Blood-curdling screams and headless bodies of siege town: Mail man SAM GREENHILL reports from the frontline as jihadi squads lie in wait for Western hostages By Sam Greenhill for the Daily Mail 22:52 12 Oct 2014, updated 23:03 12 Oct 2014 +12 Facebook Twitter WhatsApp Click to open Pinterest Google Plus Reddit Stumble Upon Digg it LinkedIn Email Click to close 113 shares 4 comments Thirteen-year-old Dillyar cannot get the image of his cousin being beheaded out of his mind. The pair were fleeing Kobani and running down a street when Islamic State fighters blocked their exit. Dillyar managed to slip through their grasp but his cousin Mohammed, 20, was seized, and gave a blood-curdling scream as one of the black-clad maniacs drew out a knife. ‘They pushed him to the ground and sawed his head off, shouting “Allahu Akbar”,’ the schoolboy told me yesterday. ‘I see it in my dreams every night and every morning I wake up and remember everything.’ +12 +12 Ominous: An Islamic State group flag flies on a hilltop in Kobani, Syria. The town has been under assault by extremists of the Islamic State group since mid-September and is being defended by Kurdish fighters According to those who escaped, the jihadis’ savagery is more hideous than anyone feared. Headless corpses litter the streets of the besieged Syrian border town, they say, and some of the mainly Kurdish townsfolk have had their eyes gouged out. MORE... British soldiers in Iraq, says MoD Hundreds of well-wishers gather to remember Alan Henning as local, national and world hero at ceremony in his memory ISIS eagerly awaits Western boots on the ground: Hostage John Cantlie delivers fourth slickly edited video message from bloodythirsty extremists to Obama and Cameron ISIS releases chilling new video featuring 100 recruits at training camp in Iraq being kicked in stomach and shot at on the ground The last line of defence: Panorama taken on the front line at Kobane show ISIS and Kurdish forces just yards apart as Turkey continues to refuse to step in Refugees who made it to Suruc, just across the border in Turkey, tell of witnessing appalling horrors in hushed tones, as if they can barely believe it themselves. Father-of-four Amin Fajar, 38, said: ‘I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off. Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out – I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all.’ +12 While the world watches: Turkish soldiers on the Syrian border watch as a explosions rock the besieged Syrian town of Kobani in front of them It worked. Mr Fajar, a floor fitter from Kobani, and his wife and children aged three to 12, ran for their lives. ‘The children saw the headless people. They saw them,’ he said quietly, sitting cross-legged on a rug in his tent in a squalid refugee camp in Suruc. Ahmed Bakki, a farmer from a village near Kobani, said his cousin, a 48-year-old father of seven, stayed behind when the rest of the family fled. ‘We phoned my cousin and IS answered his phone. They said, “We’ve got his head, and we’re taking it to Jarabulus (an IS stronghold)”.’ +12 Street fighting: An Islamic State video shows militants fighting in Kobani. There have been reports ISIS is mutilating corpses and mounting heads on walls +12 An ISIS fighter fires a rocket-propelled grenade during the bloody urban skirmishes +12 Another man, Khalid, a teacher, claimed he had seen two fighters involved in the crushing of Kobani, and he had been told by a friend that the pair were boasting they were British He added: ‘An English teacher in our village tried to reason with them, but they just called him a kaffir (non-believer) and tied him to their car and dragged him away. We heard they beheaded him later. ‘My neighbour was beheaded because they said he was “delivering vegetables to the kaffir”. They burned his farm, livestock, even his bees – they destroyed everything.’ This ‘scorched earth’ policy is being waged by jihadis whose most brutal members seem to be Europeans. ‘They are Chechen, they are English, they are from all over Europe. We know because we can hear their accents,’ said Mr Bakki. Another man, Khalid, a teacher, claimed he had seen two fighters involved in the crushing of Kobani, and he had been told by a friend that the pair were boasting they were British. The United Nations estimates there are still 700 civilians in Kobani, mainly elderly, and up to 13,000 in the surrounding areas under siege from Islamic State, who ‘will most likely be massacred’ if the town falls. Our reporter on the frontline in Syria, reporting from Kobani +12 Kurdish Rabia Ali, right, accompanied by her son Ali Mehmud, left, mourn at the grave of her son Seydo Mehmud Curo , a Kurdish fighter, who was killed in the fighting with the militants of the Islamic State group +12 Innocence lost: A Kurdish refugee camp in the Turkish border town of Suruc where young children described how they fled the advancing forces of IS after witnessing their brutalit +12 Grim: Syrian Kurdish refugees who fled Kobani in a refugee camp in Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura