Tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing a Russian-backed government advance on Aleppo have remained stranded near the Turkish border over the weekend, with no sign that the authorities in Ankara will respond to mounting international pressure to allow in more refugees uprooted by the escalating war.
Airstrikes targeted villages between Syria’s largest city and the border crossing of Bab al-Salameh while convoys of aid supplies and ambulances entered fromTurkey – reinforcing the impression that the Turks plan to create a border buffer zone that could in time become a safe haven for civilians.
Bashar al-Assad’s government made clear, however, that it was in no mood to contemplate a ceasefire – the focus of faltering US diplomatic efforts with Russia.
“Turkey has reached the end of its capacity to absorb [refugees],” Numan Kurtulmuş, the deputy prime minister, told CNN-Turk. “But in the end, these people have nowhere else to go. Either they will die beneath the bombings and Turkey will ... watch the massacre like the rest of the world, or we will open our borders. “At the moment, we are admitting some, and are trying to keep others there [in Syria] by providing them with every kind of humanitarian support,” Kurtulmuş added. “We are not in a position to tell them not to come. If we do, we would be abandoning them to their deaths.”
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