Turkey says will not stop Syrian refugees reaching Europe

Turkey is “no longer able to hold refugees” following a Syrian attack in Idlib, a spokesman for president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party, said on Friday.
On Thursday morning, 33 Turkish soldiers were killed and dozens more wounded in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib province. Turkey’s decision reverses a 2016 EU-Turkey deal aiming to cut the numbers of migrants entering Europe. Analysts believe Turkey’s decision aims to force the EU and NATO to support its military operation in Idlib.
Under the deal with the EU, Turkey has promised to stop the flow of migrants travelling to the EU, which in return has promised to reexamine membership talks for Turkey’s EU accession.
“As a result of the attack, the (refugees) in Turkey are heading towards Europe, and those on Syrian territory are heading towards Turkey. Our refugee policy is the same as before, but we are now in a situation where we can no longer hold them”, Omer Celik from Erdogan’s AKP party told the media shortly after midnight Friday morning.
After the announcement, some of the 3.6 million Syrians currently living in the country under the 2016 deal with the EU, began to move quickly. In Istanbul, the local Syrian community began organising buses to take people from the city to the borders, Turkish media said.
Erdogan’s top press aide accused Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad of “conducting ethnic cleansing” and seeking to drive millions of Syrians out of Idlib: “These people will try to escape to Turkey and Europe. Already hosting close to 4 million refugees, we do not have the capacity and resources to allow entry to another million”.
Local media said that in anticipation of the migrants, Greece has increased border patrols “to the maximum possible level”. According to EU figures, Greece saw more than 60,000 asylum seekers arrive from Turkey in 2019, and it expects more than 100,000 more in 2020.