Kurdish fighters are claiming progress in their fight against ISIS and now control at least 80% of the embattled Syrian city of Kobani, a monitoring group said Monday.
Fighters belonging to the People’s Protection Units, known as YPG, captured the city’s government square area, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based opposition group.
Fourteen ISIS militants were killed in clashes, the SOHR said. It was not immediately clear whether any Kurdish fighters were killed.
ISIS, the Sunni Muslim extremist militant group, has been fighting for Kobani for months, hoping to add it to the territory it has already controls in parts of Syria and Iraq for what it calls its new independent Islamic nation.
Syria has been embroiled in a more than three-year civil war, with government troops battling ISIS and other rebels elsewhere, leaving Kobani’s ethnic Kurds to defend the city.
Kobani is strategically important with its location on the border with Turkey.
Airstrikes by the United States and its allies, part of a larger U.S.-led coalition effort against ISIS in the region, intermittently take out ISIS targets in the area. The coalition started operations in September.