Turkish riots over failure to aid Kurds leave 21 dead

At least 21 people were killed in riots across Turkey, the deadliest street unrest in years, after the Kurdish minority rose up in fury at the government’s refusal to protect a besieged Syrian Kurdish town from Islamic State.

Street battles raged between Kurdish protesters and police across Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, in Istanbul and in Ankara, as the fallout from war in Syria and Iraq threatened to unravel the Nato member’s own delicate peace process with Kurds.

Across the frontier, US-led air strikes appeared to have pushed Islamic State insurgents back to the edges of the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani, which the militants had been poised to capture this week after a three-week siege.