Tripoli Fighter Killed in Syria's Kobane

A Lebanese man who hails from the northern city of Tripoli has been killed while fighting alongside jihadists in the Syrian border town of Kobane, reports said Monday.

They said Alaa al-Hosni, a resident of the Tripoli neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh, died as he and other Islamic State group militants fought with fighters in Kobane, a Kurdish town.

Al-Hosni goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Mujahid, said the reports.

The IS group's offensive on Kobane and nearby Syrian villages since mid-September has killed more than 800 people, activists say. The Sunni extremists captured dozens of Kurdish villages and control parts of Kobane. More than 200,000 people have fled into Turkey as a result.

Many Lebanese fighters, mainly from northern Lebanon, have joined the jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

Jihadi recruitment in impoverished Sunni areas of northern Lebanon is on the rise, and black Islamic State group flags fly freely in some areas, reflecting pockets of growing support for the radical group.

The IS threat first came to Lebanon in August, two months after the group's summer blitz in which it seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. In a surprise attack, the IS and al-Nusra Front militants crossed over from Syria and overran the northeastern border town of Arsal.

They took with them hostages from the army and police and later executed three of them.

G.K.

M.T.