Erdoğan: World Powers Offer No Help for Syrian Refugees in ‘Safe Zone’

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the international community had given no support to his country for a planned “safe zone” in northern Syria, where he intends to resettle a million Syrian refugees, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported on Wednesday. Turkey has said that the zone will enable the safe return to Syria of refugees currently living in Turkey. But Western countries have criticized the Turkish military incursion into northern Syria, which drove US-allied Syrian Kurdish forces away from the border. Erdoğan, talking to reporters on Tuesday in Geneva where he was attending the Global Forum on Refugees, said that more than 600,000 refugees would voluntarily join the 371,000 already living in the Turkish-created “peace zone” in northern Syria, but that “not even the countries we regard as the most powerful and respected have come out yet in response to our call on the safe zone and said, ‘We’re in.’” Erdoğan said Ankara has paid $40 billion to host 3.7 million Syrian refugees. The EU, he said, had pledged nearly €6 billion ($6.61 billion) to support the refugees but had only delivered about half of the promised assistance.