Kurdish forces said they fully secured the Syrian border town of Kobane on Saturday and killed more than 60 Islamic State militants, two days after the insurgent group attacked it with suicide bombers.
Redur Xelil, spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, said around eight IS militants managed to escape north toward the Turkish border after the Kurds pushed them back.
The official SANA news agency also said Kobane had been cleared of IS presence and forces were searching for any remaining militants, Reuters reported.
In Syria’s northeast, Kurdish forces and the Syrian Army fought separate battles with IS militants around Hasaka city overnight as the group tried to capture more areas of the major urban center near the Iraqi border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Saturday.
Hasaka is important to all sides fighting in an area that sits between IS-seized territory in Syria and Iraq and which reaches north up to the Turkish border.
In Kobane, the YPG blew up a school building used by IS earlier on Saturday, the observatory said, and plumes of smoke could be seen rising into the air from the Turkish side of the border.
IS killed around 200 civilians in the town and surrounding areas in the attack which started on Thursday, the observatory said, describing it as one of the worst massacres committed by the group in Syria.
Kobane was the site of one of the biggest battles against IS last year. YPG forces drove the militants back from the town with the help of US airstrikes after four months of fighting and siege.
