SYRIA-CRISIS/TURKEY-BORDER REFUGEES Islamic State closes in on Syrian town, refugees flood into Turkey

Record ID: 274644

  • Title: SYRIA-CRISIS/TURKEY-BORDER REFUGEES Islamic State closes in on Syrian town, refugees flood into Turkey
  • Date: 22nd September 2014
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF BOY BEING TREATED
  • Embargoed: 7th October 2014 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA97URLWYPFCXPZCQOZ8A87ZHTL
  • Story Text: Islamic State militants closed in on a northern Syrian border town on Sunday (September 21) as 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.
    Residents fleeing the frontier town of Ayn al-Arab, known in Kurdish as Kobani, 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.
    Kurdish politicians in Turkey renewed their appeal to young people in the country's mainly Kurdish southeast to head to Kobani to help their ethnic kin push back IS, which has seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in recent months and proclaimed a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.
    Some Syrian Kurds compared their plight to the Yazidi minority in Iraq, which came under attack from IS earlier this year. Tens of thousands of Yazidis were forced to flee their homeland of Sinjar and other villages.
    Turkey has said an estimated 70,000 Syrian Kurds have crossed the border since Friday (September 19), but the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said the figure may be too conservative.
    Residents in Kobani said IS was within 15 km (9 miles) of Kobani and closing in from the east, west and south.
    The town's strategic location has been blocking the Sunni Muslim insurgents from consolidating their gains in northern Syria. The group tried to take the town in July but was repulsed by local forces backed by Kurdish fighters from Turkey.
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