Someone had a rude awakening once that bullet passed through his head.

Suruc, Turkey (AFP) – Kurdish grocer Cuneyt Hemo remembers the moment he crossed paths with a jihadist Islamic State (IS) prisoner inside the besieged Syrian town of Kobane.

“He begged us to kill him so he could go to paradise and be rewarded,” Hemo told AFP, in a rare glimpse of life inside the town which has been fought over street by street for nearly a month.

Hemo, 33, is one of an estimated 200,000 mainly Kurdish Syrians who have fled the onslaught of Islamic State (IS) militants on Kobane to the relative safety of Turkey.

The jihadist was captured by Kurdish fighters during fierce close-quarters fighting for control of the town on the Turkish border.

He was held for a day and, according to Hemo, was ultimately killed by his captors.

“We captured him in the street,” said Hemo, dragging on a cigarette in the Turkish border town of Suruc, where along with other Kobane refugees, he has found sanctuary.

“He said he came from Azerbaijan. He was in his 20s and spoke to us in Arabic,” he added. The fighter was dressed in full camouflage gear.

The extraordinary encounter — which AFP cannot independently verify — marked a rare moment that a Kurdish civilian stood face-to-face with an IS fighter, who have been glimpsed by the outside world largely only as distant figures seen from the Turkish border.