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MADRID Dec. 9 () –
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced this Monday that the Yayladagi border crossing, in the province of Hatay, will be reopened to manage the safe and voluntary return of the millions of Syrian migrants hosted by Ankara.
“To avoid accumulations and facilitate traffic at the border, we will open the Yayladagi border crossing,” said the Turkish president regarding this crossing, which had been closed since 2013 for security reasons.
Erdogan stressed that Türkiye will always be proud of having welcomed thousands of “oppressed” Syrians during that “dark” time. “I believe that the strong winds of change will lead to beneficial results for all the Syrian people,” he stressed.
The Turkish president has also accused the deposed president, Bashar al Assad, of fleeing “leaving behind a Syria where almost a million people have been massacred, 12 million have been forced to move and many cities have been reduced to rubble,” according to The Anatolia news agency has reported.
Türkiye shares a 900 kilometer border with Syria. Ankara began building a border wall with concrete blocks starting in 2015 to try to contain the illegal passage of people due to the increase in Syrian refugees during the conflict in the neighboring country.
The day before, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called for an “orderly” transition in Syria following the fall of the Al Assad regime after the capital, Damascus, fell into the hands of rebel forces led by the Hayat jihadist group. Tahrir al Sham (HTS) and its allied factions.
Ankara is a key actor in the Syrian conflict due to the campaign it has been waging for years against Kurdish forces in the northeast of the country. Fighting still continues between the Syrian National Army, an armed group it supports, and the Kurdish-Arab militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
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