Turkey to keep its doors open to Syrians, says Erdogan

ISTANBUL

Turkey has stood by the Syrian people since the start of the crisis and will continue to do so, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday.

“As Turkey, since the first days of the crisis, we did not abandon our Syrian brothers. We opened our doors to them, and we will continue to open them,” Erdogan told a meeting with foreign students in Istanbul.

Erdogan’s comments come days after he accused the EU of not keeping its promises to grant billions of euros to support millions of Syrian refugees living in Turkey. He made it clear that Turkey does not rely on foreign help when support the refugees.

“For six years our [Syrian] brothers were being brutally murdered by an illegitimate regime,” Erdogan said. “Until today, about 600,000 innocent people have been killed with barrel bombs, ballistic missiles, torture and chemical weapons.”

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, Turkey has opened its doors to some three million Syrian people fleeing the war, making it the country hosting the largest number of refugees in the world.

Erdogan also accused Daesh, the YPG and PYD terror organizations -- Syrian affiliates of the terrorist group PKK -- of committing “ethnic cleansing and genocide” in Syria. “All of this happened and is happening before the eyes of the world,” he said.

The president said that those who stood idly to the murder of people in Rwanda in 1994 are doing the same thing today in Syria, Libya and Yemen.