ISIL militants suffer heavy losses in Syria's Kobane

Militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) battling for the capture of the Syrian town of Kobane suffered some of their heaviest losses yet in 24 hours of clashes and U.S.-led air strikes, monitors said Nov. 30.

At least 50 jihadists were killed in the embattled border town in suicide bombings, clashes with Kobane's Kurdish defenders and air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Canada, meanwhile, said it was "aware of reports" one of its citizens may have been captured in Kobane, reportedly an Israeli-Canadian woman fighting alongside Kurdish forces.

The Britain-based Observatory also said the U.S.-led coalition battling the ISIL hit at least 30 targets in and around Raqqa, the jihadists' de facto capital. There were no immediate details of a toll in the Raqqa strikes.

Syrian regime strikes on Nov. 30 killed at least 29 civilians, among them seven women and three children, the group said.

The deaths in Kobane came on Nov. 29 after ISIL launched an unprecedented attack against the border crossing separating the Syrian Kurdish town from Turkey.

Kurdish officials and the Observatory alleged the attack was launched from Turkish soil, a claim the Turkish army dismissed as "lies."

ISIL began advancing on Kobane on Sept. 16, hoping to quickly seize the small frontier town and secure its grip on a large stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border, following advances in Iraq.

At one point it looked set to overrun the town, but Kurdish Syrian fighters, backed by coalition air strikes and an influx of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, have held ISIL back.

The U.S.-based monitoring group SITE said ISIL claimed a woman described as a "female Zionist soldier" had been...