The president of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced this Monday that the Yayladagi border crossing will be reopenedin the province of Hatay, to manage the safe and voluntary return of the millions of Syrian migrants hosted by Ankara. “For avoid accumulations and facilitate traffic at the borderwe will open the Yayladagi border crossing,” said the Turkish president regarding this crossing, which had been closed since 2013 for security reasons.
Erdogan has highlighted 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 massacred12 million have been forced to move and many cities have been reduced to rubble,” according to the Anatolia news agency.
Türkiye shares a 900 kilometer border with Syria. Ankara began building a border wall with concrete blocks starting in 2015 to try contain the illegal passage of people given the increase in Syrian refugees during the conflict in the neighboring country.
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, called for a “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 jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) and its allied factions.
Ankara is a key player in the Syrian conflict for the campaign he 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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