Syrian Kurds battle al-Qaeda-linked rebel faction

Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi announced on Tuesday that Damascus is willing "to fully cooperate with the United Nations chemical experts."

After months of negotiations, a 20-member U.N. team led by Swedish chemical weapons expert Ake Sellstrom arrived in Damascus on Sunday to investigate three sites where chemical weapons attacks allegedly occurred: the village of Khan al-Assal just west of the embattled northern city of Aleppo and two other locations being kept secret for security reasons.
 
Diplomats and chemical weapons experts have raised doubts about whether the experts will find anything since the alleged incidents took place months ago.
 
The mandate for the investigation is also limited: The team will report on whether chemical weapons were used, and if so which ones, but it will not determine the responsibility for an attack. This has led some commentators to question the value of the investigation.
 
This comes as Kurdish militias fought al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups in northeastern Syria in heavy fighting that has helped fuel a mass exodus of civilians from the region into neighboring Iraq, activists said.    
   
The clashes between Kurdish gunmen and Islamic extremist rebel groups have sharply escalated in Syria's northern provinces in recent months. The violence, which has left hundreds dead, holds the potential to explode into a full-blown side conflict within Syria's broader civil war.                      

Tuesday's fighting, which pitted Kurdish militiamen against rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, was focused in three villages near the town of Ras al-Ayn in the predominantly Kurdish Hassakeh province, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.                 

There was no immediate word on casualties.                   

Kurds are Syria's largest ethnic minority, making up more than 10 percent of the country's 23 million people.                     

They are centered in the poor northeastern regions of Hassakeh and Qamishli, wedged between the borders of Turkey and Iraq. There are also several predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods in the capital, Damascus, and Syria's largest city, Aleppo.               

Syrian Refugees:             

Aid agencies said Syrian refugees continue to stream over the border into northern Iraq, where the Kurdistan regional government has put in place a daily quota of 3,000 persons.                  

About 30,000 refugees, believed to be mainly Syrian Kurds, have poured into Iraq since Thursday, and up to 3,000 are lined up to cross on Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.          

"The Kurdistan regional government authorities have put a daily quota for those refugees who will be allowed in. Today they will allow 3,000 persons in, but yesterday a similar quota of 3,000 was set but at the end of the day, 5,000 refugees were allowed to cross," Jumbe Omari Jumbe of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) told a news briefing in Geneva.        

Asked about the reasons for the exodus, Jumbe said: "There is a perception that violence will increase against Syrian Kurds by various armed groups including al-Nusra Front."                    

UNHCR is aware of agreements between the border authorities on both sides, but has no specific information on numbers relating to any quotas, spokesman Dan McNorton said.          


REUTERS/AP