DHAKA: About 80 Iraqi Peshmerga fighters have arrived in Turkey enroute to the besieged Syrian town of Kobane to help fellow Kurds in their battle against the ISIL.
They flew into the airport at Urfa and are bound for Suruc on the border with Syria. Another convoy of 70 fighters is waiting on the Iraq-Turkey border, waiting for permits to enter Turkey for their onward journey to Kobane.
An Al Jazeera reporter earlier saw a convoy of 50-60 vehicles, including buses carrying soldiers and some vehicles towing canons, leaving the Iraqi city of Erbil on Tuesday afternoon to cross the border into Turkey, reports Al-Jazeera.
Syrian Kurds have battled fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in and around Kobane since mid-September. Despite US-led air strikes supporting the Kurds, ISIL has kept up its assault.
Last week the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) authorised about 150 Peshmerga soldiers to go to Syria to fight.
Turkey has been reluctant to join the US-led coalition against ISIL. But after pressure from its Western allies, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last Wednesday that some Peshmerga soldiers from Iraq would be allowed to transit through Turkey to Kobane.
Halgord Hekmat, spokesman for the KRG's ministry for Peshmerga affairs, has said the soldiers are "support forces" and will be armed with automatic weapons, mortars and rocket launchers.
They are not expected to fight on the frontline.
BDST: 1110 HRS, OCT 29, 2014
