Reuters, Turkey :
Turkey signaled it may send troops into Syria or Iraq and let allies use Turkish bases to fight Islamic State, as coalition jets launched air strikes on Wednesday on insurgents besieging a town on its southern border with Syria.
The government sent a proposal to parliament late on Tuesday which would broaden existing powers and allow Ankara to order military action to “defeat attacks directed towards our country from all terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria”.
The proposal would also mean Turkey, until now reluctant to take a frontline role against Islamic State, could allow foreign forces to use its territory for cross-border incursions.
The Islamic State advance to within sight of the Turkish army on the border has piled pressure on the NATO member to play a greater role in the US-led military coalition carrying out air strikes against the insurgents in Syria and Iraq.
The militants are encroaching on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the Ottoman Empire’s founder, which lies in northern Syria but which Ankara considers sovereign territory and has made clear it will defend.
A column of black smoke rose from the southeastern side of Kobani, a predominantly Kurdish border town under siege by Islamic State for more than two weeks, as jets roared overhead, a Reuters correspondent on the Turkish side said.
“(They) hit a village that is four to five kilometers (two to three miles) southeast of Kobani and we heard they destroyed one (Islamic State) tank,” Parwer Mohammed Ali, a translator with the Kurdish PYD group, told Reuters by telephone from Kobani, known as Ain al-Arab in Arabic.
The United States has been carrying out strikes in Iraq against the militant group since July and in Syria since last week with the help of Arab allies. Britain and France have also struck Islamic State targets in Iraq.
Using mostly nighttime strikes, it aims to damage and destroy the bases and forces of the al Qaeda offshoot which has captured large areas of both countries. Turkey, which hosts a US air base at its southern town of Incirlik, has so far not been militarily involved.
Britain said on Wednesday that it had conducted air strikes overnight on Islamic State fighters west of Baghdad, attacking an armed pick-up truck and a transport.
The insurgents have taken control of 325 of 354 villages around Kobani, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war. Kurds who have fled to Turkey have described beheadings and the killing of children as the insurgents went from village to village.
“They’re killing us on the Turkish border, that makes us very angry. There’s no humanity from Turkey, no humanity from Europe or anywhere else in the world,” said Maslum Bergadan, who fled to Turkey and said two of his brothers had been captured by Islamic State fighters.
Turkey shares a 1,200 km (750-mile) border with Iraq and Syria and is already struggling with 1.5 million refugees from the Syrian war alone. It deployed tanks and armoured vehicles in the hills overlooking Kobani this week as fighting intensified.
