Syrians who are looking to find safe refuge in Turkey will find that they are no longer allowed to enter the country.
According to the Catholic News Agency (CNA), several families, among which are Christians, are currently stranded on the Syria-Turkey border when Turkish authorities decided last week to close the border after the Islamic State took more Syrian hostages.
"There are 200 families who were running away and trying to escape to Turkey, but the border is closed for Syrians. No Syrian can cross into Turkey," Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo of the diocese of Hassakeh told CNA in a phone interview.
Last week, the number of Syrians held hostage by ISIS increased to 250 following sustained attacks on villages and cities in the Al-Hasakah region. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday last week that 90 of these hostages were Assyrian Christians and were kidnapped in two villages inhabited by Christian minorities near the city of Tal-Tamr.
Nineteen of these Assyrian Christian hostages were released over the weekend after the Islamic State "processed" them through the Sharia court, Reuters reported.
The Archbishop said that the Islamic State appears to target villages that are inhabited by Christians. He told CNA of an attack on two Christian villages at 4:00 am last Thursday in which more hostages were taken by ISIS.
Archbishop Hindo said that ISIS took the abducted families to their Syrian stronghold in Sheddadi, 25 miles south of Hassakeh.
Islamic State fighters eventually managed to seize eight more villages by the end of last week, CNA reported.
The hostage taking comes as the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and its Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga allies make steady advances on ISIS-held positions. The YPG and the Peshmerga, with air support from United States-led coalition bombers, have so far retaken 19 more villages since expelling the Islamic State presence in the border town of Kobani in January.
