Calm prevails over besieged Syrian town of Kobani

The Syrian border town of Kobani woke to relative calm in the early hours of Monday (November 10) with white smoke rising from town buildings and machine guns being fired from the outskirts of the embattled town but no shelling witnessed.    

Coalition jets hit suspected Islamic State targets four times on Sunday (November 9) as mortars landed in central areas of the besieged town and thick plumes of smoke filled the sky.     

The town, known as Ayn al-Arab in Arabic, has been besieged by Islamic State fighters since September, becoming one of the highest-profile battlefields of the fight against the militant group.    

After losing scores of men in the weeks-long assault, Islamic State called on dozens of its fighters in the northeast of Aleppo province to head west towards Kobani, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.      

Kobani has become a test of the U.S.-led coalition's ability to halt the advance of the Sunni Muslim insurgents. The town is one of few areas in Syria where it can co-ordinate air strikes with operations by an effective ground force.

Also on Monday, a monitoring group said gunmen killed five nuclear engineers, four of them Syrian and one Iranian, on the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday.

The engineers were shot dead as they were traveling in a small convoy to a research center near the northeastern district of Barzeh, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.      

No one claimed responsibility and Syrian and Iranian state media did not mention the attack, which occurred in an area controlled by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.         

The U.N. atomic agency (IAEA) said last year that Syria declared a "small amount of nuclear material" at a Miniature Neutron Source Reactor, a type of research reactor usually fueled by highly enriched uranium, near Damascus.          

Iran has backed Assad throughout Syria's three-year war and Iranian military advisers are working with Syrian forces throughout the country.         

The IAEA has also asked for permission for years to visit a site in the eastern province Deir al-Zor that U.S. intelligence reports say was a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor geared to making plutonium for nuclear bombs. Israel bombed it in 2007.       

Iran, the United States and the European Union began a second day of talks in Oman on Monday to discuss ways to resolve a confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program, U.S. and Iranian officials said.