Some hundreds of Syrians have begun to move towards the border with Greece after information, not yet officially confirmed, that Turkey would allow Syrian refugees free to escape to the European Union. An initiative attributed to an attempt by Ankara to pressure Brussels to involve itself in containing the humanitarian drama that is lived on the border between Turkey and Syria, where more than one million civilians fleeing the attacks of the regime of Bachar el Asad. This, in full military escalation in the region after about thirty Turkish soldiers died this Friday in an attack in the province of Idlib, the main focus of confrontation between Ankara and Damascus.
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According to the CNN-Türk chain, groups of Syrians left from Istanbul during the night and about 300 had arrived this morning at Edirne, a Turkish town bordering Greece and Bulgaria, both countries of the European Union. The state news agency Anadolu published images of groups of Syrians walking through the fields near the border.
"We have heard that buses were being organized towards the border and we have come," Halil, a Syrian refugee residing in Istanbul, explained to EL PAÍS: "People who have arrived in Edirne say the Turks have opened the border. We will try our luck, if the Greeks open it too, we will pass, if not, we will have to return to Istanbul ”. Halil, along with several tens of Syrians, roamed this noon in the Istanbul neighborhood of Fatih around a couple of closed buses. They claimed that previously, at least three other buses full of Syrian refugees had departed from that same point in the direction of Edirne. When one of the vehicles opened the doors, the refugees crowded at their doors trying to get a position. They were mostly young men, although there were also couples with young children.
“Here the situation is very bad, they make you work more than twelve hours, they pay you little. If God wants we will arrive in Greece and from there to Germany or Sweden, ”said Adnan, Syrian of Homs, who recognized that“ right now it is impossible to return to Syria ”. Another young man, from the Kurdish locality of Qamishlo, explained that in Turkey he had suffered abuses and accidents at work and that is why he decided to try his luck leaving for Greece.
All the refugees gathered in that place kept glued to the phone informing their families about the last hour of the situation and explained that if the opening of borders works they will call the rest of their family to pass. "Crossing with the help of traffickers is very expensive, I don't have that money to pay for it, but these buses are free," Walid explained. A man in his fifties, named Emir, said he learned about the buses through social networks although he did not have much information because, he complained, since dawn, the Internet works at a slower speed in Turkey and some applications have been restricted so that "propaganda" is not shared regarding last night's attack on Turkish soldiers in Idlib.
The buses that this journalist could see had the seal of TÜRSAB, the federation of travel agencies and tour operators in Turkey and, as one of the drivers confessed, belonged to the Çelik Turizm company. A person in charge of managing the trips, who did not want to give his name, told this newspaper that they have organized at the request of “a Syrian citizen named Mehdi who phoned at night after knowing that the border would be opened and who assured that there were many requests for Syrians who wanted to be transferred to the border. ” Asked by who pays for the rental of vehicles, he replied: "We do it for free, it has been very difficult for us to keep the Syrians here, so now we help them to leave."
Turkey hosts around 3.7 million Syrian refugees, who have arrived since the war began in the neighboring country nine years ago. Another million people gather at the border of the Syrian side, fleeing the fighting in the punished province of Idlib.
