Turkey opens frontier for Syrian refugees to enter Europe
Turkey won't stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe, a senior Turkish official said, as Ankara responded on Friday to the killing of 32 Turkish soldiers in a strike by Syrian government forces in Syria's northwestern Idlib region.
Opening the frontier could unleash a repeat of the migration crisis of 2015-2016, when greater than a million persons arrived by sea in Greece and crossed the Balkans on foot, until Turkey shut its frontier in a manage the EU. By the first hours of Friday, refugees and migrants were already making their way to frontier posts.
The state said police and border guards had been told to stand down and invite exit by both land and sea.One column of migrants made their way towards the frontier by walking in the early morning light, with one man carrying a little child in his arms. Others headed there in taxis."
We found out about it on the tv screen," said Afghan migrant Sahin Nebizade, 16, in a group packed into among three taxis parked on a highway on the outskirts of Istanbul. "
We've been living in Istanbul. You want to go to Edirne and to Greece," Nebizade said before the taxis headed for the northwestern province of Edirne and border crossings with Bulgaria and Greece, 200 km (124 miles) west of Istanbul.
A million civilians have already been displaced since December inside Syria near to the Turkish border in desperate winter conditions, possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of the nine-year war. Turkey is already home to 3.7 million Syrian refugees and says it cannot take more.Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air power, have launched an assault to fully capture the northwest.
, the last remaining territory held by rebels who are backed by Turkey. With diplomacy sponsored by Ankara and Moscow in tatters, NATO-member Turkey has come closer than ever before in the conflict to direct confrontation with Russia on the battlefield.
Ankara's fury over Thursday's attack - the deadliest suffered by the Turkish army in practically 30 years - raised the chance that President Tayyip Erdogan will launch a full-scale procedure against the Russian-backed Syrian army.Russia said Erdogan discussed the crisis by phone on Friday with President Vladimir Putin.
"We've decided, effectively immediately, not to stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe by land or sea," said the state, who requested anonymity. "All refugees, including Syrians, are now welcome to cross in to the European Union."
Syria's civil war has worsened drastically lately despite largely vanishing from the agenda of Western countries. Since 2016, Europe has relied on Turkey to halt the flow of refugees, and for quite some time the West has left responsibility for diplomacy in the hands of Moscow and Ankara.
Any mass movement of folks into Europe would create a new crisis for the EU, whose leaders have already been contemplating restrictions on internal borders and public gatherings to handle the coronavirus outbreak.
Greek government sources said land and sea borders with Turkey were being tightened.Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to open the gates for migrants to go to Europe, reversing a pledge Turkey made to the EU in 2016.
The US and others have needed an instantaneous ceasefire, but three rounds of talks between Ankara and Moscow have didn't reach a deal, and the fighting has raged on.
Turkey has sent thousands of troops and heavy military hardware into Idlib in recent weeks, and Erdogan has warned that Turkey would repel President Bashar al-Assad's forces unless they pulled back from Turkish observation posts in your community.
The air strike on Thursday raised Turkey's military death toll to 54 in February in Idlib. The governor in Turkey's border province said 32 other troops were wounded. It had been the worst losses suffered by the Turkish military since a 1993 attack by Kurdish separatist guerrillas.
Turkey's defense minister, Hulusi Akar, said the attack occurred despite coordination with Russian officials on the floor and continued even after the alarm was sounded following a first strike.
Turkey's communications director, Fahrettin Altun, said that in retaliation, "all known" Syrian government targets were being fired on by Turkish air and land support units.
Russia's Defense Ministry said the Turkish troops hit by shelling shouldn't have been around in that area and Ankara hadn't informed Moscow beforehand about their location. A senior Russian lawmaker said any full-scale Turkish military procedure in Idlib would end badly for Ankara.
Amid the mounting crisis over Syria, Turkey's lira slid to a 17-month low and its main stock index plunged 10% in early stages Friday even though authorities banned short selling across all Turkish shares.
The State Department said america was very concerned about the reported attack on Turkish soldiers and stood by "our NATO ally Turkey".UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres voiced "grave concern" about the increase in Idlib.
