Islamic State militants “fired at everything that moved” during Thursday’s attack on the Syrian border town of Kobani, in what activists are calling “one of the biggest massacres by the group” since the Islamic State’s offensive began last summer.
“According to medical sources and Kobani residents, 120 civilians were executed by IS in their homes or killed by the group’s rockets or snipers,” Rami Abdulrahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told BBC News.
The bodies of women and children were littered inside homes and on the streets of Kobani, he said.
Activists later revised the death toll to 146, Reuters reported, while ANHA, a local news agency, says Islamic State militants wounded 180 civilians.
U.S. officials have frequently pointed to Kobani as a symbol of Kurdish and American ability to defeat the Islamic State after a U.S.-led coalition bombing assisted a Kurdish victory there six months ago.
Another Islamic State attack Thursday on the city of al-Hasakah, about 180 miles east of Kobani, left 60,000 people displaced, according to the United Nations. Militants have tried unsuccessfully for months to wrest the town from control of government forces and Kurdish fighters.
The attack on Kobani and al-Hasakah represents a “classic” Islamic State strategy of diversion, drawing YPG forces away from the Islamic State’s de-facto capital of Raqqa, observed analyst Charles Lister of the Brookings Doha Center.
Thursday’s surprise attack by the Islamic State on Kobani began after approximately 32 militants drove five cars through Kurdish lines in the early morning hours, then set off a large car bomb and a second one hours later. Some reports indicate that the militants were disguised in Kurdish uniforms.
Twenty Syrian Kurds, including women and children, were brutally executed in a nearby village on Thursday, according to reports.
The war in Syria has been the world’s largest driver of displacement, forcing an average of 42,500 people to become refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced every day in 2014, according to the UN. In four years of Syria’s civil war, over 11 million have been forced from their homes.
This report has been revised to include additional death totals.
