More than 130,000 flee Syria for Turkey in wake of Islamic State raids
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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 Monday, although local officials in Syria said that Kurdish militias had blunted the militants’ advance there.
For nearly a week, the Islamic State 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 1 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 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.”
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 5 miles outside of town.
“I am here, and my wife is here, and we are not leaving,” 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 PKK.
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 Monday, throwing stones at Turkish security forces, who responded with tear gas and water cannons.
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.