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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 | A5
**
WORLD NEWS
Kurds Seize Most of Syrian City of Kobani
Militia Backed by U.S. Airstrikes Is Close to Declaring a Major Military Victory Over Islamic State Along Turkish Border
By Ayla Albayrak in
Istanbul, Yaroslav
Trofimov in Suruç,
Turkey, and Raja
Abdulrahim in Beirut
Kurdish fighters and officials
in Kobani, a once-bustling city
that was destroyed by four
months of urban warfare with
Islamic State, said that only
mopping-up operations continued Monday night, and the entire city could be proclaimed liberated as early as Tuesday.
“Kobani’s war is over,” resident Farhad Shami said by telephone from the city.
A U.S.-led bombing campaign
launched in September helped
tip the balance in favor of the
Kurds and prevented Islamic
State, also known as ISIS or ISIL,
from seizing Kobani outright and
solidifying its control over much
of the Turkish-Syrian border.
The U.S. military’s Central
Command said Monday that
Kurds now control 90% of Kobani, up from an estimated 70%
on Friday.
“While the fight against ISIL
is far from over, ISIL’s failure in
Kobani has denied them one of
their strategic objectives,” the
U.S. military said.
But the resources and time
dedicated to the retaking of just
one city showed just how daunting a task it will be to dislodge
Islamic State from a Britain-size
area it still rules across Syria
and Iraq.
Unlike in many other parts of
the country, in Kobani the U.S.
could count on—and work
closely with—a viable local militia, the so-called People’s Defense Units, or YPG, a Kurdish
secularist group.
“Without YPG, the American
airstrikes alone cannot fight
ISIS. They need our ground
forces,” said Farid Atti, an official in the YPG-run Kobani administration. “In our area, nobody accepts the ISIS ideology,
which is why all our villages are
empty now. All our people want
democracy and freedom.”
In the battle of Kobani, the
YPG was aided by some 150
fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan
known as Peshmerga and a unit
of the Western-backed Syrian
rebel group Free Syrian Army, or
FSA. Unlike the Kurds, the Iraqi
army and the FSA have enjoyed
notably less success in retaking
territory from Islamic State.
The U.S. has conducted 708
airstrikes in Kobani since September—the vast majority of its
954 strikes against Islamic State
in Syria. Seventeen of these
strikes came on Sunday and
Monday.
For much of the fight in Kobani, the U.S. has been in close
communication with the Kurdish
fighters trying to defend the
town. A senior military official
said that has allowed the U.S. to
precisely coordinate its airstrikes.
“When they call and say: ‘We
need you to drop ordnance,’ we
know exactly what they are talking about,” said the senior military official.
This coordination was on display on Monday morning, as a
pitched battle involving mortars
and heavy machine guns raged
over a hill close to the Turkish
border, on the eastern side of
Kobani.
By then, the Kurds already
controlled another major hill
overlooking the city, seized late
last week, and their yellow, red
and green flags fluttered from
rooftops elsewhere.
A jet was heard circling over
the city throughout the fight.
Then, three booming airstrikes
on Islamic State positions in the
Canadian Troops
Trade Fire Again
With Militants
European Pressphoto Agency
Kurdish forces regained most
of the Syrian border city of Kobani, hoisting their flags atop
strategic hilltops as the regional
campaign against extremist
group Islamic State appeared on
the cusp of a major military victory.
Members of the Syrian Kurdish militia known as YPG celebrate their victory in Kobani on Monday.
early afternoon appeared to have
tilted the battle in favor of the
Kurds.
An hour later, Kurdish fighters hoisted their flag on the only
remaining hilltop outside their
control.
“Congratulations for all humanity and Kurdistan and the
people of Kobani for the liberation of the city of Kobani,” Polat
Can, a YPG spokesman, tweeted
Monday.
Alan Hesso, a fighter with
YPG inside Kobani, said that Islamic State fighters were clinging to the one final neighborhood, in the southeast of the
city, as darkness fell.
“I hope we will be able to liberate the entire city tonight,”
Mr. Hesso said.
Photos of flag-waving Kurds
dancing in Kobani and in the
mainly Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey spread across social media.
That revelry rose over a devastated city emptied of most of
its residents, its streets left
mostly to those with guns.
Kurdish forces were combing
through empty buildings searching for remaining Islamic State
fighters and clearing land mines,
officials and residents said.
The YPG systematically evacuated all villages around Kobani
and almost all of the town’s civilian residents in September to
avoid a feared massacre of Kurdish civilians.
