Kurdish Fighters Push Closer to ISIS Caliphate’s Capital in Syria

Kurdish forces say they seized a military base from ISIS fighters just 30 miles from the self-declared caliphate's capital city in Syria, another gain in an offensive that is pushing deeper into militant strongholds.

U.S. airstrikes and allied rebel groups helped Kurdish fighters to conquer Base 93, which is located north of Raqqa. The military site's fall to ISIS last summer provided a propaganda coup for the group.

Idriss Nassan, deputy foreign minister of the Kurdish Kobani regional government in northern Syria, confirmed to NBC News on Tuesday that Base 93 had been taken. He added that Kurdish YPG forces had also routed ISIS in the nearby town of Ain Issa and 16 other villages over a 24-hour period. Earlier, a Kurdish official told Reuters that the base was under YPG control after ISIS had been “defeated.”

Only last month, ISIS further alarmed the international community after taking the city of Ramadi, the provincial capital of western Iraq's Anbar province, forcing almost 25,000 people to flee the violence, according to UN estimates.

Analysts are treating the latest news from northern Syria with caution, though they say that the setbacks for the Sunni militants indicate weaknesses in the same way that past victories have indicated strength.

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“We shouldn't just pay attention to their gains but also their losses,” says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Much has been made of ISIS' fighting prowess,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “But their victories have been number one against Iraqi security forces, and [in Syria] against the battered Assad regime.”

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