Al Qaeda insurgents have released 300 Kurdish men in the country's north who were taken captive on Sunday, a Kurdish official said on Monday.

Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for the Kurdish PYD party in Europe, told Reuters by phone that the "men were released by the militant groups who were holding them".

Idris Nassan, an official in Syria's Kobani canton, said on Monday that the Kurdish men were taken on Sunday evening as they were travelling from the town of Afrin, which is under Kurdish control, to the cities of Aleppo and the capital Damascus.

"They left women and children but they kidnapped 300 men and young people," he said.

"They captured them in Tuqad village, 20 kilometres west of Aleppo and then they moved them to al-Dana town in Idlib province," he said.

The Nusra Front has not claimed the kidnapping. Syrian state media did not report the incident.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, which tracks the conflict from Britain, said Kurds were kidnapped but it was not clear how many.