The first Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters bound for the battleground Syrian town of Kobani arrived in neighboring Turkey early Wednesday, a Turkish official told AFP.
After flying in from Iraq, on their way to tackle Islamic State fighters around Kobani, an unknown number of the peshmerga combatants headed immediately for the Turkey-Syria border by bus, a journey of some 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.
Last week, under heavy U.S. pressure, Turkey unexpectedly announced it would allow some 150 fighters from Iraq's autonomous Kurdish province to cross its territory to join the fight for Kobani.
The main Syrian Kurdish fighting force in the town, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), has close links with the outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought a three-decade insurgency in southeast Turkey.
Ankara had previously resisted calls to allow in reinforcements.
The deployment comes at a time when Kurdish forces are still engaged in heavy fighting against ISIS militants in Iraq.