It’s almost a year since I stood amid the ruins of Kobane, a Syrian town whose Kurdish population withstood a brutal Islamic State (IS) assault, and marvelled at the cost of its liberation. The coalition air campaign – which Britain, of course, hadn’t taken part in – had reduced half of the town to rubble. There were craters nearly 20 feet deep and IS corpses, torn and mangled, lying in the street.
It seemed as if hardly a building in the town had been left untouched by the months of fighting. But Kobane had won, the Kurds were left standing and no one I met complained about the cost of defeating IS. This was a first and notable victory for international bombs and local forces. But Kobane isn’t Raqqa and it almost certainly is not Mosul. In Kobane, the population was near-united in its antipathy towards IS; Raqqa and Mosul are the group’s heartlands in Syria and Iraq.
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