I don’t think that Europeans are going to take this latest attempt by Turkey to flood it with Muslim migrants as easily as it did five years ago…
The international media, of course, are busy leveling vitriol against the Greek government for their handling of the situation, even more so than against Turkey which is causing it.
Greek police fire tear gas and barricade the border with barbed wire as more than 75,000 migrants try to cross from Turkey into the EU
- EU border protection agency Frontex said it was on ‘high alert’ today at Turkey-Greece and Bulgaria border
- Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan ‘opened the doors’ to allow up to 4million to leave country
- Greek police closed border crossings and fired tear gas at groups of migrants who tried to enter the country
- Pregnant women and children were among those making hazardous crossings from Turkey to Greece by sea
An estimated 75,000 migrants have crossed from Turkey into the EU three days after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared the border ‘open’.
Greek police fired tear gas and erected barbed wire along their frontier in a desperate attempt to prevent chaos and what authorities termed ‘illegal’ entry into their country.
Bulgaria deployed its army to patrol the country’s 118-mile line with Ankara.
And the EU’s border agency, Frontex, moved onto a ‘high alert’ footing, stationing corps along the 27-nation bloc’s land border with Turkey and in the Greek islands.
But the efforts proved futile as migrants waded across the Maritsa river into Greece and arrived by boat on the Greek islands of Samos, Lesbos and Chios. It is unclear whether migrants have also entered Bulgaria.
Bureaucrats in Brussels said tonight they will hold an ‘emergency meeting’ in the coming days as fears played out across the continent that scenes from the 2015 migrant crisis, where thousands of refugees streamed across borders to reach Germany, France and Britain, could be repeated.
Turkey, which has held back 4million refugees following a £2.3-billion deal with the EU four years ago, opened the floodgates on Friday, a day after 34 Turkish troops were killed in a Syrian regime airstrike in Idlib.
Ankara ramped up tensions with the Assad regime tonight as it bombed airports outside Aleppo, deep inside Syrian-government held territory, and shot down two of President Bashar al-Assad’s fighter jets. Tensions were also heightened with Moscow, which has backed the regime, as three Russian journalists were detained in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.
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