KUCUK KENDIRCILER, turkey — The 19-year-old Kurdish militant, who has been fighting the Islamic State group in Syria, brought his family across the border into Turkey to safety Sunday. But in the tranquility of a Turkish tea garden just miles from the frontier, Dalil Boras vowed to head back after nightfall to continue the fight.
Pulling a wad of Syrian bills from his pocket, the young fighter — who has already lost a 17-year-old brother to the Islamic militants’ brutal advance — said that if the Turkish border guards tried to stop him, money would persuade them.
Boras and his relatives are among about 100,000 Syrians, mostly Kurds, who have flooded into Turkey since Thursday, escaping an Islamic State offensive that has pushed the conflict nearly to the Turkish border.
The al-Qaeda breakaway group, which has established an Islamic state, or caliphate, ruled by its harsh version of Islamic law in territory it captured straddling the Syria-Iraq border, has in recent days advanced into Kurdish regions of Syria that border Turkey, where fleeing refugees Sunday reported atrocities that included stonings, beheadings and the torching of homes.
As refugees flooded in, Turkey closed the border crossing at Kucuk Kendirciler to Turkish Kurds in a move aimed at preventing them from joining the fight in Syria. A day earlier, hundreds of Kurdish fighters had poured into Syria through the small Turkish village, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Despite the huge number of new refugees, Turkish authorities said they were ready to deal with the influx. The conflict has pushed more than a million Syrians over the border in the past 3½ years.
“We have been prepared for this,” said Dogan Eskinat, a spokesman for Turkey’s disaster management agency. “We are also prepared for worse.”