Most of these refugees, numbering hundreds of thousands,
now live in camps and private
housing in and near the Turkish
city of Suruç just across the border from Kobani.
In Suruç on Monday afternoon, as news of YPG advances
raised the spirits, Kobani refugees gathered on the main
square to share the latest information from the battlefields and
to discuss when they could all go
home.
“I am hopeful. I hope we can
return really soon,” said Akram,
a 19-year-old from a village near
Kobani whose family of 15 is
sharing the same house in Suruç.
—Dion Nissenbaum,
Julian E. Barnes,
Mohammad Nour Al Akraa
and Dana Ballout
contributed to this article.
Canadian special forces exchanged fire with Islamic State
in Iraq twice in the past week, a
military officer said, indicating
engagements have recurred
since Canada on Jan. 20 became the first Western country
to say its ground troops have
fought the extremist group.
Royal Canadian Navy Capt.
Paul Forget said on Monday that
Canadian Special Operations
Forces returned fire twice in the
past week after being fired upon
by Islamic State militants. Their
efforts helped “neutralize the
threat,” he told reporters.
A week ago, Canada said its
forces had returned fire against
Islamic State militants as they
accompanied local forces on a
training mission. A Canadian
general also confirmed that the
country’s forces enabled airstrikes on Islamic State by using lasers to highlight targets
for coalition missiles. The revelation raised questions about
Ottawa’s description of its mission as limited to training local
forces.
In Parliament on Monday,
Canada’s opposition parties accused the government and Defense Minister Rob Nicholson of
misleading the country on the
role of Canadian troops in Iraq.
“Is he [Mr. Nicholson] finally
willing to admit that this is a
combat mission?” said Thomas
Mulcair, the leader of the opposition New Democratic Party.
Mr. Nicholson said Canadian
military personnel are there to
“advise and assist” Iraqis, as the
government originally said.
“There are risks, but these
are risks that are being managed,” he said.
—Alistair MacDonald
U.S. Closes Yemen Embassy, Kills Two Militants in Strike
SAN’A, Yemen—The State Department on Monday said it was
closing its embassy in Yemen’s
capital until further notice, while
a U.S. drone strike killed two
suspected al Qaeda militants in
the first such attack in the country since the U.S.-backed president said he was resigning last
week.
The State Department has reduced staff at the U.S. Embassy
in San’a over the past week as
tensions and clashes intensified.
On Monday, it said the embassy
would continue to provide emergency consular services and remains “operational,” according
to a message on its website.
The Central Intelligence
Agency carried out Monday’s
strike in the central province of
Marib, U.S. officials said.
Yemeni defense ministry officials said one of the suspected
militants killed was from Saudi
Arabia and the other was Yemeni. Both were believed to be
members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the Yemen-based group that claimed
responsibility for this month’s
attack on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,
ministry officials said. A 12-yearold Yemeni boy was also killed in
the strike, the officials said.
The U.S. has carried out hundreds of drone strikes targeting
AQAP, but Monday’s was significant because of its timing.
President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a U.S. ally, said he was
quitting on Thursday after
armed Houthi militants overran
governmental and presidential
buildings two days earlier,
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
BY ASA FITCH
AND HAKIM ALMASMARI
Yemenis gather around a burned car after it was targeted by a U.S. drone strike on Monday in a desert area east of the capital San’a.
though Yemen’s parliament
hasn’t accepted the resignation.
The political chaos has cast
doubt over the U.S. counterterrorism cooperation over which
Mr. Hadi has presided.
Monday’s strike, however, appeared to show operations haven’t stopped. President Barack
Obama had said on Sunday at a
news conference during his trip
to India that the activities continued despite the uncertainty.
“We continue to go after highvalue targets inside of Yemen,”
he said.
Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon
spokesman, declined to comment
specifically on Monday’s strike,
but said, “Our commitment to
hunt and kill AQAP where they
are is unchanged.”
The latest turmoil pits Mr.
Hadi against the Houthis, a
movement of adherents to the
Zaidi offshoot of Shiite Islam
who are based in the north of the
country. Like Mr. Hadi, the
Houthis are bitter enemies of al
Qaeda, but the Houthis want
greater political sway for their
minority group than Mr. Hadi
has been willing to cede.
U.S. and Saudi officials have
accused Iran of arming and funding the Houthis to maintain a
proxy force in Yemen. Although
some Houthi leaders privately
admit their militia has Iranian
ties, they maintain that the
group’s focus is national, to end
the central government’s discrimination against the Zaidi
sect.
A parliamentary session on
Sunday to approve or reject Mr.
