The Turkish government won parliamentary approval to deploy troops against the Islamic State group as Australia announced on Thursday that it was joining combat sorties against the jihadists in Iraq.
The vote by Turkish MPs came as IS fighters pressed an assault on a Syrian frontier town, whose capture would give the jihadists unbroken control of a long stretch of Turkey’s more than 900 kilometre (560 mile) border with Syria.
An AFP correspondent on the frontier saw huge plumes of smoke above the town of Kobane as outnumbered and outgunned Kurdish militia put up a desperate resistance.
Early Friday, the town’s defenders destroyed two IS armoured vehicles which had reached less than two kilometres (little more than a mile) from the town, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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