Turkey awash with 'one million' Syrian refugees

ANKARA - The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey has reached "almost one million", Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday, while pledging to keep accepting those fleeing the war.

"Are we supposed to ask our brothers not to come, and to die in Syria?" Erdogan said as he addressed his party's lawmakers in parliament.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in the three-year conflict which has sent millions fleeing to neighbouring countries and beyond.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, there are now over 715,000 registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, with the country experiencing an influx in recent months as fighting has escalated on Syria’s northern border.

The UN aid mission in Turkey is currently gravely underfunded, with only 9 percent of the total $522m needed for 2014 delivered so far.

Non-registered refugees are hard to categorise. They can either be relatively well off, and choose to stay with friends or relatives rather than register, or can be some of the most vulnerable refugees who are denied basic protections and often flee to a host country’s towns or cities in search of low grade work.

Turkey, a staunch opponent of the regime in Damascus, is one of the countries that has born the brunt of the refugee crisis, along with Lebanon and Jordan. The country has striven to present itself as an example to other donors and host countries, installing state-of-the-art refugee camps, although the sheer size of the influx is overwhelming the 76-million-strong nation.

The United Nations said earlier this month that more than a million people Syrians had officially registered as refugees in Lebanon, and that numbers were swelling by the day.

For a special report on Syrian schoolchildren in Turkey, see here.