Six women executed by IS

Up to 700 trapped in Kobane: UN

• US asks Turkey to get involved
• Jihadists seize Kurdish HQ in Kobane
• Must negotiate with IS: Foley’s father

Mosul (Iraq): Two doctors were among six women executed by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group which controls Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, an official said on Friday.

The reason why the women were executed on Thursday was not immediately known, the source said, identifying the slain physicians as Maha Subhan and Lamia Ismail.

The head of the security committee in the province of Nineveh, Mohamed Ibrahim al-Bayati, said the women were fatally shot in a place commonly used by the IS to murder its opponents. The bodies of the slain women were handed over by the jihadist to the Forensic Medicine Service of Mosul, Bayati added.

The UN special envoy to Syria has warned that up to 700 people, mainly elderly, are still trapped in the Syrian border town of Kobane. Staffan de Mistura also urged Turkey to allow in volunteers to Syria to defend the town from Islamic State militants.

There are reports that IS has taken control of the Kurdish headquarters in the town, but this has been denied by a Syrian Kurdish official there. Kobane has been a major battleground for IS and the Kurds for three weeks.

The fighting has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians, mainly Kurds, to flee into neighbouring Turkey, which has so far ruled out any ground operation on its own against IS.

US-led warplanes have intensified air strikes against IS fighters who have been attacking Kobane for three weeks but the Pentagon has warned that, without a force on the ground to work with, there are limits to what can be done.

The father of James Foley, the US reporter beheaded at the hands of Islamic State militants in August, said he believed governments would have to negotiate with the extremists "eventually".

John Foley told French radio: "Eventually, I think we are going to have to negotiate. This situation is not going to be solved by military intervention." He added that it costs nothing to talk to the militants who have rampaged through large parts of Iraq and Syria and whose brutal murder of several Western hostages, the first of which was the beheading of his son, has sent shockwaves through the international community.

Meanwhile, the US has asked Turkey to join the fight against advancing Islamic State fighters, who have seized part of the key Syrian border town of Kobane despite US-led air strikes.

But after talks with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara could not be expected to act alone. "It's not realistic to expect that Turkey will lead a ground operation on its own," he said.