Kurdish fighters seize large parts of IS border stronghold

BEIRUT – U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters captured large sections of a strategic town on the Syria-Turkish border on Monday, dealing the biggest setback yet to the Islamic State group, which lost a key supply line for their nearby self-proclaimed capital.

The seizure of Tal Abyad threatened to flare tensions between Kurds and ethnic Arabs, who accused the Kurdish militia of deliberately displacing thousands of people from the town, which has a mixed population.

Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the main Kurdish fighting force, known as the YPG, said Kurdish fighters entered from the east and were advancing west toward the town’s center amid fierce clashes with pockets of IS resistance.

“We expect to have full control over Tal Abyad within a few hours,” he told the Associated Press by telephone. A few hours later, the YPG announced on its Facebook page that it had liberated the town.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the Kurdish fighters had “almost full control” of Tal Abyad by Monday evening, and had taken command of the border crossing with Turkey. It said some 40 Islamic State militants were targeted by U.S.-led airstrikes as they tried to flee south.

An AP photographer in Akcakale, on the Turkish side of the border, saw several dozen YPG fighters waving their yellow triangular flag and flashing victory signs.

A few people on the Syrian side of the border were seen raising the green, white and red flag of the Free Syrian Army before being apprehended by Turkish security after they broke a hole in the border fence. A contingent of Free Syrian Army fighters is battling alongside the Kurds in an effective alliance against the Islamic State group called “Burkan al-Furat,” or Volcano of the Euphrates.

The loss of Tal Abyad, some 50 miles north of Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State group’s self-declared caliphate, is the extremists’ biggest setback since Kurdish fighters took control of the Kurdish border town of Kobani near Turkey, after fighting IS for months.

A Kurdish victory in Tal Abyad deprives the militant group of a direct route for bringing in foreign militants and supplies, and links the Kurds’ two fronts, putting even more pressure on Raqqa.