More than 130,000 refugees have flooded into Turkey from Syria in recent days, fleeing attacks by Islamic State (IS) militants on their villages, Turkey's deputy prime minister said yesterday, although local officials in Syria said that Kurdish militias had blunted the militants' advance there.
For nearly a week, IS has been using tanks and heavy artillery to sweep through hamlets with mostly Kurdish inhabitants near the north-central Syrian border town known to Arabs as Ayn al-Arab and to Kurds as Kobani. The fighting poses major problems for Turkey, which already had more than one million Syrian refugees on its hands, including 200,000 living in camps near the border.
The new influx is one of the largest since the crisis in Syria began more than three years ago, and it is prompting Kurdish fighters in Turkey to rush across the border and join the fight in Syria.
‘Man-made disaster’
“What we are faced with is a man-made disaster,” Numan Kurtulmus, the deputy prime minister, said yesterday. “We don’t know how many more villages may be raided, how many more people may be forced to seek refuge.”
He said the crisis caused by the IS’s advance was “worse than a natural disaster”.
A local official in Ayn al-Arab, Enver Muslim, said that Kurdish militias had mobilised there and that they had halted the militants’ advance about 8km (five miles) outside of town. “I am here, and my wife is here, and we are not leaving,” Muslim said.
He said that Kurdish fighters and civilians had evacuated a number of villages that were deemed indefensible, adding to the flow of refugees. But he said the local forces dug in around Ayn al-Arab have been reinforced by many fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, known as the PKK.
Turkey is nervous about any military action by the PKK, which battled the Turkish government for decades in pursuit of autonomy, a conflict that has resulted in more than 30,000 deaths.
Turkey has closed its border near Ayn al-Arab to Turkish Kurds in the hope of preventing them joining the fight in Syria. A few hundred young men protested against the policy near the border yesterday, throwing stones at Turkish security forces, who responded with tear gas and water crannons.
Barazani Hamam, a relief worker near the border, said that Turkey regularly opened its crossings to allow refugees in but that many thousands more remained displaced inside Syria. Many Kurds near Ayn al-Arab are outraged that they have come under attack from IS, saying they are Sunni Muslims and cannot be considered infidels by the militants.
Women and children
While only a few dozen fighters have been reported killed on each side, the fighting in the area has been hard on the civilians, mostly women and children, who have crossed the desert border with Turkey on foot, carrying few belongings.
Kurdish leaders have drawn parallels between the militants' anti-Kurdish offensive around Ayn al-Arab and their siege of the Yazidi minority in Iraq earlier this year, which figured in President Barack Obama's decision to conduct airstrikes against the militants there.
Mr Obama has said that the US may strike IS inside Syria as well, but it has yet to do so. The US is building an international coalition to fight the group, and last week Washington approved $500 million (€389 million) to support rival rebel groups in Syria that it regards as more moderate.
Individual attacks
IS responded yesterday by taunting Mr Obama and calling on its supporters around the world to carry out individual attacks on non-Muslims. “Wherever you are, hinder those who want to harm your brothers and the state as much as you can,” the group’s spokesman, known as Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said in a 55-minute audio recording posted online.
“The best thing you can do is to make an effort to kill any infidel, French, American or any of their allies.”
Separately, a French man purported to have been kidnapped in Algeria on Sunday appeared in a video yesterday saying he had been kidnapped by an Algeria-based IS splinter group the Caliphate Soldiers.
The man, who gives his name, age and date of birth, said he had arrived in Algeria on September 20th and been taken on September 21st.
“I am in the hands of Jund al-Khilifa, an Algerian armed group. This armed group is asking me to ask you [President François Hollande] to not intervene in Iraq. They are holding me as a hostage and I ask you Mr President to do everything to get me out of this bad situation and I thank you.”
A French foreign ministry spokesman could not confirm the authenticity of the video. – (New York Times service/ additional reporting Reuters)