MOSCOW, October 7 (RIA Novosti) – Kurds in Brussels have forced their way into the European Parliament building, protesting against the Islamic State (IS) militant group and demanding more support for Kurdish forces fighting the IS in Syria, RT reported Tuesday.
“Some 50 protesters waving flags, some of them depicting Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) broke through security at the EU legislature and occupied the VoxBox multimedia stage,” RT reported.
Also on Tuesday, Kurds organized an anti-IS rally in Berlin and held demonstrations in several other German cities. In London, Kurdish protesters occupied Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2.
On Monday night, Kurdish protesters occupied the Dutch parliament building in The Hague. Kurds are also actively protesting across Turkey, where police reportedly used water cannons and tear gas to disperse demonstrators.
The protests come as Kurdish fighters are struggling to hold on to the Syrian town of Kobani, which is being attacked by IS militants. The IS has been besieging Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, one of the largest towns in the Kurdish region bordering Turkey, for the last three weeks.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the conflict has forced at least 300,000 people to flee their homes.
Last Wednesday, Salih Muslim, the leader of the Syrian Kurdish party PYD, said that IS militants were likely to slaughter the residents of Kobani, unless Kurdish fighters receive the weapons promised to them by the West, as part of the US strategy to defeat the IS.
The IS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has been fighting the Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, the group extended its attacks to northern and western Iraq, declaring a caliphate on the territories under its control in both countries.
In August, the United States started launching airstrikes against IS positions in Iraq. In September, the attacks of the US and its allies were extended to Syria.
