Asia

Asia

Kurds warn of massacre by Islamic State in Syrian town

03 October 2014 21:12 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Kurdish fighters warned on Friday they faced a massacre by Islamic State insurgents who have encircled the Syrian border town of Kobani with tanks and bombarded its outskirts with artillery fire, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Islamic State's battlefield gains in recent months have come as President Bashar al-Assad's forces have focussed on other rebel groups, and on Friday the army was reported to have advanced on the city of Aleppo further west, threatening rebel supply lines in a potentially major reversal.

U.S.-led forces have been bombing Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq but the action has done little to stop their advance in northern Syria towards the Turkish border, piling pressure on Ankara to intervene.

And as U.S. warplanes bomb Islamic State in Syria, Assad's military has intensified its own campaign against some of the rebel groups in the west and north of the country that Washington considers its allies.

Turkey said it would do what it could to prevent Kobani, a predominantly Kurdish town just over its southern border, from falling into Islamic State hands but stopped short of committing to any direct military intervention.

Esmat al-Sheikh, head of the Kurdish forces defending Kobani, said the distance between his fighters and the insurgents was now less than one kilometre (half a mile).

"We are in a small, besieged area. No reinforcements reached us and the borders are closed," he told Reuters by phone. "My expectation is for general killing, massacres and destruction."

Islamic State has carved out swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq in a drive to create a cross-border caliphate between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers and earning a reputation for extreme violence.

Two large clouds of smoke rose up to the east of Kobani and there were several loud explosions from further inside the town as shelling continued and gunfire rang out, a Reuters correspondent on the Turkish side of the border said.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 60 shells had hit the town, known as Ayn al-Arab in Arabic. There were also heavy clashes on the eastern and southeastern fronts.

Fighters from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) tried to push the insurgents back, firing missiles lit up by bright red tracers from the town and striking Islamic State targets in a village a few kilometres to the east.

Kurds from northern Syria have fled into Turkey.

"It's a dramatic humanitarian tragedy as we have all witnessed," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in Geneva. "It's the largest single outflow of Syrians in a few days, 160,000 people."