President Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that up to 250,000 migrants were fleeing from the northwestern Syrian region of Idlib towards Turkey, adding that Ankara was trying to prevent them from crossing its border.
Turkey hosts some 3.7 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population in the world. It fears a new wave from Idlib, where up to 3 million Syrians live in the last rebel-held swathe of territory, after Russian and Syrian government forces last month intensified their bombardment of targets in the region.
"Right now, 200,000 to 250,000 migrants are moving towards our borders. We are trying to prevent them with some measures, but it's not easy. It's difficult, they are humans too," Erdogan told a conference in Ankara.
In the latest round of violence in Syria's nearly nine-year-old war, regime forces have upped their deadly bombardment of the northwestern opposition bastion of Idlib in recent weeks.
In December alone, the violence pushed some 284,000 from their homes in the Idlib region of some three million people, the United Nations says.
The mass movement of people has seen public buildings such as mosques, garages, wedding halls and schools turned into shelters, UN humanitarian agency OCHA says.
Regime ally Russia announced a ceasefire for Idlib in late August after months of deadly Russian and regime bombardment that killed around 1,000 civilians.
But sporadic clashes and bombardment persisted throughout the autumn before a spike in violence in the past month, the Observatory says.
In total 11,215 people including more than 1,000 children were killed during the war last year, although it was the least deadly year on record since the beginning of the conflict.
The eight-year-old war has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and forced 13 million people from their homes, half of whom have left their shattered homeland.
Agencies, Zaman Al Wasl
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