SURUC, Turkey/BEIRUT: ISIS militants tightened their noose on a northern Syrian border town Sunday as the United Nations said the number of Syrian Kurds fleeing into neighboring Turkey may have topped 100,000 and was likely to go much higher.

 

Residents fleeing the frontier town of Ain al-Arab, known in Kurdish as Kobani, and its surrounding villages said the militants were executing people of all ages in the areas they had seized to create a climate of fear and slavish obedience.

 

Kurdish politicians in Turkey renewed their appeal to young people in the country’s mainly Kurdish southeast to head to the battle to help their ethnic kin push back the militants from the Al-Qaeda splinter group.

 

“ ISIS is continuing to advance. Every place they pass through they kill, wound and kidnap people. Many people are missing and we believe they were kidnapped,” Welat Avar, a doctor, told Reuters by telephone from Ain al-Arab.

 

“We now urgently need medicines and equipment for operations. We have many casualties ... ISIS killed many people in the villages. They cut off the heads of two people, I saw it with my own eyes,” he said.

 

A Kurdish politician from Turkey who visited the town Saturday gave a similar account of the militants’ tactics. “Rather than a war this is a genocide ... They are going into the villages and cutting off the heads of one or two people and showing them to the villagers,” Ibrahim Binici, a deputy from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish HDP party, told Reuters.

 

“It is truly a shameful situation for humanity,” he said, calling for international intervention.

 

Some Syrian Kurds compared their plight to the Yazidi minority in Iraq, which came under attack from ISIS earlier this year. 

Tens of thousands of Yazidis were forced to flee their homeland of Sinjar and other villages.

 

The U.S. has carried out airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and has said it is prepared to extend them into Syria, but it is not clear when or where this could take place.

 

Among the tens of thousands crossing the border into Turkey Sunday was Muhammet Abbas, a 40-year-old teacher who wore a blue cap as protection against the blazing sun. He led a group of about 20 people including his wife and six children. “Everybody is scared ... Where is humanity? Where is the world? They are killing us and nobody cares.”

 

Turkey has said an estimated 70,000 Syrian Kurds have crossed the border since Friday, but the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said that figure may be too conservative.

 

“I don’t think in the last three and a half years we have seen 100,000 cross in two days. So this is a bit of a measure of how this situation is unfolding and the very deep fear people have about the circumstances inside Syria, and for that matter Iraq,” said Carol Batchelor, the UNHCR representative in Turkey.

 

“Quite frankly, we don’t know when those numbers will end, we don’t know what the future holds. ... It could well go again into the hundreds of thousands. We need assistance for core, life-saving support,” Batchelor said.

 

Residents in Ain al-Arab said ISIS was within 15 km and closing in from the east, west and south.

 

The town’s strategic location has been blocking the jihadists from consolidating their gains in northern Syria. The group tried to take the town in July but was repulsed by local forces backed by Kurdish fighters from Turkey.

 

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-regime, Britain-based group of activists, said up to 150,000 Kurds had been displaced – internally and externally – since ISIS launched its latest offensive last Tuesday.

 

It also said that clashes overnight had killed 10 insurgents, bringing the number of ISIS fighters killed to at least 39. At least 27 Kurdish fighters have died.

 

The group has seized at least 64 villages around Kobani since Tuesday, using heavy arms and thousands of fighters. It executed at least 11 civilians Saturday, including at least two boys, the Observatory said.

 

In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) called on the country’s Kurds to take up arms. “Supporting this heroic resistance is not just a debt of honor of the Kurds but all Middle East people. Just giving support is not enough, the criterion must be taking part in the resistance,” it said in a statement on its website.

 

“ ISIS fascism must drown in the blood it spills. ... The youth of North Kurdistan [southeast Turkey] must flow in waves to Kobani,” it said.

 

Meanwhile, Turkish security forces clashed with hundreds of Kurdish protesters who had gathered in solidarity with Kobani for a third day on the Turkish side of the barbed wire fence where many of the refugees were crossing.

 

The security forces repeatedly fired tear gas and water cannon at the Kurdish protesters, some of whom concealed their faces with scarves as they threw stones. “The PKK is the people, the people are here,” some chanted.

 

Separately Sunday, Turkey’s military said it had scrambled two fighter jets after a Syrian MI-17 helicopter approached the border near Nusaybin in Mardin province.