Kurds Call For Help to Fight ISIL in Syria
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The ISIL fighters besieged a Kurdish city in northern Syria after seizing 21 villages in a major assault, prompting a call to arms from Kurds in neighboring Turkey who urged followers to go and help resist the group's advance.
The attack on the city of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish, came two days after a top US military officer said the Syrian opposition would probably need the help of the Syrian Kurds to defeat the Islmic State in Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL) fighters.
ISIL fighters, armed with heavy weaponry including tanks, seized the villages near Kobani in an offensive which the UK-based Syrian Observatory monitoring group said had started on Tuesday night.
It said 21 villages had fallen to ISIL in the last 24 hours.
"We've lost touch with many of the residents living in the villages that [ISIL] seized," Ocalan Iso, deputy head of the Kurdish forces in Kobani, told the Reuters news agency via Skype.
He said the group was committing massacres and kidnapping women in the newly-seized areas, giving the names of 28 members of a single family he said had been taken captive. It was not possible to verify his account immediately.
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 ISIL attack on Kobani in July. Turkish PKK rebels later issued a call for young men in Turkey's southeast to join the fight in northern Syria.
"The youth of northern Kurdistan [southeast Turkey] should go to Kobani and take part in the historic, honourable resistance," the PKK said in a statement on its website.
Footage posted on YouTube on Wednesday by the YPG, the main Kurdish armed group in Syria, appeared to show Kurdish fighters armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades battling a tank flying the Islamic State's black flag west of Kobani.