Islamic fighters intensify Syrian advance despite multiple US strikes

US planes pounded Islamic State positions in Syria for a second day yesterday, but the strikes did not halt the fighters’ advance in a Kurdish area where fleeing refugees told of villages burnt and captives beheaded.

US president Barack Obama, speaking at the United Nations, asked the world to join together to fight the militants and vowed to keep up military pressure against them. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force, so the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death,” Mr Obama said in 40-minute speech to the UN General Assembly.

Islamist militants in Algeria boasted in a video they had beheaded a French hostage captured on Sunday to punish Paris for joining air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Iraq, now known as Islamic State. French president François Hollande confirmed the execution. “My determination is total and this aggression only strengthens it,” Mr Hollande said. “The military air strikes will continue as long as necessary.”

Al-Qaeda associate

The US said it was still assessing whether Mohsin al-Fadhli, a senior figure in the al-Qaeda-linked group Khorasan, had been killed in a US strike in Syria.A US official earlier said Fadhli, an associate of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, was thought to have been killed in the first day of strikes on Syria.

Washington describes Khorasan as a separate group from Islamic State, made up of al-Qaeda veterans planning attacks on the West from a base in Syria.

Syrian Kurds said Islamic State had responded to US attacks by intensifying its assault near the Turkish border in northern Syria, where 140,000 civilians have fled in recent days in the fastest exodus of the three-year civil war.

Washington and its Arab allies killed scores of Islamic State fighters in the opening 24 hours of air strikes, the first direct US foray into Syria two weeks after Mr Obama pledged to hit the group on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border.

However, the intensifying advance on the northern town of Kobani showed the difficulty Washington faces in defeating Islamist fighters in Syria, where it lacks strong military allies on the ground. “Those air strikes are not important. We need soldiers on the ground,” said Hamed, a refugee who fled into Turkey from the Islamic State advance.

Mazlum Bergaden, a teacher from Kobani who crossed the border yesterday with his family, said two of his brothers had been taken captive by Islamic State fighters. “The situation is very bad. After they kill people, they are burning the villages ... When they capture any village, they behead one person to make everyone else afraid,” he said. “They are trying to eradicate our culture, purge our nation.”

As Mr Obama tried in meetings in New York to widen his coalition, Belgium said it was likely to contribute warplanes in the coming days and the Netherlands said it would deploy six F-16s to support US-led strikes. British prime minister David Cameron said parliament would be recalled on Friday from a recess to debate an Iraqi government request for airstrikes against Islamic State.

France, which has confined its air strikes to Iraq, said it would stay the course despite the killing of hostage Herve Gourdel (55), a mountain guide captured on holiday in Algeria on Sunday by a group claiming loyalty to Islamic State.

In a video released by the Caliphate Soldiers group entitled “a message of blood to the French government”, gunmen paraded Mr Gourdel’s severed head after making him kneel, pushing him on his side and holding him down.

The campaign has blurred the traditional lines of Middle East alliances, pitting a US coalition comprised of countries opposed to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad against fighters that form the most powerful opposition to him on the ground. – (Reuters)