Islamist rebels linked to al-Qaeda kidnapped at least 120 Kurdish civilians yesterday from a village near the Turkish border in Aleppo province, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters entered Ihras, 20 kilometres south of the border town of Azaz, and took the captives, including at least six women, to an unknown location.

The British-based Observatory, which has a network of sources across Syria, cited Arab and Kurdish sources in and around Ihras. The incident is the latest in a series of kidnappings and killings by Isil this month targeting Kurds in northern Syria, where mainly Sunni Arab Islamist rebels and Kurdish fighters have clashed repeatedly in recent months.

Control over Syria’s northeast, where Kurds predominate, has swung back and forth between them and Islamists, who strongly oppose what they suspect are Kurdish plans to secede.

The Observatory said Isil had kidnapped 51 Kurdish civilians from Manbij and Jarablus northeast of Aleppo since the start of December, including eight women and two children. Isil has also evicted 15 Kurdish families linked to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) from their homes in Idlib province, according to the Observatory.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said yesterday that both rebels and government forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad had stepped up abductions recently.

Syrian Kurds number over two million of a total of more than 25 million Kurds in Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Kurds are often described as the world’s largest ethnic group without a state.

Oppressed under President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Syrian Kurds view the civil war as an opportunity to gain more autonomy – much as their ethnic kin in neighbouring Iraq have consolidated self-rule during turmoil there.