ISIS is losing ground in Syria thanks to the efforts of Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units aka YPG and coalition airstrikes. The jihadist group has faced one defeat after another to Kurdish forces since being forced to withdraw from the town of Kobane back in in January. In contrast to the Iraqi army’s failures, Kurdish troops in Syria have managed to retake around two dozen towns and villages in the country’s northeast with the help of coalition airstrikes. Last week, they liberated Tal Abyad, a key ISIS outpost that was an access point to its self-declared capital of Raqqa. Now the Kurdish fighters have captured an ISIS-held military base thirty miles from Raqqa.
Via Fox News:
Taking the Brigade 93 base further squeezes the extremists, especially after they lost a major supply line when the Kurds captured the town of Tal Abyad on the Turkish border last week.
However, even with the aid of U.S.-led airstrikes, battling even closer to the Islamic State’s stronghold of Raqqa could prove costly for the Kurds and allied rebel factions.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish activist Mustafa Bali said Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, captured the base Monday night. Both said YPG fighters and their allies later entered parts of the nearby town of Ein Issa, the last major residential area north of Raqqa, which ISIS considers the capital of its self-declared “caliphate” across Syria and Iraq.
The YPG’s official Facebook page said “dozens of Daesh mercenaries were killed” at Brigade 93, using an Arabic acronym for the extremist group. The Observatory said that ISIS militants transferred the corpses of 26 of its fighters to Raqqa after they were killed in Ein Issa by airstrikes.
A spokesman for the the YPG said Ain Issa and its surrounding villages were now under their “total control.”
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