MOSCOW, October 18 (RIA Novosti) - With fighting between Kurds and the Islamic State (IS) militants trying to seize the Syrian city of Kobani continuing, the US analysts lose certainty that the US-led airstrikes will manage to defeat jihadists, US broadcast institution reported.
"They [Islamic State] have been quite adept at applying combined arms, which means they use both direct and indirect fire simultaneously. They maneuver well. They fight hard," Voice of America quoted Ben Connable, senior international analyst with the Rand Corporation, as saying Friday.
"They have apparently good leadership that the low level troops have some faith in, so they've been very good at not only moving forward and advancing and using all of the weapons they've been able to capture, but also they've been resilient in the face of counter-attacks and also coalition airstrikes," Connable added.
Lack of efficiency of the US-led airstrikes encourages Islamic State morally and gives them stronger basis for their propaganda, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Daveed Gartenstein-Ross believes.
"Showing that the air campaign is not slowing them down is important. They have a model which seeks to attract more people to their cause, and as such, showing that they haven't been slowed down despite the fact that these outside countries have been drawn in is helpful on a propaganda front and also helpful psychologically to the organization," Gartenstein-Ross said.
To a great extent, Islamic State's successes come as a result of the recruitment policy of the group's leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi.
"He [Baghdadi] has recruited good people to work for him in terms of their skills and their ability to get things done," Voice of America quoted a research professor at the U.S. Army War College W. Andrew Terrill as saying. "About a third of the people he's got in very senior positions I understand are former officers in Saddam's army, so he really seems able to be someone who's very good at identifying talent and promoting talented people," he added.
Another factor that gives a certain advantage to Islamic State in Kobani is the fact that the US military does not know how many IS militants are currently attacking the Syrian town, according to the Pentagon Press Secretary's statement Thursday.
For the past several weeks Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, one of the largest towns in the Kurdish region of Syria bordering Turkey, has been under attack of the IS militants.
Early in October IS tanks and artillery managed to enter into Kobani, fighting street battles with local Kurdish population. IS also raised its flag on Kobani's outskirts, which is still present there.
The Islamic State is a Sunni jihadi group that has been fighting the Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, it launched an offensive in Iraq, seizing vast areas in both countries and announcing the establishment of an Islamic caliphate on the territories under its control.
Kurds are one of the ethnic groups in Iraq and Syria that have suffered greatly from IS violence.
In September US President Barack Obama announced his decision to form an international anti-IS coalition. Washington extended its airstrikes against the militants into Syria, while continuing airstrikes against the group's targets in Iraq. Obama said the United States would arm and equip Kurds, Iraqis and Syria's moderate opposition in an effort to eradicate the IS.
