Turkey will take "drastic measures" to deal with the influx of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into its biggest city Istanbul, including forcibly sending them to camps in the southeast, the city's top official said Wednesday. Istanbul governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu said there were now 67,000 Syrian refugees in the city and legislation would now be adopted that could see them effectively expelled from the city of 15 million to refugee camps closer to Syria.
Mutlu said authorities would take "drastic measures" to contain the negative consequences of Syrian refugees in Istanbul, including sending those begging in the streets back to the refugee camps "without their consent". His comments came amid signs of growing tensions over the increasingly visible presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as well as protests in several southeastern cities. "In a very short time, we will take new and drastic measures," Mutlu said at an official meeting.
"We are working on legislation that will enable us to send the refugees to the camps even without their consent," he said, adding that 500 were already sent back to a tented camp in southeast Turkey last month. Turkey, a vocal critic of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, currently hosts more than a million Syrian refugees after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced an open-door policy for those fleeing the conflict. Fewer than a third of these are living in camps along the volatile border and hundreds of thousands are eking out a precarious existence in big cities, including Istanbul.