Islamic State Will Capture Syrian Border Town Kobani, Says Turkish President

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that Islamic State militants were about to seize the Syrian border town of Kobani.

The capture of Kobani would help the Islamic State to establish complete control over a large stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border.

Erdogan said that the U.S. led air strikes would not be enough to stop the advance of Islamic State militants and asked for more support for the Syrian opposition.

"Kobani is about to fall," Erdogan said during a visit to a Syrian refugee camp in the Turkish town of Gaziantep, near the border. "We asked for three things: one, for a no-fly zone to be created; two, for a secure zone parallel to the region to be declared; and for the moderate opposition in Syria and Iraq to be trained and equipped," he said, reports the Associated Press.

 Turkey had said a few days ago that it would not allow Islamic State militants to capture Kobani. However, it has not intervened in the fight till now, though its tanks and military are stationed very near to the border town.

The Syrian Kurdish fighters have ridiculed the Turkish statement. They said that instead of helping, the Turks were impeding the defense of Kobani by stopping Kurdish fighters in Turkey from crossing the border to help in the fight.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish representative in Australia, Haval Syan, has asked the international community including Australia to order the Turkish army to cross the border into Syria to avert an impending massacre of Kurdish civilians.

"The international community, they have to take action very immediately at least to stop genocide in Kobani. This is very, very important ... I'm talking about hours. A day is too late because the situation is very hard now,"  he said in an interview with Fairfax Media, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.