BEIRUT — Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have crossed from Turkey and Iraq into neighboring Syria to defend a Kurdish area under attack by Islamic State militants, as leaders of the ethnic group appealed for international assistance in their battle against the extremists.
The movement of the Kurdish fighters into Syria reflected the ferocity of the fighting in the northern Kobani area, which borders Turkey. Militants of the extremist Islamic State group have been barreling through the area over the past three days, seizing villages and forcing at least 60,000 Syrian Kurds to flee into Turkey.
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Too good to be true?
ANKARA, Turkey – Turkish authorities say they have freed 49 hostages from one of the world’s most ruthless militant groups without firing a shot, paying a ransom or offering a quid pro quo.
But as the well-dressed men and women captured by the Islamic State group more than three months ago clasped their families Saturday on the tarmac of the Turkish capital’s airport, experts had serious doubts about the government’s story.
The official explanation “sounds a bit too good to be true,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat who chairs the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies. “There are some very legitimate and unanswered questions about how this happened.”
The hostages were seized from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul after the Islamic State group overran the Iraqi city on June 11. Turkish leaders gave only the broadest outlines of their rescue.
– The Associated Press
“Kobani is facing the fiercest and most barbaric attack in its history,” said Mohammed Saleh Muslim, head of Syria’s powerful Kurdish Democratic Union. The groups’ members dominate the Syrian Kurdish group known as the YPK, which is fighting the Islamic State militants.
“Kobani calls on all those who defend humane and democratic values … to stand by Kobani and support it immediately. The coming hours are decisive,” he said in a message sent to reporters.
On Friday, the president of Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region, Masoud Barzani, warned that the Islamic State group’s attacks on the Kobani area in northern Syria “threaten the whole entirety of the Kurdish nation and it has targeted the honor, dignity and existence of our people.”
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish official Nawaf Khalil said that fighters were streaming into the Kobani area from Turkey. The Observatory, which obtains its information from a network of activists on the ground, estimated their numbers in the hundreds.
A military official in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region said 600 fighters also crossed from there into Syria, heading toward Kobani. The fighters belong to the PKK, a Kurdish movement that waged a long, bloody insurgency in southeast Turkey.
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