Alas what boots it

Photo by Jim Legans, Jr. Great boots-on-the-ground art on current view at the Riddled Galleries, by the way.

AP is now reporting that the Da'esh advance on Kobane has been "halted":

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Islamic State militants have not been able to advance in Kobani since Friday but are sending in reinforcements. The Observatory's chief, Rami Abdurrahman, said the group appears to have a shortage of fighters and has brought in members of its religious police known as the Hisbah to take part in the battles.

Since the offensive on Kobani began, some 550 people have been killed, including about 300 Islamic State fighters, 225 Kurdish gunmen and 20 civilians, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists across Syria. It said the number of jihadists killed could be much higher.

Farhad Shami, a Kurdish activist in Kobani reached by phone from Beirut, said the town was "relatively quiet" on Sunday apart from sniper fire. He said Islamic State fighters launched an offensive south of the town on Saturday but were repelled and lost many fighters.

I hope this holds for a while at least, and that as many as possible of the endangered civilians, especially the 500 to 700 old people holed up in the city center, manage to get away. Very glad as well that the number of dead civilians so far seems to be relatively low, and particularly happy for the Caliphic religious police to be putting some time in actual combat. I wish our American Taliban could be doing the same.

US-driven airstrikes have probably helped make this situation a lot less bloody than the Da'esh advances in northern Iraq have been, or so the story suggests. I still don't see any reason to believe that the proverbial military footwear on the proverbial earth surface for which everybody from John McCain (even as the situation stabilizes, McCain is on TV begging us to unstabilize it back) to Jon Stewart seems to have been calling would have made any positive difference.