Two French Rafale fighter jets fly in formation in this handout photograph provided on September 19, 2014 by ECPAD, during a strike mission against a logistics depot in Iraq, from the Al-Dhafra airbase
Reuters/Dikmetas, Turkey
Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani called on Friday for international intervention to protect a Kurdish town in neighbouring Syria from Islamic State fighters who have driven many Syrian Kurds to flee across the border to Turkey.
Several thousand Kurds began crossing the frontier on Friday fearing an imminent attack on the border town of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish, after Islamic State (IS) fighters seized dozens of nearby villages over the past two days.
"I call on the international community to use every means as soon as possible to protect Kobani," Barzani, the president of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, said in a statement. "IS terrorists... must be hit and destroyed wherever they are.
His appeal comes as the United States draws up plans for military action in Syria against the radical Sunni Muslim group which has seized swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, proclaiming a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.
The Islamic State gains have challenged efforts by Kurds to exploit the three-year-old civil war in Syria and carve out regions of their own in the northeast of the country.
The violence is also a headache for neighbouring Turkey, which is already sheltering more than 1.3 million Syrian refugees and fears hundreds of thousands more, waiting in the mountains on the Syrian side of the 900-km (560-mile) border, could seek to cross as fighting escalates.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks developments in the war, said on Friday IS had seized three more villages near Kobani, bringing to 24 the number it had taken.
Esmat al-Sheikh, head of the Kurdish forces defending Kobani, said fierce clashes continued to the east, west and south of the city, which is bordered by Turkey to the north. IS fighters armed with rockets, artillery, tanks and armoured vehicles seized from the Iraqi army in Mosul had advanced to within 20 km (12 miles) of Kobani, he told Reuters by telephone.
"The whole world is silent," he said. "Every day we hear there is going to be an attack on ISIS. But where is it? ... Will it come after everyone is already dead?"
The attack prompted a Kurdish militant call to the youth of Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast to join the fight against IS, whose offensive began on Tuesday after the U.S. military said Syrian moderates would probably need the Syrian Kurds' help to defeat Islamic State, along with the help of Turkey and Jordan.
Sheikh said dozens of civilians -- women, children and the elderly -- had been killed on roads in the area. "They took women, girls, small children and youths as hostages but we cannot count them," he said, adding he had no figures on the number of Kurdish fighters killed.
