A Kurdish fighter in the town of Kobani, Syria, which was devastated by the Islamic State and an American-led air campaign to expel the militants.”
KOBANI, Syria — Lasheen Abdulla steered her white minivan through the streets of her hometown, past the charred husks of car bombs, the shattered storefronts, the unexploded mortar shells. Across the gray of destruction were streaks of color: the purple sheets hung to hide the Kurdish snipers who, for months, defended this city from the extremists of the Islamic State.
She pointed to the spots where her city’s martyrs fell — five over there, near the bullet-pocked wall of a girls school, six at a heap of rubble that used to be an open-air vegetable market. In recent days, the ruins have yielded corpses of Kurdish fighters, their heads severed. Even childrens’ dolls were found decapitated, a symbol, Ms. Abdulla said, of the cruelty of their enemy.
“When you see your hometown destroyed like this, you feel destroyed from within,” said Ms. Abdulla, 43, who remained in Kobani for the entire siege. She has washed many bodies of Kurdish fighters for burial, and said she had three in the house where she was staying.
Key points in the terrorist group’s rapid growth and the slowing of its advance as it faces international airstrikes and local resistance.
The devastation of this city, wrought by the Islamic State siege and the American-led air campaign that ultimately expelled the militants, is so thorough that it manages to feel unreal, like a movie set.
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“Soon it will be filled up, and it will be the biggest refugee camp in Turkey,” said the camp’s director, Mehmet Han Ozdemir.
Regardless of how long it takes to repopulate Kobani, the Kurds say they will never again accept dominion by outsiders — neither the Arabs of Syria, who treated them as second-class citizens, nor the Turks, who ruled them during the days of the Ottoman Empire. There are already plans to open a school in Kobani, where lessons will be taught in the Kurdish language, something that had long been prohibited.
Standing just inside the gate that separates Kobani from Turkey, Mohammed Jarada, a fighter guarding the post, savored the recent victory and shrugged off the costs.
“This means that the Kurds exist,” he said. “We exist.”
Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Kobani, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
