ANKARA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan laid his cards on the table on Wednesday and demanded EU help for his military action in Syria in return for ending the migrant crisis on Turkey’s border with Greece.
Thousands of refugees have massed at the border and around the Greek islands since Erdogan last week tore up a 2016 deal with the EU to keep the migrants in Turkey in return for cash aid to help with the influx from northwest Syria. Clashes have broken out between police and refugees.
Erdogan said Europe had to support Turkey’s “political and humanitarian solutions in Syria” if it wanted to resolve the situation, but government spokesman Ibrahim Kalin denied this was blackmail.
“Our objective by opening the doors was not to create an artificial crisis, to place political pressure or to serve our interests,” he said, but Turkey’s capacity “has a limit.”
Turkey already hosts more than 3.6 million refugees, most of them Syrians, and has been fighting the Assad regime in a bid to prevent more crossing from Idlib province.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and European Council president Charles Michel met Erdogan in Ankara on Wednesday, and pledged an additional 170 million euros in aid for vulnerable groups in Syria.
But Turkish spokesman Kalin urged the EU to produce a “road map” for the management of the funds.
Borrell said the EU recognized the “difficult situation Turkey is facing” but Turkey’s green light to migrants could “only make the situation worse.”
