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On Monday the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that the isolated Kurdish enclave of Kobani was  “about to fall” to a massive, sustained assault from ISIS. Also on Monday, Rooz Bahjat, a Kurdish intelligence officer stationed in Kobani said the city would fall within  “the next 24 hours.” By now ISIS was expecting to be slaughtering civilians by the score.

Instead, something totally unexpected happened –  ISIS has been forced to pull back.

A local Kobani official, Idris Nahsen, told AFP that fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had managed to push ISIS fighters outside several key areas after “helpful” airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition

“The situation has changed since yesterday. YPG forces have pushed back ISIS forces,” he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, confirmed that ISIS fighters had withdrawn overnight from several areas and were no longer inside the western part of Kobani. They remained in eastern parts of the town and its southern edges, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a network of sources inside Syria. The number of dead in the overnight fighting was not clear, but Mustafa Ebdi, a Kurdish journalist and activist from Kobani, wrote on his Facebook page that the streets of one southeastern neighborhood were “full of the bodies” of ISIS fighters.

Kobani has been under attack by  9,000 ISIS jihadists, armed with tanks and heavy artillery for nearly a month. This is the largest manned assualt by ISIS in its short existence.They are being opposed by just  2,000 Kurdish fighters with the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), without access to any heavy weaponry and short on ammunition. To put this into perspective,  800 ISIS fighters routed 2 divisions of the Iraqi Army, totaling 30,000 heavily armed soldiers, in June. In other words, the Syrian Kurds of Kobani weren’t supposed to stand a snowball’s chance in Hell.

My father used to say, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters. It’s the size of the fight in the dog that does.”

And now, here we are. Two days after Kobani was supposed to have become just the latest victims of ISIS terror. The difference is obviously the  motivation of who is fighting.

“We either die or win. No fighter is leaving,” Esmat al-Sheikh, leader of the Kobani Defence Authority, told Reuters. “The world is watching, just watching and leaving these monsters to kill everyone, even children…but we will fight to the end with what weapons we have.”