Defense News: Top United States Envoy In Turkey After Syria Intervention Speculation

While the YPG has shown itself to be a potent force in the fight against Islamic State, its effectiveness is seen to diminish beyond the predominantly Kurdish areas it was set up to defend in northern and northeastern Syria.

The YPG has been the only notable partner to date on the ground in Syria for the US-led alliance battling to eliminate Daesh in Syria and northern Iraq.

The U.S. special envoy for the coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group was in Ankara on Tuesday to meet Turkish officials, after speculation Turkey could launch a military intervention inside Syria, sources told AFP.

Obama said the group’s “strategic weaknesses are real”, noting it has no air force and no support from any nation.

BEIRUT: ISIS fighters seized a Syrian town back from Kurdish-led forces near Raqqa city Monday, an activist group monitoring the war reported, recovering ground near its de facto capital two days after it was pummelled in heavy U.S.-led airstrikes.

On Saturday night and Sunday morning, almost 30 IS fighters were reported killed in US-led raids in and around the city, with infrastructure including bridges also destroyed in the strikes.

Since the US-led raids in Syria began last September, they have been key to helping Kurdish forces repel IS and take territory from them.

In January, Kurds secured the symbolic town of Kobane on the border with Turkey after four months of IS attempts to overrun it.

According to reports, a Kurdish female brigade (YPJ) helped them in the operation to liberate the town.

Also on Wednesday, Syrian government troops and the fighters belonging to Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, made further advances into the northwestern areas of the Syrian border town of Zabadani.

The town, 50 kilometres north of Raqqa city, was seized by IS fighters from the Kurdish YPG militia in an attack on Monday.

“The coalition aircraft have played an effective role in the recapture”, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

Elsewhere, the Observatory said six children were among at least nine people killed in regime strikes on the Naseeb area in the southern province of Daraa.