Kurdish forces making a stand against Islamic State fighters in Kobani said yesterday they have begun coordinating with the US military to provide targets for air strikes, helping to halt the advance of the fighters through the Syrian frontline town.

A four-week siege of the mainly Kurdish town on the border with Turkey has become a focus of the US-led effort to halt the militants who have seized swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. The United Nations has warned that a massacre could take place in the town if it falls to militants, who now control nearly half of it after pushing their way inside last week.

Some of the militants have withdrawn but they regroup and return

A US-led alliance has been bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq since August and extended the campaign to Syria in September. After weeks in which Kobani was rarely targeted, the town has become the main focus of strikes in recent days. The US military said it and its allies conducted 21 attacks on the militants near Kobani on Monday and Tuesday and appeared to have slowed Islamic State advances there, but cautioned that the situation was fluid.

The air strikes, visible from across the frontier in Turkey, have clearly intensified in recent days, and a monitoring group said they have become more effective, killing at least 32 Islamic State fighters in direct hits on the town this week.

Kurdish officials said the improvement in the effectiveness of air strikes in and around Kobani had come about after the main Kurdish armed group, the YPG, began giving the coordinates of Islamic State positions to the US-led alliance.

“The senior people in YPG tell the coalition the location of ISIL targets and they hit accordingly,” Polat Can, a YPG spokesman, told Reuters, using an acronym for Islamic State.

“Some of the militants have withdrawn, but they regroup and return. But because the air strikes are working in coordination, they hit their targets well,” he said.

He did not disclose how the YPG fighters share coordinate information with the US military.

Tim Ripley, a British defence expert with Jane’s Defence Weekly, said US air controllers responsible for picking targets could check any information provided by YPG fighters, by also using spotters watching the fighting from across the frontier in Turkey and video from drones.

It was also possible that US target spotters could be operating alongside the YPG on the ground in Kobani, Ripley said, but he thought this unlikely because of the high risk to the operation if they were injured or captured.

The Kurdish YPG have been struggling to defend Kobani from better armed Islamic State fighters who have used tanks, artillery and suicide truck bombs in a month-long offensive against the town at the Turkish border. ­­

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