TURKEY CURBS FLIGHTS TO EASE MIGRANT CRISIS
Turkey on Friday banned Syrian, Yemeni and Iraqi citizens from flights to Minsk, potentially closing off one of the main routes the European Union says Belarus has used to fly in migrants by the thousands to engineer a humanitarian crisis on its frontier.
Thousands of migrants from the Middle East are suffering freezing conditions in the forests on the border between Belarus and EU states Poland and Lithuania, which are refusing to let them cross for fear of being overwhelmed by a future stream of refugees. Some have already died and bitter winter conditions are on the horizon.
The EU accuses Belarus of creating the crisis as part of a “hybrid attack” on the bloc — distributing Belarusian visas in the Middle East, flying in migrants and pushing them to cross the border illegally. Brussels may impose new sanctions next week on Belarus and airlines ferrying the migrants.
EU officials welcomed Friday's announcement by Turkey's Civil Aviation General Directorate that Syrians, Yemenis and Iraqis would not be permitted to buy tickets to Belarus or board flights there from Turkish territory.
Turkey has denied allowing its territory to be used, but the website of the airport in Minsk, the Belarus capital, listed six commercial flights arriving from Istanbul on Friday.
The media has been kept away, which critics say conceals the scale of the crisis.
EU officials have repeatedly said their best hope of resolving the crisis is to stop would-be migrants in the Middle East from boarding flights for Belarus, and that diplomats were negotiating in the region to achieve this.