has warned that the world faces the spectre of ‘another Srebrenica’ – referring to the 1995 genocide of 8,000 Muslims during the war in Bosnia, which nobody intervened to stop. Yesterday, Daily Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I watched from a Turkish hilltop next to Kobani as the terrifying onslaught unfolded. Islamic State’s menacing black flag flutters defiantly from buildings seized by the heavily-armed maniacs. Down below, bursts of machine gun fire echoed across the valley, followed by the bone-shaking booms of mortar bombs and pillars of grey smoke. From the hilltop, it is not possible to witness the street fighting at close quarters. But propaganda-savvy Islamic State has released a video offering a glimpse into the hell taking place at street level. The professionally-filmed footage shows its militants waging ferocious attacks on homes inside Kobani, capturing the town house by house and blasting rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. +12 Bloody, but unbowed: Kurdish mourners flash the V-sign as they sing a nationalistic Kurdish song at a cemetery in Suruc during the funeral of two Syrian Kurdish fighters who were killed in the fighting The barbarians are now said to be in control of half of the town and have reached its centre. Earlier in the week, punishing air strikes from US and Arab warplanes appeared to force IS back towards the edge of Kobani. Yesterday there were more bombs from fighter jets circling high above the town, greeted with applause from Kurds on the hilltop. But although the air strikes are slowing the militants’ advance in some areas of the town, reinforcements are reportedly on the way from al-Raqqa, their stronghold in Syria about 80 miles away. For the people of Kobani, there seems little hope, and for those who have escaped, little solace. One girl, aged 19, screams all night long in her tent in the Suruc refugee camp, four miles back from the frontier. +12 Turkish tanks watching the besieged Syrian town of Kobani from the Turkish side of the border, pictured in the mist that hid the Kurdish town from view. The sounds of battle could still be heard, however, and jets flying bombing missions overhead didnt seem to be hindered A few miles along the dusty border from the hell unfolding in Kobani, there is a new and spine-chilling threat. Jihadi snatch squads are said to be lying in wait in Turkey to seize more Western hostages and spirit them into Syria to meet Jihadi John, the beheader of innocent victims such as Alan Henning. There are hundreds of aid workers from Britain and other nations operating in Turkey’s border areas. If Islamic State terrorists were able to operate in Turkey – a Nato state hoping to join the EU – the brutality being waged on Europe’s doorstep will truly cross a line. The fact is, Turkey is already struggling to quell the threat of IS, and faces the spectre of civil war because of its failure to do so. The snatch-squad peril is most acute around the frontier town of Akcakale, 40 miles east of Kobani. The Foreign Office is now warning against all travel there, but we were in Akcakale last week – before the warnings – investigating how easy it is for British jihadis to cross into Syria. They wriggle under a wire fence and instantly become citizens of the self-styled caliphate which commands a firm grip on the territory in that part of Syria. Amateur video shows fighters defend Kobani against ISIS Their belongings duly follow by road via the official border crossing – with locals telling us they have seen rucksacks bearing British Airways, Air France and Turkish Airlines luggage tags. There are even porters in green vests to do the heavy lifting. Dirt-poor Akcakale has become a boom town for the cross-border trade in all things jihadi, and a sinister feeling hangs in the air. When we took photographs near the border gate, a mob of men appeared from nowhere and quietly surrounded us. One well-built young man scowled and said in Arabic to our translator: ‘What are you doing? No photos.’ Another group took a keen interest in the contents of our car parked nearby. This is the terrifying reality in a Turkey which is now the springboard to a terrorist state. A Turkey whose army – with tanks parked idly on a nearby hill – stands accused of turning a blind eye to the atrocity on its doorstep. Turkey’s failure to protect the Syrian Kurds in Kobani has triggered violent riots among the country’s own population of 15million Kurds. At least 33 people have died since Tuesday in the country’s worst unrest in more than a decade. Given the sickening stories being told by Kobani’s refugees, it is easy to understand why everyone fears the unrest in Turkey will escalate to unprecedented levels if the town is allowed to fall. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp Click to open Pinterest Google Plus Reddit Stumble Upon Digg it LinkedIn Email Click to close 113 shares 4 comments
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 06:25:02 +0000
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