BEIRUT -- Islamic State fighters backed by tanks have captured 21 Kurdish villages over the past 24 hours in northern Syria near the Turkish border, prompting civilians to flee their homes amid fears of retribution by the extremists sweeping through the area, activists said.
For more than a year, the Islamic State group and Kurdish militias have been locked in a fierce fight in several pockets of northern Syria where large Kurdish populations reside. The clashes are but one aspect of Syria's broader civil war -- a multilayered conflict that the U.N. says has killed more than 190,000.
Since Wednesday, Islamic State militants appear to have gained the upper hand in Syria's northern Kurdish region of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, overrunning 21 Kurdish villages, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Observatory said there were casualties on both sides, but that Kurdish civilians were fleeing their villages for fear that Islamic State group fighters "will commit massacres against civilians."
Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria's powerful Kurdish Democratic Union Party, said the Kurdish fighters withdrew or lost up to 20 villages in the Kobani region and evacuated civilians with them.
"The battles that are taking place in Kobani are the most violent," Khalil said, adding that Islamic State group fighters were using tanks in their offensive. Khalil called on Kurds around the world to go to Syria to defend Kobani.
The fighting forced nearly 3,000 people to flee to Turkey and gathered near the border Turkish district of Suruc, according to the private Dogan News Agency. A video released by the agency showed Syrian refugees walking to the border with some Kurds asking to be allowed to cross to stay with relatives on the Turkish side of the frontier.
The Syrian Kurds have been one of the most successful groups fighting against the Islamic extremists, but unlike U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds, they are largely on their own.
The main Kurdish force in Syria, known as the People's Protection Units or YPK, is viewed with suspicion by mainstream Syrian rebels and their Western supporters because of perceived links to President Bashar Assad's government.
NATO member Turkey also is wary of the group, which it believes is affiliated with the Kurdish PKK movement that waged a long and bloody insurgency in southeast Turkey.
The fighting around Kobani is part of the Islamic State's wider battle in Syria as the extremists look to seize control of the few areas in the northeast still outside of their hands.
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has begun targeting the Islamic State with greater frequency since the militants overran much of northern and western Iraq. Before that Assad largely left the group alone, instead focusing his firepower on more moderate rebel brigades.
On Thursday, government helicopter gunships attacked the northern town of al-Bab, which is controlled by the Islamic State, killing more than two dozen people. The Local Coordination Committees activist group said 51 people were killed in the attack in which a helicopter dropped a barrel packed with explosives on a bakery.
The Observatory also reported the airstrike, but said at least 26 were killed. It warned that the number could rise because some of the wounded were in critical conditions.
The discrepancy in death tolls could not be immediately reconciled.
Syria's civil war has killed more than 190,000 people, forced more than 3 million to seek refuge abroad and displaced another 6 million more inside the country.
As fighting in the country continued, the United Nations said Thursday that it is running out of money to pay for its food programs for Syrian refugees and that aid will be cut.
The U.N. World Food Program needs $1 billion for its emergency programs for this year for refugees but has received only $410 million, or 39 percent, spokesman Bettina Luescher said. Operations for Syrians displaced within the country need $915 million but have received only $324 million, or 35 percent.
The program receives its support from governments, the private sector, other organizations and individuals.
In addition, a report released Thursday by the Britain-based Save the Children shows that three million Syrian children are not attending school because of the war. The report cited a variety of reasons, including prohibitively high school fees for refugees in other countries and the need for children to work to support their families.
In neighboring Iraq on Thursday, a series of bomb and mortar shell attacks in and around Baghdad killed at least 36 people, Iraqi officials said.
At least 15 people alone were killed in an apparently coordinated assault the northern Shiite district of Khazimiyah, a major pilgrimage site that contains the shrine of two revered Shiite Imams, police said. At least 31 others were wounded.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for those attacks or a series of other explosions that rattled the capital area, but car bombs and attacks against Shiite civilians are common tactics used by the Islamic State.
Information for this article was contributed by Bassem Mroue, Robert Burns, Greg Keller, Trenton Daniel, Sameer N. Yacoub and Diaa Hadid of The Associated Press.
A Section on 09/19/2014