Syrian civil war: The Siege of Kobanî is broken by the People's Protection Units (YPG) and Free Syrian Army (FSA), marking a turning point in the Rojava–Islamist conflict.

The Syrian civil war began with the Syrian revolution in March 2011, when popular discontent with the Ba'athist regime ruled by Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring. The Assad regime responded to the protests with lethal force, sparking a civil war. The Syrian revolution lasted almost 14 years and culminated in the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Many sources regard this as the end of the civil war.

The siege of Kobanî was launched by the Islamic State (IS) on 13 September 2014, in order to capture the Kobanî Canton and its main city of Kobanî in northern Syria, in the de facto autonomous region of Rojava.

The People's Defense Units (YPG), also called People's Protection Units, is a libertarian socialist US-backed Kurdish militant group in Syria and the primary component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The Free Syrian Army is a big-tent coalition of decentralized Syrian opposition rebel groups in the Syrian civil war founded on 29 July 2011 by Colonel Riad al-Asaad and six officers who defected from the Syrian Armed Forces. The officers announced that the immediate priority of the Free Syrian Army was to safeguard the lives of protestors and civilians from the deadly crackdown by Bashar al-Assad's security apparatus; with the ultimate goal of accomplishing the objectives of the Syrian revolution, namely, the end to the decades-long reign of the ruling al-Assad family. In late 2011, the FSA was the main Syrian military defectors group. Initially a formal military organization at its founding, its original command structure dissipated by 2016, and the FSA identity was later used by several different Syrian opposition groups.