Within minutes though, gunfire had started up again, a reminder that while air strikes serve as a dramatic morale boost to spectators and anti-Isis forces inside the Syrian border town, they have done little to turn the tide of a ruthless campaign.Crowds who were gathered on hilltops just a few hundred metres inside Turkey – near enough to hear the gun battles, but distant enough to feel safe – said they had watched the fight drift westwards over several days as militants took street after street.“I just watch the fighting and feel pain,” said Ismail Usdamir, a 47-year-old farmer, as ambulances raced down the main road from the border, taking wounded fighters for treatment, and the unclaimed dead for burial in the nearby cemetery.Black Isis flags can be seen from Turkey, flying over a strategic hill and on at least one building. The hardline group now controls more than a third of Kobani, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, but commanders have reportedly rushed in extra troops, suggesting the strength of resistance had surprised them.Isis had pledged to hold prayers for the Muslim holiday of Eid in the town’s mosques, but its fighters are still tied down in slow fighting through tightly packed homes and apartment buildings. “The clashes are ongoing – street battles,” militia chief Esmat al-Sheikh told Reuters by telephone from inside the city. He estimated that around a quarter of the town was now controlled by Isis.They cannot be taken out by air strikes now though, because they are fighting at such close quarters. The town’s fate will be decided on the ground.“Air strikes alone are not going to do this ... they’re not going to save the town of Kobani,” Pentagon press secretary, Rear Admiral John Kirby, admitted in a news briefing. “We all need to prepare ourselves for the reality that other towns and villages, and perhaps Kobani, will be taken.”The main group fighting Isis, the Kurdish YPG militia, are far less well armed and running low on supplies of ammunition, but are well trained and determined to hold on to the last Kurdish enclave on a long stretch of the border with Turkey.“My children will stay there until the fighting ends. If they opened the border I would go and bomb them myself,” said 48-year-old Bediar Gulkus, standing within sight of the town where she believed her son and daughter were battling Isis. She had come to feel close to them – not to try and get them back, she added. “We would fight even if we have nothing left but stones. But we are asking the international community for help.”That assistance is unlikely to come soon, say western leaders, who have pledged to keep their soldiers’ boots off Syrian soil.“As horrific as it is to watch in real time what’s happening in Kobani, it’s also important to remember that you have to step back and understand the strategic objective and where we have begun over the course of the last weeks,” the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in a briefing.Instead, the US has been leading a diplomatic push to win more Turkish support for the men and women defending Kobani. Retired US general John Allen, special envoy for the international coalition fighting Isis, arrived in Turkey on Thursday for talks.Ankara wants a broader strategy aimed at toppling the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, while Washington is focused on Isis. Turkish leaders are also suspicious of links between the Syrian Kurds defending Kobani and Kurdish separatist groups fighting the Turkish state.Turkish tanks are lined up along the border, and there is a heavy police and military presence, but for now most of it is directed at keeping Kurds who want to join the battle away from crossings, and others from gathering to watch or protest.Even after stray mortar shells and bullets flew over the fence, not a shot has been fired into Syria. Instead, civilians on the Turkish side have been regularly teargassed and hit by water cannon, and one group of refugees even taken into detention.For Kurds across the region, the fight for Kobani has become more than a battle for a town. They have come from towns around Turkey to join the militias fighting inside, or to protest against the Turkish government’s inaction, and demand more help.“The fence is just a geographic obstacle, they can’t put a fence in my heart,” said Leila Salman, a 31-year-old who is running a protest camp just near the border where hundreds of Kurds have gathered from around Turkey in a show of solidarity with the besieged town.“What is happening in Kobani is the most important thing in our life,” she said. “When it comes to the Kurds, everyone in the world just closes their eyes, but Kurds are not blind.”(theguardian.com)Bakudaily.Az