Kurds flee town as IS wages deadly assault

Street fighting raged between Kurdish defenders and Islamic State militants who advanced into Kobani yesterday after subjecting the Syrian border town to an assault lasting almost three weeks, a monitoring group said.

Islamic State had earlier raised its black flag over a building in the outskirts and forced thousands more of Kobani’s mainly Kurdish inhabitants to flee for their lives across the nearby border into Turkey.

Islamic State fighters had penetrated about 100m into the eastern part of the town, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group which monitors the war through its sources on the ground.