Aleppo fighting to send 600,000 more to frontier, Turkey predicts
THE fierce fighting in Aleppo province could send a fresh wave of 600,000 Syrian refugees to the border of Turkey, the country’s deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, warned yesterday.
As 35,000 Syrians who have fled the area remained camped along the closed border last night, Mr Kurtulmus said that figure could rise dramatically.
“The worst-case scenario in this region in the short term would be a new influx of 600,000 refugees at the Turkish frontier,” he said.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, meanwhile, visited Turkey to discuss the refugee crisis.
A growing number of those stranded at the border are now believed to be returning to the site of the fighting they have fled.
Again and again at the Oncupinar gate and in the nearby town of Kilis, refugees spoke of friends, families and acquaintances on the other side of the crossing who had decided to make the perilous journey back home.
“Going home is the only choice they have left in this world,” said a Syrian nurse for an international organisation who asked to remain anonymous.
More than a quarter of a million Syrians have died during the five-year war. Another four million have become refugees, mostly in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
Although a Turkish-backed aid group, IHH, is building a new displacement camp on the Syrian side, those interviewed did not believe they would remain safe spaces for long.
Recent months have been dominated by intensive Russian air strikes and attacks on civilians have become common. Displacement camps have been hit several times, once with Moscow’s cluster bombs.
Ali Mohamed’s family endured the bombing in Aleppo for almost five years, vowing they would only leave when the war swallowing their city became too much to bear.
But when his wife and daughter fi- nally fled the bombs and the advance of Iranian-backed militias last week, they found the Turkish border closed.
So on Sunday, Mr Mohamed said, they turned around and walked back.
“They are walking into death, but what can I do? My wife says she would rather die at home than in this humiliation,” he said, standing at Turkey’s Oncupinar border crossing.
Mrs Merkel criticised Russian tactics, saying she was “appalled” by the suffering in Aleppo, which she blamed on bomb attacks largely carried out by Russia.
She also called for immediate steps from Ankara to improve the situation in Turkey, saying the €3 billion (£2.3 billion) that has been promised by the European Union must be deployed without delay.
“It doesn’t help a child from Syria that is a refugee here, or a Turkish class that has to share its room with Syrian refugees to say we have pledged €3 billion,” she said. “They want to see a school in the city and fast.”
Troops allied to Bashar al-Assad’s regime, mostly from Hizbollah and Iranian-backed militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, scored a potentially decisive victory last week, cutting rebel supply lines into Aleppo.
Now encircling the city, the regime and its allies are less than 14 miles from the Turkish frontier.
Twenty-seven people including 11 children drowned yesterday after their boat sank in the Aegean while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece, the Turkish coastguard said. The boat was found half-capsized after it set off from Edremit in an apparent bid to reach Lesbos. Four people had been saved and nine were still missing last night.