Massive Influx Of Syrian Refugees To Turkey Contınues Unabated

Turkey has been receiving very large numbers of refugees from Syria since the civil war in the neighboring country began more than three years ago, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Sunday, with at least 70,000 Syrian Kurdish civilians having entered Turkey in the last two days.

Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) fighters have seized dozens of villages close to the border and have recently advanced to within 15 kilometers (9 miles) of the town of Ayn al-Arab -- known as Kobani in Kurdish -- on the Syrian border with Turkey. Fearing an imminent attack, many Kurdish civilians fled their homes and sought refuge in Turkey, following the opening of the Turkish border.

At least 70,000 people are confirmed to have crossed into Turkey in less than two days. The UNHCR and the Turkish authorities said they were preparing for the possibility of thousands more refugees arriving in the coming days. "This massive influx shows how important it is to offer and preserve asylum space for Syrians as well as the need to mobilize international support to the neighboring countries," António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, told Reuters.

The UNHCR has estimated the number of internally displaced Syrian Kurds to be as high as 200,000 after ISIL's advance began on Tuesday. UNHCR spokeswoman Selin Ünal said that most of those coming across the border from Kobani are Kurdish women, children and the elderly. She called for the international community to increase its aid for Syrian refugees in Turkey, who are already nearing 1.5 million.

Mohammed Osman Hamme, a middle-aged Syrian Kurdish refugee who managed to cross the border into Turkey, told The Associated Press that he fled with his wife and small children from the village of Dariya in Raqqa province 10 days ago after learning that ISIL militants were seizing nearby villages.

The family abandoned their village immediately and headed towards north on foot for three days, passing the town of Tell Abiad, near the Turkish border, where they saw four severed heads hanging in the streets, he said.

Hamme said he didn't have the time to bring along his possessions and was only able to carry a sack of grain and some of his belongings in a plastic bag.

In an interview with CNN Türk TV station, UNHCR representative in Turkey Carol Batchelor praised Turkey's open-door policy and pointed out that the intensity of the clashes and ever-changing situation near Kobani hinder any cross-border aid efforts, implying that the only solution is to keep the Turkish border open. "I don't think in the last three and a half years we have seen 100,000 [people] cross in two days. So this is a bit of a measure of how this situation is unfolding, and the very deep fear people have about the circumstances inside Syria and for that matter, Iraq," said Batchelor.

"Quite frankly we don't know when those numbers will end; we don't know what the future holds. ... It could well go again into the hundreds of thousands. We need assistance for core, lifesaving support," she added.

According to the UNHCR, Turkey officially hosts nearly 1.4 million Syrians in and outside refugee camps in the country and Turkey has spent around $4 billion on Syrian refugees so far. In addition, the government estimates that hundreds of thousands more Syrians have sought sanctuary in Turkey without formally registering, the agency said.

Along with Turkey, neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt also host large numbers of the Syrian refugees, whose number now totals about 3 million.

SHOTLIST
TURKEY, ŞANLIURFA, 21 SEP 2014

VAR of the borderline
Soldiers staying in row to take the security of refugees
VAR of refugees crossing the border into Turkey
Some man carry their old parents on their back
VAR of refugees in Turkey's land

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