a dent in it.”
