Islamic State: Kurds issue new call to arms against advancing militants in Syria

Updated

Kurdish militants in Turkey issued a new call to arms to defend a border town in northern Syria from advancing Islamic State (IS) fighters, as the Turkish authorities and United Nations prepared for a surge in refugees.

The United Nations said the number of Syrian Kurds fleeing into neighbouring Turkey may have topped 100,000 and was likely to go much higher, as IS militants seized dozens of villages close to the border and advanced on the frontier town of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish.

Carol Batchelor, the United Nations refugee agency's (UNHCR) representative in Turkey said the country faced one of the biggest influxes of refugees from Syria since the war there began more than three years ago.

"I don't think in the last three-and-a-half years we have seen 100,000 cross in two days," she said.

"So this is a bit of a measure of how this situation is unfolding and the very deep fear people have about the circumstances inside Syria, and for that matter Iraq.

"We don't know when those numbers will end, we don't know what the future holds ... It could well go again into the hundreds of thousands. We need assistance for core, life-saving support."

A Kurdish commander on the ground said IS militants had advanced to within 15 kilometres of Kobani, whose strategic location has been blocking the radical Sunni Muslim militants from consolidating their gains across northern Syria.

IS want 'climate of fear and slavish obedience'

The United States said it was prepared to carry out air strikes in Syria to stop the advance of IS as residents fleeing the frontier town, and its surrounding villages said the militants were executing people of all ages in the areas they had seized to create a climate of fear and slavish obedience.

Rather than a war this is a genocide operation ... They are going into the villages and cutting the heads of one or two people and showing them to the villagers. deputy for Turkey's pro-Kurdish HDP, Ibrahim Binici

"Islamic State are continuing to advance. Every place they pass through they kill, wound and kidnap people. Many people are missing and we believe they were kidnapped," Welat Avar, a doctor, told Reuters by telephone from Kobani.

"We now urgently need medicines and equipment for operations. We have many casualties," he added.

"ISIL (IS) killed many people in the villages. They cut off the heads of two people, I saw it with my own eyes," he said, referring to an incident in the village of Chelebi, near Kobani.



A Kurdish politician from Turkey who visited Kobani on Saturday said locals had told him IS fighters were beheading people as they went from village to village.

"Rather than a war this is a genocide operation ... They are going into the villages and cutting the heads of one or two people and showing them to the villagers," Ibrahim Binici, a deputy for Turkey's pro-Kurdish HDP said.

"It is truly a shameful situation for humanity," he said, calling for international intervention.

Every country can contribute something: Power

US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said other countries were willing to join Washington in launching air strikes in Syria against IS militants.

"Every country can contribute something to this effort and there's universal support I think, for degrading and destroying this group."

Despite other Western nations yet to announce support for IS airstrikes, Ms Power indicated that the US had received private commitments.

"We're going to leave it to other nations to announce for themselves what their specific commitments to the coalition are going to be," she said.

"We will not do the air strikes alone."

US forces have bombed the group in Iraq at the request of the government, but it is unclear when or where any military action might take place in Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad, Washington said is no longer legitimate.

Western states have increased contact with the main Syrian Kurdish political party, the PYD, since IS made a lightning advance across northern Iraq in June.

Its political wing, the YPG, says it has 50,000 fighters and should be a natural partner in any US-led coalition.

However, Mr Obama said in August that arming the Syrian fighters was a fantasy because they are a "group of doctors, farmers and pharmacists".

The president of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, Hadi Al-Bahra, said they are "not asking anyone to fight our own war."

"This situation reminds me greatly with the American Revolution. Who made that revolution? Wasn't it the farmers, doctors? We are the normal Syrian fighting for our freedom."

Mr Bahara said he expected it would take two to three years to defeat the Islamic State.

Separately on Sunday, Turkey's military said it had scrambled two fighter jets after a Syrian MI-17 helicopter approached the border near Nusaybin in Mardin province.

Reuters

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, terrorism, syrian-arab-republic, turkey

First posted