Increasingly intensive Russian airstrikes are pushing tens of thousands of Syrians from Aleppo towards the Turkish border, Ahmet Davutoğlu has told a Syriafundraising conference. The Turkish prime minister said he had been sent news of the mass exodus as he arrived in London for the conference, which aims to raise billions of dollars in aid for refugees in Syria and bordering countries.
Calling on the conference to recognise that the world was locked in a twin fight against Islamic State and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, he said: “Ten thousand new refugees are waiting in front of the door of Kilis because of air bombardments and attacks against Aleppo.”
Kilis is a border province in southern Turkey abutting an area of Syria that is largely held by opposition fighters.
“Sixty to seventy-thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving towards Turkey. My mind is not now in London but on our border – how to relocate these new people coming from Syria?” he said on Thursday. “Three hundred thousand people living in Aleppo are ready to move towards Turkey.”
The conference began the day after Syrian peace talks in Geneva were put on holdafter just three days, a move that suggests the refugee crisis will be prolonged.
The talks were halted until the end of the month after the Syrian opposition delegation said it could not start talks while the sieges of towns and increasing Russian airstrikes continued. Nearly half the country’s population is now displaced.
On Tuesday, Syrian army troops, backed by the most intensive Russian aerial bombardment to date, came close to shutting the supply lines from Turkey to Aleppo, once one of Syria’s most populous cities.
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