Pressure mounts on Turkey to act on insurgents

Syrian Kurds battled to defend a key border town from an Islamic State advance as Kurdish youths from neighbouring Turkey rushed to their aid, heightening the pressure on Ankara to act against the Islamist insurgents.

In Turkey, which is struggling to manage an influx of more than 130,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees since Friday, security forces fired tear gas and water cannon at hundreds of Kurdish protesters who accuse Ankara of favouring Islamic State against the Kurds.

The main Kurdish armed group in northern Syria, the YPG, said its fighters had halted the Islamic State advance east of the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, but that fierce fighting was continuing.

Hundreds of Kurdish youths gathered on the Turkish side of the border, responding to calls from Kurdish leaders to join the fight against Islamic State fighters who have seized swathes of Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate.

Residents fleeing Kobani said the militants were executing people of all ages in villages they seized. Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims but Islamic State views them as apostates because of their secular ideology. It has persecuted and killed Shi’ite Muslims, Christians and members of the ancient Yazidi sect as well as moderate Sunnis who reject its stark version of Islam.

Turkish security forces are now trying to keep Kurds from crossing the frontier to aid their brethren. At the Mursitpinar border crossing, a line of paramilitary police stood guard along a barbed-wire border fence.

Ismet, 19, a local man who makes a living collecting strawberries, said the protesters had gathered from cities across Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

The advances by the Sunni insurgents just across Turkey’s southern border have alarmed Ankara. But so far Turkey has been slow to join calls for a coalition to fight Islamic State, worried in part about links between the Syrian Kurds and Turkey’s own Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which waged an armed campaign for Kurdish rights over decades.

Turkey strongly denies it has given any form of support to the Islamist militants, but Western countries say its open borders during Syria’s three year civil war allowed Islamic State and other radical groups to grow in power.

The PKK called Turkey’s Kurds to arms on Sunday, saying “supporting this heroic resistance” in Kobani was a “debt of honour”. Radio stations played patriotic Kurdish songs about heroic fighters and martyrs and one played recordings of PKK commander Murat Karayilan in a bid to drum up support.