18 dead after al-Qaeda loyalists attack Syria Kurdish town

A man and woman stand in a home riddled with bullets in the Kurdish town of Ras Al Ain. Al-Qaeda loyalists attacked a mainly Kurdish town in northeast Syria sparking fighting in which 18 people were killed, two of them ambulance crew, a watchdog said on Saturday. The assault on the strategic border town of Ras al-Ain, from which the opposition fighters were expelled by Kurdish militia last month, sparked an exodus of civilians into neighbouring Turkey, an activist said.
The attack on the town was part of a wider offensive by al-Qaeda against several Kurdish majority areas of north and north-east Syria that began on Friday and was continuing on Saturday, British based group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
At least 14 people were killed and dozens injured after government forces shelled the town of Maliha al-Gharbiyah, while the Free Syrian Army said it destroyed an army tank heading to Damascus airport.  
Four Kurdish militiamen and 11 made up the rest of the dead, the watchdog said.
Syrian Kurd activist Havidar said civilians had fled \"in waves into villages in Turkey.\"
\"Intermittent clashes are continuing to take place till now, in the Asfar Najjar area and the outskirts of Tal Halaf,\" Havidar told AFP via the Internet.
Government troops pulled out of majority Kurdish areas of Syria last year, leaving Kurdish militia to fend for themselves.
Elsewhere in Syria, rebels attacked a pro-regime militia checkpoint in a majority Christian area of Homs province, killing six civilians and five militiamen, the Observatory said.
State news agency SANA said all those killed were civilians, and described the attackers as \"terrorists\".
Homs has seen some of Syria\'s worst violence since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011.
Local and military sources also confirmed the death of 10 people on Saturday, some of them women and children, after a regime sniper carried out an attack at the Bustan al-Qassr cross point. Sources added that more than 50 were injured.
Activists in Damascus posted a video on the internet showing a fire in a residential area of Yarmouk, caused by government bombings, and another showing ‘huge’ destruction in the al Qaboun area.
Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency has said that it was scrambling aid in northern Iraq after thousands of Syrians crossed the tightly-controlled border in a sudden and unexplained influx.
The vast majority of the new arrivals were women, children and elderly people from embattled Aleppo in northwest Syria or communities in the northeast, closer to Iraq.
UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said 750 people initially crossed the Tigris River at Peshkhabour in Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday, followed by a huge crowd of between 5,000 and 7,000.
UNHCR and other aid agencies, along with local authorities, rushed food and water to the site, and were working round the clock to build a camp away from the border zone for the new arrivals.
\"The factors allowing this sudden movement are not yet fully clear to us,\" Edwards told reporters. \"Both the Syrian and Iraqi sides of the frontier at Peshkhabour are normally tightly controlled.\"
Syrian war refugees\' access to Iraq has been erratic, with local political tensions and fears of a spill-over of the conflict leading Kurdistan region authorities to shut the border in May.
Some restrictions were eased last month to allow Syrians stuck in their homeland to join family members already in Iraq, but numbers seeking to cross the border had remained relatively low.
It was not clear whether the new arrivals were from Syria\'s long-marginalised Kurdish minority, which has walked a fine line since the conflict erupted in 2011.
Syria\'s Kurds have tried to avoid antagonising forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad or rebels fighting to overthrow him, but there has been fierce fighting in recent weeks between Syrian Kurdish forces and the Islamist Al-Nusra Front, which is also fighting Assad.
The Syrian National Coalition, an alliance of opposition groups, revealed it will form a joint committee with Kurds to monitor events on the ground.  Kamal al Labwani, a prominent member of the coalition, said the group will hold a meeting in Istanbul, in the presence of the Turkish Minister for Foreign Affairs, with Kurdish representatives to discuss the issue.  He added, “The committee will include six of the Kurdish delegation, the most important ?Hakim Bashar and Mostafa Gomaa in addition to other six from the coalition, including Michel ?chilo and al Labwani.”  ?Earlier this month, Iraqi Kurdistan\'s leader threatened to intervene to protect Kurds in Syria.
According to the United Nations, Iraq hosts more than 160,000 registered Syrian refugees, most of whom are Kurds.
All told, more than 1.9 million Syrians have fled their homeland\'s civil war, with most seeking a haven in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
Additional source: AFP