Turkey’s PKK Kurdish rebel group on Monday called on fellow Kurds to cross into Syria and combat Islamic State jihadists besieging a town near the border, the pro-Kurdish agency Firat reported.
The rebel group in Turkey called for “mobilisation” and said: “The day of glory and honour has arrived.”
Some 100,000 Syrian Kurds have crossed the border into Turkey over the past few days, fleeing an advance by Islamic State jihadists who seized dozens of villages near a strategic border town, the UN said Monday.
The Turkish government “confirmed the figure” of 100,000, said Melissa Fleming, the spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR.
The UN body on Saturday said that as many as hundreds of thousands of refugees might flee the fighting.
Syrian Kurds were leaving the area around Ain al-Arab, or Kobane, as the town is known in Kurdish, which is under attack by IS forces.
Until now, Kobane, the third biggest Kurdish population centre in Syria, had been relatively safe and had taken in 200,000 people displaced from elsewhere in Syria.
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