Over 2,400 Syrian refugees cross Turkey's (newly opened) border: Turkish FM

[Turborama]

Source: Xinhua

2011-06-10 02:51:42

ANKARA -- The number of refugees who have left the violence-shadowed northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour to neighboring Turkey has acceded 2,400, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday.

"We have serious concerns about the situation in Syria. Half an hour ago I received exact numbers. More than 2,400 people have now come to Turkey as refugees," the semi-official Anatolia news agency quoted Davutoglu as saying at Libyan Contact Group meeting in Abu Dhabi.

He said it was time for Syria to act "more decisively on political reforms." Davutoglu said that Turkey called Bashar al-Assad to calm down the tension, adding that the people that had died in the clashes "are also our brothers".

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The arrivals have sharply increased since Tuesday, after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Turkey will not "close its doors" to Syrians fleeing from unrest in their country, urging Damascus to "change its attitude towards civilians" and "take its attitude to a more tolerant level as soon as possible."

Read more: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-06/10/c_13920783.htm

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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/syria/">

[Turborama]

1. Syrian refugees in Turkey: 'People see the regime is lying. It is falling apart'

Bloodied but defiant, those who have fled the besieged town of Jisr al-Shughour damn the rule of Bashar al-Assad
Martin Chulov in Antakya, southern Turkey | guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 9 2011 19.43 BST

As the blood from a gunshot wound oozed down his right thigh, Abu Majid shook his fist: "You know what dictatorships are like in the Middle East," he said. "Syria was the strongest of them all, like an iron ball. Well it isn't any more."

The 39-year-old elder from the besieged Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour fled with his wife and children to southern Turkey after he says he was shot last Saturday in a battle – the fiercest yet during the three-month uprising.

Since fleeing, he has kept in contact with men who stayed in Syria, and others among the several thousand who have crossed the border as government forces prepare for what many fear will be a full-scale assault on a largely abandoned town that was, until Saturday, home to 41,000 people.

After five days away from his homeland, Abu Majid is convinced that the four decades of unshakable autocracy he left behind are now steadily unravelling. He is sure that the government's claim that armed locals killed 120 government forces through ambushes and assaults in Jisr al-Shughour over the weekend will soon be proved wrong. He is sure, too, that those who oppose the rule of President Bashar al-Assad now outnumber his supporters. But he says Assad's government is stirring sectarian chaos as it tries to claw back the legitimacy it lost during street demonstrations across the country, which it regularly crushed through violence.

Full insightful article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/syria-turkey-refugees-denounce-regime

[Turborama]

2. Al Jazeera English's Anita McNaught reports from Yayladagi in Turkey (Video)

Uploaded by http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish">AlJazeeraEnglish on June 10, 2011
Al Jazeera's Anita McNaught reports from Yayladagi in Turkey, and Al Jazeera's Rula Amin reports from Beirut in Lebanon, as foreign journalists are not allowed to work within Syria.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye0h0cyZur4