The first Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters bound for the battleground Syrian town of Kobani arrived in neighboring Turkey early Wednesday

The first Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters bound for the battleground Syrian town of Kobani arrived in neighboring Turkey early Wednesday, a Turkish official told Agence France Presse.

After flying in from Iraq, on their way to tackle ISIL terrorists around Kobani, an unknown number of the peshmerga combatants headed immediately for the Turkey-Syria border by bus, a journey of some 50 kilometers (30 miles).

They were escorted by four Turkish armored cars and a police vehicle.

Turkish security forces closed off the road to the border, preventing the many gathered journalists from following the convoy.

Earlier, the dozens of peshmerga fighters had loaded machine guns and mortars into trucks at an airbase in northern Iraq.

The deployment comes at a time when Kurdish forces are still engaged in heavy fighting against ISIL militants in Iraq.