Turkey to allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to reinforce fellows in Kobani

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey said on Monday, Oct 20, it would allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to reinforce fellow Kurds in the Syrian border town of Kobani, while the United States air-dropped arms for the first time to help the defenders resist an Islamic State assault, Reuters reported.

Washington said the arms had been supplied by Iraqi Kurdish authorities and had been dropped near Kobani, which came under Islamic State attack in September and is now besieged to the east, west and south, and bordered to the north by Turkey.

Turkey has stationed tanks on hills overlooking Kobani but has refused to help the Kurdish militias on the ground without striking a broader deal with its NATO allies on intervening in the Syrian civil war, saying action should also be taken against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

However, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a news conference that Turkey was facilitating the passage of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces which have also fought Islamic State when the militants attacked the Kurds' autonomous region in Iraq over the summer. He gave no details, according to Reuters.

Turkey's refusal to intervene in the battle against Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Syria and neighboring Iraq, has led to growing frustration in the United States.

The policy has also provoked lethal riots in southeastern Turkey by Kurds furious at Ankara's refusal to help Kobani or at least open a land corridor for volunteer fighters and reinforcements to go there.

Ankara views the Syrian Kurds with deep suspicion because of their ties to the PKK, a group that waged a decades-long militant campaign for Kurdish rights in Turkey.