Two months into the battle for Syria's Kobane, the stream of casualties crossing the border with Turkey is as steady as the Kurdish resolve to defend the flashpoint city.

Outgunned and outnumbered, Kobane’s Kurdish defenders are locked in bitter fighting with members of the Islamic State (IS) group, which has overrun vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Since late August, some 400 Kurds have died in the battle for Kobane, located just a stone’s throw from the Turkish border.

Every day, dozens of grieving Kurdish families gather at the morgue in Sanliurfa, in southeastern Tukey, to claim the bodies of their loved ones.

On Thursday, four coffins were loaded into the back of ambulances, to cries of “Martyrs never die!”

The victims were Turkish Kurds, all volunteers who had crossed the Syrian border to fight alongside their Syrian brothers in Kobane.

Among them was Hulia Kesser, one of Kobane’s numerous female defenders, who died aged 25.

“Our daughter was our gift to Kurdistan, the Kurdish people, our leader,” says her uncle Zudyeir. “She isn't our martyr, she is everybody's. “

Turkish complicity

Like many Kurds, Zudyeir accuses the Turkish authorities of backing the Islamic State group.

Mashala, who also lost a nephew in the battle, said he witnessed evidence of Turkish complicity when he went to the border to recover his relative’s body.

“There were 20 of us. We witnessed there the friendly relations between Daesh and the Turkish state,” said Mashala, referring to the IS group by its Arabic acronym.

“They were giving some Islamic State fighters crates of weapons or ammunition. Twenty people saw it like me.”

His claims could not be verified.

Undaunted

While the coffins of Turkish volunteers head back to the Kurdish heartland in the country’s east, Syrian Kurds killed in Kobane are buried in nearby Suruc.

Every day, the locals dig new graves to make way for the fallen.

Bedriye’s son Mervan is one of them.

“He told me, I am ready to die as a martyr so I wished him luck. I said: if you have to sacrifice yourself for our people and our land, God help you,“ she says.

Undaunted by the losses, young Kurdish volunteers from Syria, Turkey and elsewhere continue to cross the border In the middle of the night to fight in Kobane.

Hussein, who lost his brother in the battle, says he ready to join the fight against the Islamic State group.

"We cannot lead the enemy to believe we're scared, sad or losing faith. On the contrary, each new martyr brings hope freedom is close,” he says.

France24