All that separates Mohammed Muslim from his village in Syria is a barbed wire fence running along the Turkish border, but the dull thud of artillery and the rattle of machinegun fire suggest he will not be going home anytime soon.
Muslim, dressed in a battered suit, his moustache flecked with grey, is among more than 150,000 Syrian Kurds who have fled to Turkey over the past week to escape the advance of Islamic State militants, who have seized villages and beheaded residents as they push towards the strategic border town Kobani.
“I don’t want to be in Turkey, I want to be in my village, I want to die in Kobani,” Muslim said, running prayer beads through his hands as he watched Kurdish and Islamic State fighters exchange fire in the valley below.
“If the war goes our way, then of course we’ll go home, but it looks like it will be difficult.”
Turkey, already home to an estimated 1.5 million refugees from Syria’s civil war, is pushing the United States and its allies to create a safe haven for refugees inside Syrian territory. A safe haven along the border would require a no-fly zone policed by foreign jets.
President Tayyip Erdogan, until now reluctant to commit to a frontline military role in the US-led campaign against Islamic State, has said Turkish troops could be used to help set up such a zone.
US air strikes have hit Islamic State targets around 140 km to the south of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, in the militant group’s heartland of Raqqa, and on Saturday also hit sites to the east of the town.
But the heavily-armed Sunni insurgents appear gradually to be forcing the Kurdish fighters back around Kobani, raising fears that the town may fall. Either way, the tens of thousands of refugees who have crossed the border in recent days may be in Turkey for a long time, aid workers say.
“You’ve seen it in other places along the border. There’s no fighting anymore but people stay in Turkey,” said Umit Algan, who runs the relief effort in the border town of Suruc for IMPR, a Turkish aid organisation.
“I think it’ll be the same here, they never know when (Islamic State) might come back,” he said, adding that his group’s initial relief effort aimed to help refugees camping out in mosques, schools and parks for a month only.
Cars and cattle
Crowds of mostly Syrian Kurds cheered from the Turkish hillside as Kurdish shells kick up plumes of dust near Islamic State positions just across the border, but the next day the jihadists seized new ground.
The advance towards Kobani is the latest in a series of lightning campaigns by the Islamist group which have seen them seize swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq.
The United Nations, which has warned that as many as 400,000 people could flee Kobani to Turkey, has said that the number of displaced makes the influx from the besieged border town the most serious yet of Syria’s civil war.
Many of those who have fled were from poor farming communities in the semi-arid terrain and were forced to leave their most valuable possessions behind - particularly livestock and vehicles.
“We have nothing here, nowhere to sleep. If they let us collect our cars, we can sleep in them,” said one Syrian Kurdish refugee, 60-year old Hussein Kadir Cumo.
Small crowds of Syrian Kurds gathered at crossing points along the border to plead with Turkish officials to be allowed to go back and collect their possessions, their vehicles tantalizingly visible through the barbed wire fence.
