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A Kurdish peshmerga soldier who was wounded Sept. 30 in fierce battles in nearby Nineveh province with Islamic State group militants is brought to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Dahuk, Iraq. Hadi Mizban/The Associated Press hide caption

A Kurdish peshmerga soldier who was wounded Sept. 30 in fierce battles in nearby Nineveh province with Islamic State group militants is brought to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Dahuk, Iraq.

Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq captured a border crossing with Syria on Tuesday, expelling Islamic State militants in heavy fighting that ground down to vicious house-to-house combat and close-quarters sniping.

In neighboring Syria, Kurdish militiamen were on the defensive as the extremists pressed ahead with a relentless assault on a town near the Turkish border. The attack on Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, has driven more than 160,000 people across the frontier in the past few days.

Kurdish fighters man a weapon mounted on a pickup truck as they take position behind cement blocks Aug. 29 in the Iraqi city of Rabia on the Iraqi-Syrian border, where clashes with Islamic State militants were taking place. A month later on Sept. 30, Kurdish forces finally were able to retake the city. Reuters /Landov hide caption

Kurdish fighters man a weapon mounted on a pickup truck as they take position behind cement blocks Aug. 29 in the Iraqi city of Rabia on the Iraqi-Syrian border, where clashes with Islamic State militants were taking place. A month later on Sept. 30, Kurdish forces finally were able to retake the city.

Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, were doing the bulk of the fighting on the ground as a U.S.-led coalition carried out an aerial assault against the Islamic State group in both Iraq and Syria. Britain joined the air campaign Tuesday, carrying out its first strikes against the extremists in Iraq though it does not plan to expand into Syria.

On Tuesday, Kurdish fighters in Iraq said they saw some of the heaviest fighting yet. Peshmerga spokesman Halgurd Hekmat told The Associated Press the Kurds seized the border crossing of Rabia, which the extremists captured in their blitz across Iraq over the summer.

Rami Abdurrahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also said the Kurds had retaken the border post. He said Syrian Kurdish militiamen, who control the Syrian side of the frontier, had helped in the fight.

Kurds wounded in the fighting were brought to a makeshift clinic in the town of Salhiyah, where dusty and exhausted, they described savage battles, with militants sniping at them from inside homes and from the windows of a hospital in Rabia.

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University of Colorado Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano, right, hands Ako M. Wahbi, of the Zheen Archive Center, a disk containing digital copies of captured Iraqi Secret Police files. (Mark Leffingwell, Daily Camera)

BOULDER A Kurdish delegation in Colorado retrieving cached documents detailing Iraqi persecution say Kurdish fighters can provide the increasingly sought ground force to defeat the Islamic State because this will help Kurds gain independence and be "the next Israel."

But battle-hardened Kurdish forces, credited with gains in Syria, need better weapons like night vision, artillery, anti-tank, delegation members said Tuesday.

And U.S. officials must realize that trying to keep semi-autonomous Kurdish Iraq as part of a united Iraq ultimately "will fail," said Woshiar Rasul, an adviser to the governor in Kurds' main city Sulaymaniyah.

Kurdish leaders since the 1970s have accepted limited autonomy but even within Iraq's latest coalition government "there is no full trust," Rasul said.

"We've acted exactly according to what the United States requested. We've remained in Iraq," he said. Yet, for nine months, Iraqi officials in Baghdad haven't even paid salaries of Kurdish participants in the government, Rasul said.

The U.S. government's insistence on a unified Iraq is understandable, said Ako Wahbi, owner of a contracting firm and leader of Kurdish efforts to build up history archives for museums.

"You came to the Middle East. You spent a lot of money and lives of your young soldiers. And the outcome is not what you tried to do," Wahbi said.

But even if Kurds stay temporarily as part of Iraq "there will be another conflict," he said, adding that Iraq's Sunni and Shia factions "hate each other more than they hate the Kurds."

A robust role repelling Islamic State militants "can give a good advantage for our future," Wahbi said. "Our only dream, up until now, is a Kurdistan independent state."

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