Many have been waiting on the border for days, sleeping in their cars, tending to their small flocks of sheep and goats that they are loath to leave behind.

Men like Ali Bourzan Isa have watched with increasing fear as Islamic State moves closer to the centre of Kobane, still hoping against hope that Kurdish forces may repel the militants' advance and allow his family to return to their homes.

Instead, they are here at this baking hot refugee registration point, mini-dust storms blowing across the arid land as the crack of gunfire echoes across the plains.

Ali, 30, his 25-year-old wife Samira Mohamed Hanke and their three young children, Mohamed, Omar and Deilan, are waiting to cross into Turkey with two of his brothers and their wives and children.

Like most refugees here, they have no idea where they are going once they get on the truck that will take them into Turkey.

The stress on his face is showing as he tries to contact a man who owns a farm nearby and is giving refugees work.

"If I cannot work, I will find it difficult to support my family while we are away from our home," he says.

All around us children are crying – they are tired and scared and desperate for a drink of water, overheating from the many layers of clothing they've been forced to wear in order to bring as much as they can with them on their journey into the unknown.

They are just 18 people out of an estimated 180,000 who have fled Kobane and its surrounding villages in the last three weeks, severely stretching the resources of the Turkish town of Suruc, six kilometres from the border.

Mr Isa, a construction worker from the village of Guerick, about seven kilometres from Kobane, says he is hoping to find space in a refugee camp he thinks another of his brothers is in, but until he gets there, he does not know if there is any space for his family.

There is not – when he arrives he finds groups like his have had to place their belongings on the dirt where they think the next set of tents will be pitched while they wait and hope.

He looks across the road to a half-finished four-storey apartment block.

"I think this is safer – there is more shelter here and it is close to the water at the gas station," Mr Isa says.

His family pile their belongings along the wall of the apartment block, his children silent and watchful as their little world changes again and again in short, stressful bursts.

Suruc is full of refugee families like his – living in parks, empty buildings, schools and in the few refugee camps set up by local aid agencies.

But it is full to bursting and with Kurdish forces in Kobane on the edge of defeat, many more refugees will be coming this way.