ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkey’s state-run relief agency AFAD has opened its biggest refugee camp to house 35,000 people who fled the fighting between Kurdish forces and the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Syrian city of Kobane.
The Reuters news agency quoted AFAD spokesman Dogan Eskinat as saying the new tent city which opened Sunday is located in the southeastern border town of Suruc and is equipped with two hospitals, seven clinics and enough classrooms for 10,000 children.
Turkey says it has taken in 200,000 refugees from Kobane, and Eskinat told Reuters that more facilities would be built if needed.
Neighboring Syria’s civil war, soon going into its fifth year, has sent 265,000 refugees fleeing to Turkey, where they are housed in 24 camps. Eskinat said another camp is set to open in Mardin next month.
“The majority of Turkey's 1.7 million refugees live outside camps, sometimes on the streets and in shanty towns, causing tensions with the local population. Authorities have begun to transfer those living on city streets to camps,” Reuters said.
More than 200,000 people have been killed in the Syrian war and millions displaced, mostly to Iraq and Turkey.
An ISIS assault on Kobane four months ago sent a renewed flood of tens of thousands into Turkey, and several thousand into Iraq’s autnomous Kurdistan Region.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in Diyarbakir on Sunday that his country’s borders remained open to all refugees.
“We have already opened our borders for more than 200,000 people from Kobane; whoever comes to our country we would warmly welcome them and establish refugee camps for them,” he said.
At the start of November the Kurdistan Region dispatched its Peshmerga troops to Kobane, where they have been fighting ISIS alongside the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Peshmerga officials told Rudaw earlier this month that nearly 90 percent of Kobane is now under the control of Kurdish forces.
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