Turkey is forcibly returning refugees to war-ravaged Syria, says Amnesty
Turkey is rounding up and forcibly deporting refugees back to war-ravaged Syria on a near-daily basis, claims Amnesty International.
The human rights organization said in a report released Friday that Turkish authorities in the country's southern border provinces have been forcibly deporting groups of around 100 Syrian men, women and children to Syria since mid-January.
The allegations come after Thursday's distressing The Times report accusing Turkish border officers of shooting and killing 16 Syrian refugees trying to cross the border to Turkey.
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Amnesty said it uncovered one case in which three young children were forced back into Syria without their parents. Another case involved the forced return of a woman who was eight months pregnant.
Amnesty said its investigation exposes flaws in the recent EU-Turkey deal meant to stem the flow of refugees arriving in Greece. The deal is contingent on Turkey being being a safe country for asylum seekers.
"In their desperation to seal their borders, EU leaders have willfully ignored the simplest of facts: Turkey is not a safe country for Syrian refugees and is getting less safe by the day," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's Europe and Central Asia director.
Turkey has denied sending refugees back to Syria against their will.
"None of the Syrians that have demanded protection from our country are being sent back to their country by force, in line with international and national law," a foreign ministry official told Reuters.
But Amnesty researchers say they found plenty of proof that Turkey has done so -- and on several occasions.
"The inhumanity and scale of the returns is truly shocking."
Amnesty's report is supported by multiple testimonies including those of two men whose brother and pregnant wife were removed from their car and put in a van that joined a column of seven other vans carrying dozens of Syrian refugees; a man whose mother needed emergency life-saving surgery but was not permitted to register in Gaziantep; a man who was detained at the border for four hours and not provided with food, water or access to a toilet before being deported.
Amnesty said it has documented cases of both registered and unregistered Syrian refugees being forcibly returned. All forced returns to Syria are illegal under Turkish, EU and international law, the group said.
"The inhumanity and scale of the returns is truly shocking; Turkey should stop them immediately," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's Europe and Central Asia director.
Amnesty's investigation supports a BBC report in January that also uncovered allegations of refugees being detained in Turkey before being forced to return to Syria.
These allegations follow a report in The Times, which cites information from the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that gathers information from sources on the ground in Syria, that found Turkish border guards had shot dead 16 Syrian refugees, including 3 children, as they tried to cross the border. The incidents reportedly occurred during the past four months.
Turkey has accepted some 2.7 million Syrian refugees since Syria's civil war broke out five years ago. Thousands of them live in makeshift camps along Turkey's southern border.
A wave of more than one million migrants and refugees arrived in the European Union by boat from Turkey last year. The influx triggered a political crisis of massive proportions.
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Christopher is Mashable's Senior Correspondent covering world news, particularly the post-Soviet space and especially Ukraine, where he lived and worked for more than five years. As an editor at Ukraine's Kyiv Post newspaper, Christopher was part of the team that won the 2014 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism for coverage of the Euromaidan Revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Besides Mashable, he has published with The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and GlobalPost from such countries as Greece, Italy, Israel, Russia and Turkey, among others, as well as from aboard a search and rescue ship off the Libyan coast. Originally from rainy Portland, Oregon, he is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) currently based in New York.
