Syrian rebel forces boost Kobane defence

The BBC has an article by Jim Muir about the civil war in Syria:

A group of Syrian Arab rebels has arrived in Kobane to help defend the northern border town against Islamic State (IS) militants, sources inside the town have told the BBC.
Between fifty and two hundred Free Syrian Army rebels entered the town overnight.
The news came as about a hundred and fifty Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters arrived in Turkey on their way to the town.
Syrian Kurds have been under siege in Kobane for six weeks, aided by US-led coalition air strikes. The US said it launched eight air strikes near the town, destroying five IS fighting positions and six IS vehicles.
The battle has emerged as a major test of whether the air campaign can push back IS, but the defenders, thought to number between one and two thousand, say they also need heavy weapons to defeat the militants.
Separately, IS militants took control of parts of an oil and gas field in Shaer in central Syria's Homs province, killing thirty members of pro-government forces, activists from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and government sources reported.

Analysis by Jim Muir of BBC News in Beirut, Lebanon:
The arrival of Kurdish Peshmerga forces from Iraq, and of Arab rebels from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), reflects a determination by the US-led anti-IS coalition not to let Kobane fall.
Turkey, America's NATO ally, which controls access to Kobane, won't let Syrian or other Kurdish volunteers cross to join the struggle with the Kurdish defenders of Kobane. It regards the latter, the YPG, or People's Defense Units, as terrorists, being an offshoot of the Turkish/Kurdish PKK movement.
But the Turkish capital, Ankara, has been under big pressure to allow some kind of reinforcements, to avoid a symbolic defeat of the coalition effort at Kobane.
Turkey has a close relationship with the Iraqi Kurdish KDP, the predominant faction in Iraqi Kurdistan, and with the FSA groups it is allowing to cross. Their impact may take some time to be felt, but the arrival of the heavier weaponry brought by the Iraqi Kurds may have an effect greater than the numbers of fighters involved, who will play a support role rather than front-line combat.
Some eighty vehicles carrying heavy weapons and Iraqi Kurdish fighters crossed into Turkey after dawn on 29 October 2014. They were welcomed by Turkish Kurds as they drove west towards Kobane. They will meet up with another group who arrived by air overnight
An FSA commander in Kobane, Colonel Abdul Jabbar al-Oqaidi, told BBC Arabic that "around two hundred fighters" had entered the besieged town to provide support to the defenders. He implied that more were ready to go, saying this was the first group and "we can't let all fighters in one go".
However, Kobane's Kurdish military commander, Ocalan Isso, said that less than fifty FSA fighters had arrived in the town.
Relations between the Syrian rebel groups and the main Syrian Kurdish parties have long been strained. The Kurds avoided taking sides after the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011.
SOHR activists also gave the number of FSA fighters who entered Kobane as about fifty.
Meanwhile, a group of Peshmerga fighters landed in the early hours of Wednesday at Sanliurfa airport in south-eastern Turkey, and are now reportedly at an army base in Suruc, some ten miles from Kobane.
Just after dawn, a convoy of lorries carrying weapons and more fighters crossed by land through the Habur border crossing further east and are now driving towards Suruc.
The two groups are expected to meet later before crossing the border into Syria.
Weeks of air strikes in and around Kobane have allowed YPG fighters to prevent it from falling. But clashes continued, and a local Kurdish commander said IS still controlled forty percent of the town.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has rejected claims that not enough was being done to end the jihadist assault. He told the BBC that Turkey would only take part once the US-led coalition against IS had an "integrated strategy" that included action against Assad's forces. He also noted that Western states were not prepared to send troops. "The only way to help Kobane, since other countries don't want to use ground troops, is sending some peace-oriented or moderate troops to Kobane. What are they? Peshmerga  and Free Syrian Army," he added.
US state department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that America would "certainly encourage'' the deployment of Peshmerga forces to Kobane.
Activists say the battle for Kobane has, so far, left eight hundred people dead and forced more than two hundred thousand people to flee across the Turkish border.
IS has declared the formation of a caliphate in the large swathes of Syria and Iraq it has seized since 2013.
The UN says that millions of Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict have had an "enormous" impact on neighboring countries in terms of "economics, public services, the social fabric of communities and the welfare of families".
More than three million Syrians have fled their country since the uprising against President Assad began in March of 2011, with most of them now sheltering in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq.

Rico says we haven't seen this sort of thing in the US since 1865 and, even in Europe, not since 1945... (And Rico still hasn't come up with a good 'whey' pun for all this...)