Over 130000 Flee Syria for Turkey in Wake of ISIS Raids
New York Times-2 hours ago
Turkey has closed its border near Ayn al-Arab to Turkish Kurds inthe hope of preventing them from joining the fight in Syria. A few hundred ...
130000 Syrians Have Fled ISIS And Taken Refuge In Turkey In The ...
In-Depth-Huffington Post-3 hours ago
In-Depth-Huffington Post-3 hours ago
ISIS Attacks on Syrian Kurds Create 100000 Refugees in Two Days
Blog-Slate Magazine (blog)-40 minutes ago
Blog-Slate Magazine (blog)-40 minutes ago
ANKARA, Turkey — More than 130,000 refugees have flooded into Turkey from Syria in recent days, fleeing attacks by Islamic State militants on their villages, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said on Monday, though local officials in Syria said that Kurdish militias had blunted the militants’ advance there.
For nearly a week, the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, 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.
“What we are faced with is a man-made disaster,” Numan Kurtulmus, the deputy prime minister, said on Monday. “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 Islamic State’s advance was “worse than a natural disaster.”
ISIS’ Goals and Tactics Worldwide
Some background on goals, tactics and the potential long-term threat to the United States from the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
By Natalia V. Osipova and Christian Roman on September 10, 2014. Reuters
A local official in Ayn al-Arab, Enver Muslim, said that Kurdish militias had mobilized there and that they had halted the militants’ advance about five miles outside of town.
“I am here, and my wife is here, and we are not leaving,” Mr. Muslim said in a telephone interview. “There are thousands of fighters here who have not gone to the front lines yet.”
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 P.K.K.
Turkey is nervous about any military action by the P.K.K., which battled the Turkish government for decades in pursuit of autonomy for the country’s Kurds, 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 from joining the fight in Syria. A few hundred young men protested the policy near the border on Monday, throwing stones at Turkish security forces, who responded with tear gas and water cannons.
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 the Islamic State, saying they are Sunni Muslims and cannot be considered infidels by the militants.
Omar Alloush, another local leader reached in Ayn al-Arab, said he had spoken by phone with an Islamic State leader who was a Saudi citizen and who had demanded that the Kurds in the town pledge allegiance to the Islamic State’s top leader, who has declared himself caliph.
“I told him: ‘Why should I negotiate with you? Who are you? What do you have in this land?’ ” Mr. Alloush said.
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.
GRAPHIC
How ISIS Works
With oil revenues, arms and organization, the jihadist group controls vast stretches of Syria and Iraq and aspires to statehood.
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 Obama’s decision to conduct airstrikes against the militants there.
Mr. Obama has said that the United States may strike the Islamic State inside Syria as well, but it has yet to do so. The United States is building an international coalition to fight the group, and last week Washington approved $500 million to support rival rebel groups in Syria that it regards as more moderate.
The Islamic State responded on Monday 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 early Monday. “The best thing you can do is to make an effort to kill any infidel, French, American or any of their allies.”
He continued, “If you are not able to use an explosive charge or a bullet, then single out the American or French infidel or any of their allies and smash his head with a rock, slaughter him with a knife, run him over with a car, throw him from a high place, choke him or poison him.”
Calls for attacks on the West had been rare in the group’s copious communications, which have included releases on social media sites and high-quality propaganda videos. Mostly, the Islamic State had appeared more interested in building up the caliphate it has declared on the territory it has seized in Syria and Iraq and in battling local enemies.
Some of its recent videos, though, like one last week that featured a British hostage, asked the West to reconsider military action and threatened revenge attacks for any strikes against the group.
It was unclear what threat the call for attacks posed. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims oppose the Islamic State, and even most Islamic militant groups disagree with its ideology and tactics. At the same time, some American officials consider see other extremist groups operating in Syria asa bigger threat to the West than the Islamic State.
The militants’ call for “lone wolf” attacks was part of a wider warning in the audio recording that the United States and its allies were choosing to begin a war with the world’s Muslims.
“O Americans, O Europeans, the Islamic State did not initiate a war against you, as your governments and media try to make you believe,” Mr. Adnani said in the recording, which included an English translation. “It is you who started the transgression against us, and thus you deserve blame and you will pay a great price.”
Mr. Adnani said that the West had not yet realized that there was “no cure” for the danger his group poses.
“If you fight it, it becomes stronger and tougher,” he said. “If you leave it alone, it grows and expands.”
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