“The clashes led to the injury of four civilians in the village, who were transferred to the border crossing, but the Turkish authorities prevented them from entering Turkey for treatment”, a local aid worker told ARA News on Tuesday.
Advertisement
The Syrian Kurdish forces are widely seen as the most effective force fighting Islamic State militants in Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group affiliated to Syria’s foreign-backed opposition, said fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) are trying to encircle the militants and stop their further advance into the city. Backed by US-led airstrikes, the Kurds then advanced south toward the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa.
Over the past 48 hours, militants have launched multiple assaults on the town of Kobane, a few miles west of Tal Abyad.
More than 230,000 people have been killed in Syria since a brutal government crackdown on protests in 2011 spiralled into a civil war.
The town is a key strategic stronghold for the Islamic State to advance their campaign in neighboring Turkey.
The IS group attacked several government-held southern neighborhoods of Hassakeh on Thursday.
In the city of Hassakeh in Syria’s remote northeast, government troops and allied paramilitary National Defense Forces regained control of the neighborhood of Eastern Ghoweiran on Tuesday, according to state television.
Until the latest IS push, which began June 25, the predominantly Kurdish city was split between government forces and Kurdish fighters, who have been fighting the IS separately.
She and her friends said they grew used to seeing severed heads displayed in the street, left there as a warning after ISIS carried out executions.
The Islamic State group, which governs its self-styled caliphate in accordance with an extreme interpretation of Islamic law, has in the past beheaded dozens of people for blasphemy, sorcery and espionage.
Advertisement
Earlier, the Observatory reported that Islamic State had beheaded two women and their husbands on charges of sorcery in eastern Syria, in the group’s first documented beheadings of female captives.
