AKIPRESS.COM - Iraqi peshmerga fighters headed for the Syrian town of Kobani on Tuesday to help fellow Kurds repel an Islamic State advance that has defied U.S.-led air strikes and become an important test of the coalition's ability to combat the Sunni insurgents, reports Reuters.

Kobani, nestled on the border with Turkey, has been besieged by Islamic State for more than a month. Weeks of air strikes on the insurgents' positions and the deaths of hundreds of their fighters have failed to break the siege.

Islamic State has caused international alarm by capturing large expanses of Iraq and Syria, declaring an Islamic "caliphate" erasing borders between the two and slaughtering or driving away Shi'ite Muslims, Christians and other communities who do not share their ultra-radical brand of Sunni Islam.

The Islamic State (IS) has threatened to massacre Kobani's defenders in an assault which has sent almost 200,000 Syrian Kurds fleeing to Turkey, and triggered a call to arms from Kurds across the region.

Hemin Hawrami, a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iraq, wrote on his Twitter feed that peshmerga combatants were flying from Arbil airport in northern Iraq to Turkey, from where they would travel overland to Kobani.

Saleh Moslem, co-chair of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), said later that around 150 peshmerga had entered Turkey from Iraq and were expected to reach the area of Kobani later on Tuesday night.

A Kurdish television channel showed footage of what it said was a convoy of peshmerga vehicles in northern Iraq loaded with weapons and on their way to the besieged town.

"We welcome the deployment of peshmerga fighters and weapons from the Kurdistan Region to Kobani, which began this evening," Brett McGurk, a deputy envoy tasked by U.S. President Barack Obama with building a coalition against IS, said on Twitter.

The Iraqi Kurdish region's parliament voted last week to deploy some peshmerga to Syria although a Kurdish government spokesman later said they would not engage in direct combat in Kobani but rather provide artillery support.

Kurdistan's Minister of Peshmerga, Mustafa Sayyid Qader, told local media on Tuesday that no limits had been set to how long the forces would remain in Kobani.

The fighting around Kobani has exacerbated the flow of refugees from Syria's 3 1/2-year civil war, with more than three million people already sheltering in neighboring countries including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Jordan's foreign minister warned on Tuesday the huge demand for housing, schools, jobs and health care generated by the refugees meant Syria's neighbors were reaching the limits of their ability to cope.