Turkey: Refugee limit reached

It faces pressure to take in more

A Syrian woman stands Sunday at the closed border crossing at Kilis in southeastern Turkey and asks if it will reopen. The governor of Kilis province said the gates would stay closed barring an “extraordinary crisis.”
A Syrian woman stands Sunday at the closed border crossing at Kilis in southeastern Turkey and asks if it will reopen. The governor of Kilis province said the gates would stay closed barring an “extraordinary crisis.”

KILIS, Turkey -- Turkey has reached the end of its "capacity to absorb" refugees but will continue to take them in, the deputy premier said Sunday, as his country faced mounting pressure to open its border to tens of thousands of Syrians who have fled a government onslaught.

photo

AP

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa shakes hands with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) in Quito, Ecuador, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016. Erdogan is in Ecuador as part of his Latin America tour that includes Chile and Peru.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, joined Saudi Arabia in saying that it was open to the idea of sending ground troops to Syria to battle the Islamic State group, raising the possibility of even greater foreign involvement in the 5-year-old civil war.

Turkish authorities say up to 35,000 Syrians have massed along the border, which remained closed for a third day on Sunday. The governor of the Turkish border province of Kilis said Saturday that Turkey would provide aid to the displaced within Syria, but would only open the gates in the event of an "extraordinary crisis."

Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told CNN-Turk television that Turkey is now hosting a total of 3 million refugees, including 2.5 million Syrians.

"Turkey has reached the end of its capacity to absorb [refugees]," Kurtulmus said. "But in the end, these people have nowhere else to go. Either they will die beneath the bombings and Turkey will ... watch the massacre like the rest of the world, or we will open our borders."

Kurtulmus said some 15,000 refugees from Syria were admitted in the past few days, without elaborating. He put the number of refugees being cared for on the other side of the border at 30,000.

He did not explain why the Turkish border gate at Oncupinar, opposite the Bab al-Salameh crossing in Syria, was being kept closed or why tens of thousands of refugees were not immediately being let in.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will travel to Ankara today to urge the Turkish government to make good on pledges to do more to halt the flow of refugees bound for Europe.

"The most important issue is that we implement the migration agenda with Turkey," Peter Altmaier, Merkel's chief of staff, said in an interview with Germany's ARD television Sunday. "We expect Turkey to take action against illegal migration" across the Aegean to Greece. "In return, we have to help Turkey to handle its own refugee situation better."

Merkel is due to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu less than three weeks after she and Davutoglu agreed that illegal migration presented a regional threat that must be addressed with "the utmost urgency."

In Syria, pro-government forces pressed ahead with their offensive in the northern Aleppo province, which has caused the displacement of civilians toward the Turkish border. Opposition activists said Syrian ground troops backed by Russian airstrikes were engaged in fighting with insurgents around the village of Ratyan and surrounding areas north of Aleppo city.

The army has almost fully encircled Aleppo, Syria's largest city and one-time commercial center, preparing the way for a blockade. The main supply line to the Turkish border has already been cut and many residents of the city were looking to leave, anticipating severe shortages in coming days.

Dr. Ahmad Abdelaziz of the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian organization, said there were only four general surgeons for the entire city.

"The people there are very worried there could be a siege at any time. We expect a lot of people to get out of the city if the situation remains like this, if there is no improvement," he said.

Abdelaziz, who goes in and out of Aleppo but spoke to the AP from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, described a dire scene at the border and said it was difficult to get medicine to the people gathered there.

"There are so many old people and children in the cold weather... They are surrounded by ISIS from the east, the regime from the south and Kurdish forces from the west," he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.

On Saturday, the European Union urged Turkey to open its borders, saying it was providing aid to Ankara for that purpose. EU nations have committed $3.3 billion to Turkey to help refugees, part of incentives aimed at persuading Turkey to do more to stop thousands of migrants from leaving for Greece.

Kurtulmus estimated that "in the worst case scenario" as many as 1 million more refugees could flee Aleppo and surrounding areas.

Erdogan, meanwhile, said his country shouldn't repeat in Syria the same mistake it made when it turned down a U.S. request to join the coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"We don't want to fall into the same mistake in Syria as in Iraq," Erdogan said, recounting how Turkey's parliament denied a U.S. request to use its territory for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "It's important to see the horizon. What's going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change," he told journalists on the return flight from a tour of Latin America, according to Hurriyet newspaper.

Opposition forces supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia are losing more ground to the troops of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is backed by Hezbollah militants and Russian airstrikes. Turkey has repeatedly urged the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq to increase its support for moderate rebel groups seeking the ouster of Assad.

Saudi Arabia -- one of the main backers of the rebels battling to topple Assad -- said last week it was willing in principle to send ground troops to battle the Islamic State.

The United Arab Emirates' Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash echoed that pledge Sunday, saying "we have been frustrated at the slow pace of confronting Daesh," using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. He stressed that any deployment would be relatively small, saying: "We're not talking about thousands of troops."

Also, Erdogan said the U.S. should choose between Turkey and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party as its partner.

His comments came Sunday after envoy Brett McGurk's visit to Kobani last week, where the Kurdish Democratic Union Party's military wing, aided by U.S.-led airstrikes, drove back Islamic State militants a year ago. Turkey considers the Kurdish Democratic Union Party a terrorist group because of its affiliation with Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.

Erdogan said: "How can we trust you? Is it me that is your partner or is it the terrorists in Kobani?"

In Washington, a State Department spokesman reiterated the longstanding U.S. policy that considers the Kurdistan Workers' Party "to be a terrorist organization."

"We continue to call on the PKK to immediately cease its campaign of violence. A resumed political process offers the best hope for greater civil rights, security, and prosperity for all the citizens of Turkey," said Noel Clay of the State Department.

Officials in Jordan now put the number of Syrians there at about 1.4 million. They had been warning for years that the country had reached its limit. Last week, they made even more dire admonitions before a London donor conference on Syria, pushing for more aid while channeling the darkening mood at home.

In an interview with BBC News before the London conference, Jordan's monarch, King Abdullah II, said that the "psyche of the Jordanian people, I think, it has gotten to the boiling point." If the country does not receive significant long-term support, he said, "we are going to have to look at things in a different way."

"How can we be a contributor to regional stability if we are let down by the international community?" he asked.

Jordan's planning minister, Imad Fakhoury, told reporters Sunday that creating jobs for Jordanians is a priority, but that the trade commitments at the donor conference could also put 200,000 Syrian refugees to work.

Fakhoury says that in addition to trade perks, Jordan will also receive billions of dollars in grants and loans in coming years.

Information for this article was contributed by Mehmet Guzel, Suzan Fraser, Dominique Soguel, Zeina Karam, Malak Harb, and Joseph Krauss of The Associated Press; by Benjamin Harvey, Salma El Wardany, Arne Delfs, Patrick Donahue, James G. Neuger and Benjamin Harvey of Bloomberg News; and by Kareem Fahim of The New York Times.

A Section on 02/08/2016

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