Turkey will no longer prevent migrants trying to reach Europe from crossing the border, a senior Turkish official told AFP on Friday. The decision to " open the doors " was taken during an extraordinary security council chaired by Head of State Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the night of Thursday to Friday.
The meeting was convened after the deaths of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in the Idleb region (northwest of Syria) in air strikes attributed by Ankara to the Syrian regime supported militarily by Russia. " We will no longer detain those who want to go to Europe, " said the official on condition of anonymity.
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" We are already welcoming nearly four million refugees and do not have the means or the resources to allow entry into our territory for a million additional people, " announced the communications director of the Turkish presidency on Friday. Fahrettin Altun.
According to Turkish media reports, groups of migrants were heading for the border with Greece in western Turkey on Friday morning. The news agency DHA thus reported that around 300 Syrian, Iraqi or even Iranian migrants had arrived in the province of Edirne, on the Greek border.
In the past, Turkey has repeatedly threatened to " open the doors " of Europe to migrants, observers see it as a way to put pressure on the countries of the European Union still traumatized by the migration crisis of the summer 2015. Several hundreds of thousands of people, mostly fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, then traveled to Europe in transit through Turkey.
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In March 2016, Turkey and the European Union concluded a controversial migration pact which drastically reduced the number of crossings to Greece. But Athens and the EU have seen an increase in arrivals in recent months. In recent months, Ankara has repeatedly called for more European aid to deal with the humanitarian disaster in Idleb, where nearly a million people fled the bombing of the Damascus regime and its Russian ally, taking refuge in the mostly near the Turkish border.
