Women and children take up arms in last

The snaps were posted on Twitter and captioned ‘Kurdish family vs Isis terorist in Kobane. Kurds in Kobane need help!’ Photo: Mail Online

Children armed with AK-47s fought to the death to defend Kobani yesterday after air strikes failed to stop their Islamic State enemies.

They had ignored orders to flee from Kurdish officials who warned they could no longer protect them.

Using tanks and advanced weaponry, the jihadis easily outgunned the garrison of the Syrian border town.

Their relentless advance starkly illustrates the limitations of air strikes.

Big guns: A man and young boy, possibly his son, pose holding AK-47s while defending Kobani.

Six US-led bombing raids had appeared to slow the IS assault on Kobani, destroying four armoured vehicles and damaging a tank.

Kurdish forces scored similar successes in the south and east of Kobani. Yet government officials later said the town, which has been besieged for three weeks, was about to fall.

The announcement came as photos emerged of families – including women and children – joining in the fight against IS. A boy of barely ten was pictured carrying an AK-47. 

Another picture showed a gun-toting teenage girl wearing a hoodie, jeans and ballet pumps. 

The photographs were posted on Twitter yesterday with the comment: ‘Kurdish family vs Isis terrorists in Kobani. Kurds in Kobani need help!’

Several images emerged today showing young and old in Kobani fighting IS.

Artillery shells continued to thump into densely packed neighbourhoods yesterday. Thousands of militants have advanced into the south-west of Kobani and are engaged in desperate street-fighting.

Mahmoud, 50, said he had seen IS fighters in the streets: ‘I don’t know where they were all coming from, but once they were killed, more IS would come.’ 

A veteran Kurdish leader, Omar Sheikhmous, said civilians were being advised to flee to Turkey – out of the reach of IS.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Syrian refugees in Gaziantep, a town near the border: ‘The problem of IS cannot be solved via air bombardment. Kobani is about to fall.’

Fourteen Turkish tanks were lined up just 200 yards across the border from Kobani. Turkey, a member of Nato, has done little despite pledging to stop Kobani from falling to IS. 

One Twitter user wrote: ‘So our Nato ally is standing close by, watch(ing) kids and grannies fight IS?’

Syrian Kurds have said that not only are the Turks not helping, they are actually hindering the defence of Kobani by preventing Kurdish militiamen in Turkey from crossing the border.

The Turkish government is said to fear encouraging the Kurdish separatist movement inside its own borders.

Syrian Kurds have exploited the state of civil war in their country to carve out a self-governing region on their side of the border.

Deilar Kanj Khamis. It was the first known case of a female Kurdish fighter carrying out a suicide bomb against IS. According to tributes on Twitter, she was a mother with two children.

Kurdish officials issued a fresh plea for international intervention, saying: ‘We are calling out to all international powers, forces from Kurdistan and Kurdish public that IS thugs must be stopped and thousands of civilians must be saved from massacre.’

If they do take the town, IS – also known as Isis – will control an unbroken 125-mile stretch of frontier between Turkey and Syria.

More than 400 people have been killed in the Kobani region since the fighting began, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Two black IS flags were seen flying on Kobani’s eastern fringe on Monday, hours before militants punctured the Kurdish front lines and advanced into the town itself.

David Cameron faced fresh pressure to extend the RAF’s air campaign against IS into Syria, while Kurdish officials and analysts said the extremists would only be defeated by ground troops.

Charlie Cooper, a spokesman at the Quilliam Foundation, a British counter-extremism think-tank, told the Mail: ‘Air strikes won’t really work because IS are continually changing tactics.

'What they do now is they run and shelter when they hear the planes coming, and while it may slow them down, it does not kill them.’

In Iraq, US forces have begun attacking IS forces with helicopter gunships, which are supposed to be limited to protecting the American embassy in Baghdad.

Low-flying Apache helicopters, which can be mounted with machine guns, rather than bombs, are said to be the closest thing to ground troops without putting boots on the ground.

Police failed to stop a schoolgirl feared to be travelling to Syria despite being told that she had run away with her passport.

Three hours after Samya Dirie’s parents alerted officers on September 24, she got on a flight from Heathrow to Turkey with another girl.

The girls are believed to have met online and arranged to travel to Syria, apparently to join Islamic State militants. Samya, 17, from Stockwell, South London, was a dedicated student, her family said yesterday.

She has not contacted her parents, but has told a cousin she is ‘far away’ and fears what the police will do if she returns. Her father Abidirashiid Dirie issued an emotional plea, saying: ‘You haven’t committed any crime. Come back safely.’

By Larisa Brown for The Daily Mail