ISIS Pushed-back in Syria and Iraq

In rare back-to-back setbacks in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters’ forward momentum has been thwarted, at least temporarily. Shiite militias succeeded in breaking ISIS’s grip on a town near Baghdad on Sunday, halting the ISIS drive against Shiite towns in the south. Reuters news agency reported eyewitnesses telling of militiamen heaping violent abuse on the ISIS operatives captured in the operation. In Syria, Kurdish fighters were successful in preventing ISIS from taking over the village of Kobani, or Ain Al-Arab, and cutting it off from the Turkish border. US air strikes aided the Kurds as they fought off the ISIS surge. The bitter battle for Kobani has so far cost more than 800 lives according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitor the situation. An estimated 200,000 of its residents have fled to Turkey to escape the fighting.