BEIRUT -- Jubilant Kurdish fighters ousted Islamic State militants from the key Syrian border city of Kobani on Monday after a four-month battle -- a significant victory for both the Kurds and the U.S.-led coalition.
The Kurds raised their flag on a hill that once flew the Islamic State's black banner. On Kobani's war-ravaged streets, gunmen fired in the air in celebration and troops danced in their baggy uniforms.
The failure to capture Kobani was a major blow to the extremists whose hopes for an easy victory dissolved into a costly siege under withering airstrikes by coalition forces and an assault by the Kurdish militia.
"Daesh gambled on Kobani and lost," said senior Kurdish official Idriss Nassan, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
"Their defenses have collapsed and its fighters have fled," he said from Turkey, adding that he would return to Kobani on Tuesday.
Kobani-based journalist Farshad Shami said the few civilians who remained had joined in the celebration. Most of the city of about 60,000 people had fled to Turkey to escape the fighting.
Several U.S. officials said they couldn't confirm that Kurdish fighters have gained full control of Kobani.
A senior U.S. official said the Kurds controlled most of the town and have consolidated control particularly in the central and southern areas. The official said Islamic State militants still have a considerable presence in outlying areas around Kobani and are still putting up stiff resistance to the Kurds in those pockets outside it.
U.S. Central Command estimates that 90 percent of Kobani is now controlled by Kurdish forces.
Kurdish officials and activists said Kobani was entirely in Kurdish hands, with only sporadic fighting on the eastern outer edges where the militants retained some footholds.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighters of the main Kurdish militia known as the People's Protection Units, or YPG, where searching houses in the eastern suburbs of the town and dismantling and detonating bombs and booby-traps left behind.
The U.S. Central Command said Monday that it had carried out 17 airstrikes near Kobani in the previous 24 hours that struck Islamic State infrastructure and fighting positions.
Shami, the Kurdish journalist, said it was a triumph for the "entire world" that had come to Kobani's rescue.
"It is a historic victory, when a small town like Kobani defeats a formidable criminal force like Daesh," he said.
Last month, Kurdish fighters in Iraq retook the strategic town of Sinjar that had been home to many of Iraq's minority Yazidis.
The focus is now expected to shift to several hundred villages around Kobani still held by the militants. Kurdish activists said they expected the fight for those to be easier than for the town itself.
Meanwhile, Islamic State militants continue to hold hostages in demand for money from international powers trying to negotiate the safe return of the prisoners.
In Jordan, a Japanese diplomat emerged from talks Monday with no signs of progress in securing the release of a freelance journalist held hostage by the militants.
Japanese officials refused direct comment on the contents of the talks in Jordan, where Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Yasuhide Nakayama is coordinating regional efforts to save hostage Kenji Goto.
The Islamic State said in an online video posted Jan. 20 that it had two Japanese hostages and would kill them within 72 hours unless Japan paid it $200 million -- the same amount Tokyo recently pledged in aid to nations fighting the militants.
Over the weekend, a new, unverified video showed a still photo of Goto, a 47-year-old journalist, holding a picture of what appears to be the body of fellow hostage Haruna Yukawa. It included a recording of a voice claiming to be Goto, saying his captors now want the release of a prisoner held in Jordan instead of a ransom.
Japanese officials have indicated they are treating the video as authentic.
Elsewhere in the fight against the Islamic State, Canadian special forces in northern Iraq have engaged in two gunbattles against the militants.
Navy Capt. Paul Forget said Monday that soldiers acting in self-defense returned fire and "neutralized" the threat.
Canada has 69 special forces soldiers with Kurdish peshmerga fighters in what the government calls an advising and assisting role.
The Islamic State advance in the Middle East has underscored the ongoing civil war in Syria, between government troops and various rebel groups. On Monday in Moscow, Russia and Syria played down any hopes of a breakthrough in peace talks.
President Bashar Assad has refused any option that would have him step down. The opposition is fractured among Western-backed opposition figures, rebels lacking effective arms and jihadists surging through Syria.
"These are not talks; it is a meeting," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a news conference. In the first phase, opposition members were to agree on "common approaches toward talks with the government."
After two days, "the opposition will be joined by official representatives of the Syrian republic, again simply in order to establish personal contact. ... We never had any other goals for the Moscow meeting."
Lavrov's comments came as Assad also played down the talks in an interview with a U.S. magazine published Monday.
"What is going on in Moscow is not negotiations about the solution; it's only preparations for the conference," said Assad in the Foreign Affairs interview.
The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, is not attending Moscow talks.
Information for this article was contributed by Lolita C. Baldor, Suzan Fraser, Bram Janssen, Elaine Kurtenbach, Albert Aji, Diaa Hadid, Laura Mills and Rob Gillies of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/27/2015