New US-led Airstrikes Hit Besieged Syrian Town

A Kurdish official and an activist group said the U.S.-led coalition pounded positions of the Islamic State group in the Syrian border town of Kobani on Thursday in some of the most intensive strikes in the air campaign so far. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said despite the airstrikes overnight and into the morning, the Islamic State fighters managed to capture a police station in the east of the town. The Observatory, a group that tracks Syria’s civil war through a network of activists on the ground added the militants now control more than one third of the strategic border town. The fighting over Kobani has brought Syria’s civil war yet again to Turkey’s doorstep and allies have tried to press Ankara to take a more robust role in the U.S.-led coalition to fight the Islamic State group. There has also been criticism that Turkey has stood by idly with its tanks parked just across the frontier from the Syrian Kurdish town.