The reports from inside Kobane, the Syrian border town considered a potential watershed capture for the terrorist group the Islamic State, are ever more dire as American-led airstrikes appear to do little to stop the massacre of Kurds in a gateway town to Turkey.
In an exclusive report, the Daily Mail cites the testimony of multiple witnesses, now Kurdish refugees who managed to escape the wrath of Islamic State terrorists. “Headless corpses litter the streets of the besieged Syrian border town, they say, and some of the mainly Kurdish townsfolk have had their eyes gouged out,” writes author Sam Greenhill, adding severed limbs, cut-out tongues, and a diverse array of torturous behavior carried out on Kurdish bodies.
One man repeated that his children say all the violence he, too, had witnessed, as they escaped Kobane. “I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off,” said the man, “Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out – I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all.”
Others told stories of those who were beheaded in their presence, or where friends and relatives caught in the siege. One 13-year-old boy Greenhill refers to as “Dillyar” told the Daily Mail his 20-year-old cousin was beheaded in front of him. Another witness alleged that his neighbor, a Muslim, “was beheaded because they said he was ‘delivering vegetables to the kaffir.'”
The government of Turkey has warned that, without a ground operation to supplement the work of Kurdish fighters, it is unlikely that the town will be able to fight off the threat of the Islamic State. President Tayyip Erdogan has nonetheless done nothing to contribute to the fight against the Islamic State in the town, instead bombing Kurdish PKK forces. Meanwhile, the American government is insisting that the long-term efforts to fight the Islamic State will diminish the importance of a potential collapse of Kobane’s Syrian government. “Kobani is one community, and it’s a tragedy what is happening there,” said Secretary of State John Kerry, “…[b]ut we have said from day one it is going to take a period of time to bring the coalition thoroughly to the table.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State has increased its use of suicide bombings in Kobane in the past week, and fighting has moved into the streets of the city rather than the outskirts. Kurdish fighters continue to call for increased help from the international community to ward off the terrorist group, who would have nearly unlimited use of the Turkish-Syrian border should they capture Kobane.
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