In response to weeks of rocket attacks in the province of Kilis at its border with Syria, Turkey carried out an attack on militants of the so-called Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Friday, using rocket launchers and artillery fire, Turkish media reported Saturday.
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It said fleeing civilians were being caught in the crossfire of the IS offensive, and that they were struggling to get access to food, water and medical services.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says 45,000 Syrians fled the ISIS assault between the 24 and 27 May, joining the 120,000 Syrians already “scattered in overcrowded informal settlements and fields just south of Turkey’s Öncup?nar/Bab al-Salameh border crossing and in and around the nearby Syrian town of Azaz”.
There are two walls on the Turkey-Syria border.
The IS offensive began Thursday night.
ISIS is making gains near Syria’s border with Turkey, seizing a string of villages and trapping tens of thousands of civilians, according to Doctors Without Borders and a Syrian monitoring group. A few hundred fled west to the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin.
“Our forces evacuated 460 people… majority women and children”, said Iraqi police general Raed Shakir Jawdat.
The IRC has relocated its staff from the centers and camp to shelter in safer areas of Azaz until the situation enables them to return.
Islamic State said in an online statement it had captured several villages near Azaz, which cut rebel supply lines from there to the town of Marea farther southeast, isolating the latter from other rebel-held areas, the Observatory said.
Syria’s war has killed more than 280,000 people and displaced millions since it started with the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011.
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Fallujah, which lies only 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad, has been out of government control since January 2014 and is one of only two remaining major Iraqi cities still in IS hands, the other being Mosul. That has been a lifeline for the rebels, but a government offensive backed by Russian air power and regional militias earlier this year dislodged rebels from parts of Azaz and severed their corridor between the Turkish border and Aleppo.
