BEIRUT -- Kurdish fighters captured more than a dozen villages from militants of the Islamic State group in heavy fighting across northeastern Syria, an activist group and a Kurdish official said Monday.
Kurdish fighters have been repelling the advances of the Islamic State militants for more than a year in northern Syria. The battle-hardened Kurdish force, known as YPK, has been the most successful at fighting the Islamic State group, which has routed Iraqi and Syrian armed forces.
As Syria's fractured rebels have fought a two-front war against President Bashar Assad's forces and the Islamic State group, Kurdish forces seeking greater autonomy have defended their region against the extremist group, occasionally partnering with rebels to beat back the Islamic militants.
After ignoring the spread of the Islamic State, the Syrian military recently has gone on the offensive against the extremist group, which has seized at least three army bases and killed hundreds of soldiers.
YPK fighters have captured about 14 villages across the northeastern area of Tal Hamis since the latest round of fighting with the Islamic State began Saturday, said Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria's powerful Kurdish Democratic Union Party, whose members dominate the fighting group.
"We will fight them with all that we have," Khalil said. "Those [in the Islamic State] can only be deterred by force."
President Barack Obama announced last week that the United States will ramp up airstrikes and try to build an international coalition to degrade and eventually destroy the Islamic State group. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited several Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in recent days to build a coalition aimed at beating back the extremist group.
Spokesman Khalil said the Kurdish fighters were "ready to join any political coalition to strike this terrorist group."
"We are fighting, on behalf of the world, the terrorism of Daesh," he said, using an Arabic name to refer to the group.
But the Kurdish fighting group is viewed with suspicion by the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, which says the Kurdish Democratic Union Party is linked to Assad's government. Turkey is also wary of the group, which it believes is affiliated to the Kurdish PKK movement, which waged a long and bloody insurgency in Turkey's southeast.
In addition to losing the villages, the Islamic State group suffered another blow in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, where the only bridge linking parts of the city held by militants with its suburbs was blown up.
Syria's state-run television said government forces were responsible for blowing up the al-Siyasiyeh Bridge over the Euphrates River.
Elsewhere, at least 11 people were killed in the northern city of Aleppo in government airstrikes on the rebel-held neighborhood of Marjeh, according to the Britain-based Observatory -- which relies on a network of activists inside Syria -- and Aleppo-based activist Mohammed Wissam.
Another 15 people were killed in the central opposition-held town of Talbiseh after Syrian military helicopters dropped crude bombs, according to the Observatory and a nearby activist, Tariq Badrakhan.
In the Golan Heights, the United Nations said Monday that it has withdrawn its peacekeepers from many positions because of escalating violence in the area. U.N. peacekeepers withdrew from at least one base in the region, said an activist in the area who uses the name Luay.
The withdrawal came after Syrian rebels, including the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front, advanced across the Syrian-controlled part of the territory and briefly seized dozens of U.N. peacekeepers. They were later released unharmed.
The situation has deteriorated severely in the past few days, and advances by armed groups posed "a direct threat to the safety and security of the U.N. peacekeepers" along the Syrian side of the border and in Camp Faouar where many troops are based, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The peacekeepers were withdrawn over the weekend and are currently at Camp Ziouani, the major U.N. base on the Israeli side, a U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said he doesn't think every post in the region has been vacated.
"But obviously the situation has deteriorated across a wide span of the territory, so we've had to leave from a lot of places," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Diaa Hadid, Josef Federman and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.
A Section on 09/16/2014