The heroes who crushed ISIS into bones: Ten years ago the men and women of Kobani liberated the city in a bloody battle against fanatics - with skulls and spines still among the rubble. But now Islamic State could return in a matter of days

 'Look - here's a human spine . That's an ISIS spine.'

These absurd sentences reverberated in my brain as I turned to find my Kurdish guide holding out a collection of bones he'd unearthed from the rubble for me to inspect... before crushing a piece of skull underfoot. 

This surreal moment unfolded last week amid the ruins of Kobani, a city in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, northeast Syria, where I travelled to see firsthand the fallout of the fight against Islamic State.

Ten years ago, this shattered landscape was the stage for one of the most brutal and consequential urban battles in modern history as ISIS exploited the chaos of Syria's civil war to expand its caliphate like a lethal plague.

By September 2014, a swarm of jihadists had encircled Kobani and launched a full-scale assault on the city and its surrounding villages, rounding up and slaughtering hundreds of defenceless inhabitants. Their campaign of terror triggered a mass exodus of some 200,000 people and Kobani looked set to fall beneath the black flag of ISIS in a matter of days.

But this vibrant crossroads of cultures and ethnicities was saved from extermination and assimilation by the YPG and YPJ – the Kurdish People's Protection Units.

For months, these valiant men and women stood together, battling house to house in a conflict so bitter it earned the moniker 'the Kurdish Stalingrad'.

On January 26, 2015, the ISIS scourge was finally expelled and Kobani was declared liberated – a stunning victory that proved a turning point in the global fight against ISIS, whose caliphate collapsed four years later.

This weekend, the people of Kobani gather to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their historic triumph. Yet the celebrations will be laced with anxiety, because now its citizens face another existential threat.

Just a few dozen kilometres away, the Syrian National Army (SNA) - a Turkish-backed patchwork militia – is clashing with Kobani's defenders for control of a vital dam providing power for much of the region while threatening to cross the Euphrates River and surge into Rojava. 

Meanwhile, Turkey – whose autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees the Kurds as terrorists – is sending drones and warplanes to pound civilian convoys protesting the hostilities.

And all this instability has forced the Kurds to consider an even darker, and very real, prospect - the resurgence of ISIS 'within a matter of days', according to Rojava's political and military leaders. 

'Look - here's a human spine. That's an ISIS spine'. My guide shows me a selection of vertebrae uncovered at the site of an airstrike on an ISIS position in Kobani in 2014

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