Kurdish militants in Turkey have issued a new call to arms to defend a border town in northern Syria from advancing the Islamic State in Iraq and Lebanon (ISIS) fighters, and the Turkish authorities and United Nations prepared on Sunday for a surge in refugees.
About 70,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey since Friday as ISIS fighters seized dozens of villages close to the border and advanced on the frontier town of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish.
A Kurdish commander on the ground said ISIS had advanced to within 15 km (9 miles) of Kobani, whose strategic location has been blocking the radical militants from consolidating their gains across northern Syria.
A Kurdish politician from Turkey who visited Kobani on Saturday said locals had told him that ISIS fighters were beheading people as they went from village to village.
"Rather than a war this is a genocide operation ... They are going into the villages and cutting the heads of one or two people and showing them to the villagers," Ibrahim Binici, a deputy for Turkey's pro-Kurdish HDP, told Reuters.
"It is truly a shameful situation for humanity," he said, calling for international intervention. Five of his fellow MPs planned a hunger strike outside UN offices in Geneva to press for action, he said.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a rebel group which has spent three decades fighting for autonomy for Turkey's Kurds, renewed a call for the youth of Turkey's mostly Kurdish southeast to rise up and rush to save Kobani.