Baladi - Agencies
Turkey said on Sunday it had finalised preparations to create more safe areas in Syria, which would allow the return of refugees who have fled the civil war, Reuters news agency reported.
Speaking at his AK Party’s provincial headquarters in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, President Tayyip Erdogan said a quarter of a million people had already returned to liberated areas in Syria, according to Reuters.
“God willing soon we will have liberated more places and made more areas safe,” he said.
Turkey is host to 2.7 million refugees from Syria.
Turkey is carrying out an offensive in northern Syria’s Afrin region against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara considers a terrorist organisation linked to Kurdish militants waging an insurgency on Turkish soil.
The Afrin campaign is Turkey’s second cross-border operation during Syria’s seven-year-old civil war. The first, dubbed “Euphrates Shield”, targeted Islamic State and Kurdish fighters further east than Afrin, and was completed in early 2017.
Erdogan said diplomatic and military efforts in Syria’s Idlib province, where Turkey has set up a dozen military observation posts, had been accelerated to avoid a “catastrophe” like those seen in other parts of Syria.