ISIL's strategic miscalculation at Kobani

Daily Mail on Sunday:

Islamic State militants have made fatal strategic mistakes in Kobane, allowing American and Arab warplanes to obliterate them from the air and Kurdish forces to suck them into unfamiliar 'meat grinder' street battles, an expert has claimed.

During the four-week battle for Kobane, ISIS has used the same tried and tested 'pincer movement' it deployed during the rapid seizure of vast swathes of northern Syria and western Iraq earlier this year.

In the majority of those lightning advances, ISIS was able to capture towns and cities with little to no resistance - as the group's reputation for torture and brutal murder ensured local security forces either defected or abandoned their posts, rather than face certain slaughter at the hands of the fanatics.

But as Kobane is located less than 200 yards south of the Turkish border fences and is surrounded largely by desert, the massively outgunned Kurdish fighters there have had nowhere to flee, encouraging them to gather in the centre of town and defend the city in furious street-to-street battles.

This is a tactic that does not play to ISIS' considerable armament strengths and leaves the militants out in the open for lengthy periods, where American and Arab warplanes can easily pick the fighters off.

The claim that ISIS may have made serious tactical errors in Kobane came from Justin Bronk, a research analyst in the military sciences program at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Kobane is a 'very unusual operation' for ISIS as the pitched battles they forced by giving the Kurdish troops nowhere to run have left them particularly vulnerable to airstrikes, he wrote in an opinion article for CNN.

'Despite having surrounded Kobane and conducting aggressive and apparently well-coordinated infiltration attempts from multiple approaches, the sort of street-to-street 'meat grinder' that Kobane has become does not play to ISIS's strengths,' he said.

'Against an enemy with nowhere to retreat to and air support, a numerically limited force such as ISIS that normally relies as much on psychological effects as firepower to take ground faces a tough challenge,' he added.

'This is just as well since on the ground, it is only the bravery of lightly armed Kurdish fighters standing between ISIS and control of the town. Airstrikes are essential but could not keep ISIS out of the town alone,' he went on to say.
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There is much more including several spectacular photos of the results of the air strikes.

This is consistent with what I have been arguing in recent days as Kurds have recovered real estate and the ISIL forces are getting hit by air strikes as they try to reinforce their efforts from open positions.  They are grinding up their forces in a Stalingrad type battle which is making them seaker for their real strategic objective in Baghdad.

The Kurds appear to be only serious opposition on the ground to the ambitions of ISIL.  The US and its allies need to give them more heavy weapons to fight with.  If the Iraqi government or Turkeys don't want them to have it we should ignore them and support people who are willing to fight ISIL.