Turkey denies IS bombers reentered Kobane from its territory

Turkey denies IS bombers reentered Kobane from its territory

ANKARA - Turkey on Thursday denied "baseless" claims that Islamic State (IS) militants reentered the Syrian town of Kobane through the Turkish border crossing to detonate a suicide bomb.

The car bomb killed at least five people, according to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Some claims even suggested four cars loaded with IS militants passed through the Mursitpinar border crossing in Turkey to make their way into Kobane, but Turkey vehemently rejected the allegations.

"The data we have prove that the organisation's members infiltrated into Kobane from Jarablus in Syria," the local governor's office in the border region of Sanliurfa said in a statement.

A Turkish official told AFP: "We have concrete evidence that there was no crossing from the Turkish side," adding that images would soon be published to prove this.

Arin Shekhmos, a Syrian Kurdish activist, told AFP in Beirut earlier that IS had entered Syria from Turkey through the Mursitpinar border crossing.

He claimed the IS forces were wearing Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) uniforms as a disguise when they entered.

Western states have repeatedly accused Turkey of not doing enough to halt the flow of jihadists in both directions across its 911-kilometre (566-mile) border with Syria.

Turkey fiercely rejects the accusations, saying it is making every effort to secure a long border and in turn accusing the West of not playing its part to shoulder the burden of hosting refugees from Syria.

Kurdish forces backed by US-led airstrikes and peshmerga fighters from Iraq scored a major victory in January by winning a hugely symbolic battle for Kobane.

Months of fighting has prompted a mass exodus of local residents, with some 200,000 fleeing across the border into Turkey.

Turkish officials told AFP there was no sign of any new refugee influx so far.

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