Hadi’s resignation was canceled,
leaving his political future—and
Yemen’s—up in the air. Under Yemeni law, a majority of Parliament must approve a president’s
resignation.
United Nations envoy Jamal
Benomar met with Yemeni parties on Sunday and Monday to
try to reach a compromise, people involved in the talks said. Mr.
Benomar met with Houthi leaders for several hours on Monday,
but an adviser to Mr. Hadi said
the talks hadn’t been productive.
Houthi leaders want Mr. Hadi to
remain president in order to
bring back stability, but also
want him to be stripped of his
power to act independently, the
adviser said.
“The U.N. envoy is aware that
the president will not want to sit
with him until he has something
concrete to offer,” the adviser
said. “Mr. Hadi does not want to
be a president with no authority.”
AQAP on Monday published a
statistical breakdown of its attacks between Oct. 25 and Jan.
20, according to a translation of
the report by the SITE Intelligence Group. The terrorist group
claimed responsibility for 204
attacks in Yemen during the period, and for the Paris attack.
—Dion Nissenbaum
and Felicia Schwartz
contributed to this article.
Sons of Ousted Egyptian Ruler Mubarak Released From Prison
Composite
CAIRO—The sons of ousted
Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak
were freed Monday after nearly
four years in prison, awaiting retrial on charges they played a
central role in corruption perpetuated by the old regime.
Gamal Mubarak, 51, and his
older brother Alaa, 53, are seen
by many Egyptians as symbols of
their father’s crony capitalist
system. Their release was another marker of the undoing of
the pro-democracy revolution
four years ago that forced their
father from power and of the resurgence of old regime figures.
The former Egyptian president, who is 86 and reported to
be ailing, is also expected to be
freed in the near future after a
court overturned convictions of
him and his sons on corruption
charges. Separately, the longtime
ruler was cleared of charges that
he ordered the killing of protesters during the uprising, when
hundreds died.
Renewed protests marked the
fourth anniversary of the start
of that uprising on Sunday, when
20 people were killed in
clashes—most of them demonstrators.
The Mubaraks are among several former regime officials and
leaders who have been exonerated, released from prison, or returned from exile over the past
several months. Still the freeing
of the sons prompted little in
the way of public outcry—even
after a weekend of violent pro-
tests—in a measure of the public’s exhaustion with political
turmoil.
After their release, the sons
headed to their homes in the up-
Old regime figures are
returning from exile
and being exonerated.
scale Cairo suburb of Heliopolis.
Egyptian state media and judicial employees earlier reported
that the two investment bankers
had been released on Friday.
However a judge said their release was delayed by two days
for reasons that were still unclear.
The timing appears to point
to anxiety within the government that releasing the men
might have inflamed public anger ahead of protests marking
the anniversary of the uprising
that began on Jan. 25, 2011.
An attorney who helped prosecute the elder Mr. Mubarak said
the delays in releasing all three
were political and aimed at
avoiding further unrest.
“They could have been released before and there was no
technical reason for the delay.
But the issue is that they
couldn’t release them because
that would affect the people and
lead them to believe that all this
happened for nothing,” said the
attorney, Magda Fathy Rashwan.
Authorities don’t want “people to see that all the youth who
were charged with illegal protesting are spending yearslong
sentences in jail, while the people who were the real reason for
years of bad rule have been released free from charges.”
The decisions to free leaders
of the Mubarak regime reflect a
dramatic shift in public mood
rather than any real change in
Egypt’s laws, analysts say.
In the months after the 2011
revolution, prosecutors pursued
many former regime officials
and businessmen despite a lack
of evidence connecting them to
real crimes. Many were convicted on specious grounds to
answer to a furious public that
was baying for justice following
decades of perceived corruption.
The two Mubarak brothers
and their father had been con-
P2JW027000-2-A00500-1--------XA
BY SHARAF AL-HOURANI
AND MATT BRADLEY
victed and sentenced to four
years in prison for embezzling
state funds to maintain personal
residences. Those convictions
were overturned this month.
Separately, the senior Mr. Mubarak was exonerated in November
on charges that he ordered the
killing of protesters who demanded his ouster in 2011.
Gamal Mubarak, the younger
son, was a particularly despised
figure in prerevolutionary Egypt.
Many saw his rising political
profile in the final years of his
father’s regime as evidence that
he was being groomed for a hereditary succession that many
Egyptians opposed.
All of the Mubaraks still face
retrials on corruption charges,
though legal analysts expect
them to be cleared.
MAGENTA
BLACK
CYAN
YELLOW