ISIS close to claiming another victory

BEIRUT -- A senior Kurdish fighter said Thursday that militants from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) were closing in on the town of Kobani along the Syria-Turkey border and that his men were preparing for street battles.

The Kurdish town in northern Syria has been under assault by ISIS extremists since mid-September.

Ismet Sheikh Hasan said the militants were still advancing on Thursday, despite renewed U.S.-led airstrikes in the area overnight.

Hasan spoke to The Associated Press over the phone from the front line near Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab in Arabic. He said he believed the ISIS fighters were just a few miles away.

And they may be much closer than that.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group which gets information directly from a wide network of activists and rebels on the ground, said that while ISIS remained at least a couple miles from Kobani to the west, the militants had come within just several hundred yards of the city on the southern front.

The Observatory told the Reuters news agency there were "serious fears that the Islamic State group could break into the town at any moment," using the name the militant group has adopted for itself.

There was no immediate confirmation from Washington on the latest airstrikes.