A Cameron spokesman said it was “perfectly feasible” that France would end existing border arrangements with Britain, leading to “thousands of asylum-seekers pitching up in southeast England”.
Advertisement
The UN’s humanitarian aid agency OCHA said on Monday that eight informal camps on the Syrian side of the border were at “full capacity”.
Merkel, whose country has received over one million migrants in the past year, said she was “horrified” by the suffering of the families stranded in the cold and wet around the border gate. Another Conservative legislator, Sarah Wollaston, accused Cameron of “ratcheting up the alarmist rhetoric”.
Merkel added that Germany and Turkey will push United Nations countries to abide by a resolution passed in December that demanded all parties to stop bombing Syrian regions with a civilian population.
“We are extremely concerned, as access and supply routes from the north to eastern Aleppo city and surrounding areas are now cut off”, said Jakob Kern, the WFP country director for Syria.
“We are allowing in those who want to come, in a controlled fashion”, he told a news conference with his Hungarian counterpart.
Merkel, who was in Ankara for talks with Turkish officials, said on February 8 that “tens of thousands” of people are being affected by the bombing campaign that is coming “primarily from the Russian side”.
He said aid groups were also distributing warm clothes and mattresses, with Turkey allowing humanitarian goods across the border, which remains closed to the fleeing Syrians.
Top European Union official Donald Tusk denounced Russian air strikes in Syria as helping the “murderous” government of President Bashar al-Assad and triggering fresh waves of refugees fleeing toward Europe.
But he warned: “No one should assume that just because Turkey is taking in all the refugees that it should be expected to shoulder the refugee issue alone”.
Davutoglu added that the border will open for some refugees “when necessary”. Davutoğlu said the journalist was trying to make a statement rather than asking a question and that the journalist’s “accusatory remarks spoken in front of Turkey’s prime minister” proves the existence of press freedoms in Turkey. “Is it just us that must to act with conscience?…” “It is clear that the Russians are aiming for the encirclement and to lay siege to Aleppo as has happened in other parts of Syria”.
Germany and Turkey have finally reached an accord about the Syrian refugee crisis.
The Turkish government fears that fierce fighting in Syria’s Aleppo province will spark the arrival of up to 600,000 refugees at its border in a “worst case scenario”, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Monday.
Erdoğan also said that Merkel had promised to take “quotas” of refugees directly from Turkey to Europe but that she had not specified figures and that nothing had come of the promise.
Merkel called for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation patrols to curtail the hazardous sea crossings and blamed Vladimir Putin for worsening the refugee crisis by bombing Syria.
One of the few Syrians who managed to cross into Turkey from Oncupinar recently was six-year-old Aya al-Sharqawi – who was wounded in Russian airstrikes 10 days ago at her hometown of Tel Rifaat – and her uncle, Abdelrahman al-Sharqawi.
Advertisement
A U.N.-led attempt to launch indirect talks between a government delegation and opposition representatives in Geneva was adjourned last week amid bickering.
