Tide turned in Kobani?

The BBC is reporting that Daesh is being “driven out” of the areas of Kobani that it had previously occupied:

Speaking by phone, Kurdish commander Baharin Kandal told the BBC’s Kasra Naji that she hoped the city would be “liberated soon”.

Ms Kandal said her militia group had been receiving arms, supplies and fighters but she refused to say how, reports our correspondent, who is on the Turkish border near Kobane.

I’m outsourcing the rest of this to the War Nerd, who does a great job of dissecting what’s going on (and what’s been going on, particularly with respect to the inexplicably slow ratcheting up of the U.S. air campaign) in Kobani:

Nobody expected that. Well, nobody except me. I’ve been saying for a long time that IS(IS) was the most overhyped military force on the planet, and that IS has been attacking Kobane for fifteen months—fifteen damn months—without success, which might just sort of suggest it’s not the juggernaut it’s been made out to be, and that IS’s other supposedly scary advance toward Baghdad is no more than a sad attempt to recover some of the Sunni suburbs of the capital the Sunni controlled completely less than a decade ago.

…

Because, very simply, the US was waiting eagerly for the town to fall. There were all sorts of reasons for this, and none make any real sense. The two biggest are: (a) The hick Islamists running Turkey tilt toward IS and hate Kurds, all Kurds, with the same insane virulence that Turks hate all their neighbors, and especially any minority that dares to identify itself as non-Turkish; (b) The YPG militia defending Kobane is linked to the PKK movement, which is nominally “Socialist,” and American apparatchiks, no matter who’s officially in charge, have never un-learned the anti-Commie nonsense they learned at Georgetown; and (c) The “brave, doomed defenders of Kobane” were worth much more dead than alive, much more in defeat than in victory. If they lost, they’d be beheaded by the vicious loons in IS, and those severed-head videos would be great US agitprop, a great little way to put more pressure on Turkey over the theatre the US really cares about—Iraq.

The War Nerd’s three-part explanation for why the Kurds finally managed to beat Daesh back is that, for one thing, Daesh is still a pretty slipshod fighting force (“Islamic State is good at one thing: Hype”), for another, the gutsy YPG defense of the city finally shamed the U.S. into ramping up the air campaign, and, finally, the Kurds are just tough fighters. I think you have to distinguish between Daesh’s battlefield abilities in Syria and their abilities in Iraq, where they’re still working with the Naqshbandi Army and its Baathist army veterans, but that’s nitpicking. Go read the whole piece.