Mursitpinar: A spiral of wind picks up dirt from 13 freshly drug graves on the outskirts of the Turkish town of Suruc, carrying it across the cemetery towards the Syrian border where these men and women lost their lives fighting to save Kobane.

Two of the mounds are subtly marked with the Kurdish YPG colours, the rest with just numbers and names hastily written in red paint.

At the nearby hospital volunteers are worried.

No injured have arrived in the last 12 hours and they fear patients may be dying at the Syria-Turkey border, prevented by Turkish military from making it to Suruc for the treatment that may save their lives.

"I was waiting with an ambulance on the border for two hours and they would not let us take patients," a doctor from the nearby city of Gaziantep said of his volunteer shift the day before.

"Five patients were waiting and five of them died at the border gate; two days ago nine people died, some of them simply bled to death – these are patients we may have been able to save. We are devastated."

It is widely known that Turkey has let many thousands of fighters injured in the three-year-long Syrian civil war cross its border for treatment, so its decision to let Kurdish fighters – Syrian or Turkish – die at the border has been noted with growing anger.

So too has Turkey's refusal to allow the Kurdish YPG forces to open a supply line across the border for weapons, ammunition and more fighters.

Since Islamic State militants laid siege to Kobane 26 days ago, Kurdish commanders have insisted that air strikes from the US-led international coalition alone cannot push the militants from their town, which is now controlled by IS to the east, south and west.

The Turkish border to the north is the only possible supply route for Kurdish forces.

But Syria's main Kurdish group, the YPG or People's Protection Committee, has close ties to the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers' Party – that has waged an armed campaign for Kurdish rights in Turkey and is listed as a terrorist group by Turkey and its Western allies, including Australia.

And although there has been an 18-month ceasefire in place between the Turkish government and the PKK, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears unmoved by Kurdish pleas for help.

He has instead insisted that a raft of conditions be met by the international coalition - implementation of a no-fly zone and a safe corridor along the border - and the Kurds (PYD, the Kurdish political party in Syria, must break all ties with the Syrian regime, join the Free Syrian Army in its fight against President Bashar al-Assad, and disband its Kurdish local governments along the border).

Local media has also reported that Mr Erdogan is preparing to rush through the parliament a set of new "security laws" in the face of a surge in Kurdish protests across the country.

Aimed at shutting down the growing demonstrations against the government's inaction over Kobane, the security package – due to be discussed by Cabinet on Monday – is being described in the Today's Zaman newspaper as Turkey moving "towards a de facto state of emergency".

And all the while, the horror stories of people's escape from the barbaric violence of Islamic State militants are everywhere.

Salhah Ghrani is sitting on the floor of a small mosque in Suruc that is crammed with hundreds of refugees, mattresses, blankets and belongings. Seventy years old and blind, she recounts with quivering anger being awakened at 3am and forced to flee as IS militants advanced on her home.

"My daughter helped me, we had to leave everything and run," she says. "We were so afraid – two of my sisters-in-law died as we fled. They cut people like animals, right in front of us."

At a nearby wedding reception hall that for more than three weeks has been home to hundreds of refugees from Kobane, also known as Ayn al-Arab, Abdul Khadr Abdu says he and his family of six have spent weeks on the run from the Islamic State.

"Our village is 40 kilometres from Kobane and was one of the first to fall to Daesh," he says, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

"We moved from one village to the next until we were finally almost caught – I saw two local children killed by Daesh, I ran and found a large pile of grain to bury myself and my family in until they had passed, then we made it to the border. That was eight days ago."

As night falls on Kobane, the town lies in almost complete darkness save for the occasional streak of a mortar or a fire caused by an air strike. A huge thunderstorm blows in and the first heavy rains of autumn fall over the area.

By morning, many of the estimated 200,000 refugees from Kobane already struggling to eke out an existence in Suruc will be living in mud and even more misery.

And the street-by-street fight for the border town just became that much more difficult.