Peshmerga fighters land in Turkey to battle IS

IRAQI peshmerga fighters have arrived in south-eastern Turkey ahead of their planned deployment to the Syrian town of Kobani to help fellow Kurds repel an Islamic State advance which has defied United Statesled air strikes.

A Turkish Airlines plane landed in the city of Sanliurfa at around 1:15am local time yesterday. A convoy of white buses escorted by armoured jeeps and police cars left the airport shortly afterwards.

Kobani, on the border with Turkey, has been besieged by Islamic State militants for more than a month and its fate has become an important test of the US-led coalition’s ability to combat the Sunni insurgents.

“They will be in our town today,” Adham Basho, a member of the Syrian Kurdish National Council from Kobani, said of the peshmerga, confirming that a group of 90-100 fighters had arrived in Sanliurfa overnight.

Islamic State has caused international alarm by capturing large expanses of Iraq and Syria, declaring an Islamic “caliphate” and erasing borders between the two countries, and slaughtering or driving away Shiite Muslims, Christians and other communities who do not share their ultraradical brand of Sunni Islam.

Weeks of US-led airstrikes on the insurgents’ positions around Kobani and the deaths of hundreds of their fighters have failed to break the siege. Islamic State has threatened to massacre Kobani’s defenders in an assault which has sent almost 200,000 Syrian Kurds fleeing to Turkey, and triggered a call to arms from Kurds across the region.

The Iraqi Kurdish region’s parliament voted last week to deploy some peshmerga to Syria. Under pressure from Western allies, Turkey agreed to let peshmerga forces from Iraq traverse its territory to reach Kobani.