Kurdish fighters seized control on Tuesday of a key border town from the Islamic State group, cutting a major supply line in the biggest setback yet for the jihadists in Syria.
From across the frontier in Turkey, the Kurds and allied Syrian rebels could be seen raising their
banners in place of the black IS flag and taking up positions at the Tal Abyad border post. Fighters with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia waved their yellow banner as Turkish troops looked on from the other side of the frontier. The capture of Tal Abyad, used by IS as a gateway from Turkey to its de facto capital Raqa city, was “the biggest setback to IS since it announced its caliphate one year ago,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.
The frontier town was a key conduit for foreign fighters and supplies into IS-held territory in Syria and for exports of black market oil from jihadist-held fields in eastern Syria, analysts say. Tal Abyad’s fall to the Kurds was “the most significant loss for IS in Syria yet,” said Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert at the Middle East Forum research group.
The Kurdish forces and Syrian rebel allies launched a two-pronged attack on Tal Abyad on June 11, backed by air strikes by the US-led coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq. The anti-IS forces encircled the town from the southwest and southeast before capturing the border crossing just north of it on Monday. The Observatory and Kurdish sources said they had seized full control of the town by Tuesday. “IS withdrew without much fight yesterday... It was an easy win,” said Ahmed <g data-gr-id="18">Seyxo</g>, a spokesman for the Democratic Union Party, the political party tied to the YPG.
The fighting had sent thousands of terrified residents fleeing into Turkey, with the UN refugee agency saying today that some 23,000 people had sought refuge across the border between June 3 and 15.