Kurdish militants issue call to arms to defend border town

Tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds flee north to escape advancing ISIL militants who are terrorising dozens of villages near Turkey.

Turkish police use tear gas and water cannon yesterday against Kurds who gathered on the border with Syria at Suruc in south-eastern Turkey. Ulas Yunus Tosun / EPA

SURUC, Turkey // Kurdish militants in Turkey have issued a new call to arms to defend a border town in northern Syria from advancing ISIL fighters, and the Turkish authorities and United Nations prepared on Sunday for a surge in refugees.

About 70,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey since Friday as ISIL seized dozens of villages close to the border and advanced on the frontier town of Ayn Al Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish. But the real figure may be more than 100,000, said Carol Batchelor, the representative in Turkey for the UNCHR, the UN’s refugee agency, on Sunday.

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

A Kurdish politician from Turkey who visited Kobani on Saturday said locals had told him that ISIL 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. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s civil war, said clashes continued overnight, killing 10 insurgents and bringing the number of ISIL fighters killed to at least 39. At least 27 Kurdish fighters have died.

ISIL has seized at least 64 villages around Kobani since the onslaught started on Tuesday, using heavy arms and thousands of fighters. It executed at least 11 civilians on Saturday, including at least two boys, the Observatory said.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a rebel group wthat has spent three decades fighting for autonomy for Turkey’s Kurds, renewed a call for the youth of Turkey’s mostly Kurdish south-east to rise up and rush to save Kobani.

“Supporting this heroic resistance is not just a debt of honour of the Kurds but all Middle East people. Just giving support is not enough, the criterion must be taking part in the resistance,” it said in a statement.

“ISIL fascism must drown in the blood it spills ... The youth of North Kurdistan (south-east Turkey) must flow in waves to Kobani,” it said.

Hundreds of security forces cleared the border area south of Suruc of a couple of thousand people who had gathered in solidarity with Kobani for a third day on the Turkish side of the barbed wire fence, where many of the refugees have crossed.

After gendarmes fired water cannon and tear gas, people began to flee the border zone on foot and in vehicles, while some threw stones at the security forces. Several ambulances were among dozens of vehicles that sped up the road towards the town of Suruc.

The United States has said it is prepared to carry out airstrikes in Syria to stop the advances of ISIL, which has also seized tracts of territory in neighbouring Iraq and has proclaimed a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.

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 says is no longer legitimate.

Western states have increased contact with the main Syrian Kurdish political party, the PYD, whose armed wing is the YPG, since ISIL made a lightning advance across northern Iraq in June.

The YPG says it has 50,000 fighters and should be a natural partner in the coalition the US is trying to build.

But such cooperation could prove difficult because of Syrian Kurds’ ties to the PKK, a group listed as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the US and European Union due to the militant campaign it has waged in Turkey.

A radio station broadcasting from Kobani played patriotic Kurdish songs about heroic fighters and martyrs, which residents in Turkey listened to in their cars. Recordings were also played of PKK commander Murat Karayilan as announcers sought to drum up support for the call to arms.

The UNHCR and the Turkish authorities said they were preparing for the possibility of hundreds of thousands more refugees arriving in the coming days.

Kobani’s relative stability through much of Syria’s conflict meant 200,000 internally displaced people were sheltering there before ISIL’s advance, UNHCR said.

“This massive influx shows how important it is to offer and preserve asylum space for Syrians as well as the need to mobilise international support to the neighbouring countries,” said Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees.

* Reuters