Islamic State militants capture dozens Kurdish villages in Syria

Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah
Sep18, 2014

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured on Thursday 21 Kurdish villages in northern Syria, according to the Associated Press.

Rami Abdulrahman, founder of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the villages had been seized in an ISIL advance that started on Wednesday. "They have a large number of fighters," he told Reuters by phone.

For more than a year, the Islamic State group and Kurdish militias have been locked in a fierce fight in several pockets of northern Syria where large Kurdish populations reside.

The clashes are but one aspect of Syria's broader civil war  a multilayered conflict that the U.N. says has killed more than 190,000.

The aid organization said Kurdish civilians were feeing their villages in fear of being massacred by the advancing militants.

Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria's powerful Kurdish Democracy Democratic Union Party, said the Kurdish fighters withdrew or lost up to 20 villages in the Kobani region and evacuated civilians there.

“We've lost touch with many of the residents living in the villages that ISIS [Islamic State] seized,” Ocalan Iso, deputy head of the Kurdish forces in Kobani, told Reuters via Skype.

The Kurds were appealing for military aid from other Kurdish groups in the region including the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), he said. Support from Kurds who crossed from Turkey helped to repel an Islamic State attack on Kobani in July.

Turkish PKK rebels later issued a call for the youth in Turkey's southeast to join the fight in northern Syria.

The Syrian government, meanwhile has begun targeting the group with greater frequency since the militants overran much of  northern and western Iraq ,the government on Thursday helicopter gunships attacked the northern town of al-Bab, which is controlled by ISIL, killing at least a dozen people.

 President Bashar al-Assad's regime had largely left the group alone, instead focusing his firepower on more moderate rebel brigades.

United States planning to expand military action against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria, a surveillance drone was spotted over nearby Islamic State-controlled territory in Aleppo province, Human Rights, said.

President Barack Obama pledged last week to establish a coalition to defeat ISIS fighters in both Iraq and Syria, plunging the United States into two separate civil wars in which nearly every country in the Middle East has a stake.

Iraqi President Fuad Masum said he hoped the Paris meeting would bring a "quick response" to jihadists who have declared a caliphate or Islamic state ruled under Sharia law in the heart of the Middle East.

Massoum said ISIL fighters were responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed in Iraq's history.

"We should spend more efforts, and therefore we ask to continue the air strikes against the terrorist positions. We will not give them any safe haven," Massoum added.

ISIS fighters set off alarms across the Middle East since June when they swept across northern Iraq, seizing cities, slaughtering prisoners, proclaiming a caliphate to rule over all Muslims and ordering non-Sunnis to convert or die.

"If this group installs itself in Iraq, this will create of a lot of problems in Iraq, the region and the world," Massoum said. "We must try to be helped by other countries so there is international mobilization against this group that wants to install itself in Iraq and from there unleash itself on the world."

The United States resumed air strikes in Iraq in August for the first time since the 2011 withdrawal of the last U.S. troops, fearful the militants would break the country up and use it as a base for attacks on the West.

Sources

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/syrian-air-force-attacks-held-northern-town-25587303
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/09/18/islamic-state-syria/15816861/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-syria-crisis-drones-idUSKBN0HD0O820140918