AP
Kastanies, Mar : 2 The United Nations said Sunday that at least 13,000 people were massed on Turkey's land border with Greece, after Turkey officially declared its western borders were open to migrants and refugees hoping to head into the European Union.
Turkey's decision to open the borders with Greece came amid a military escalation in Syria's northwest that has led to growing direct clashes between Turkish and Syrian forces.
In Syria, the government said it was closing its airspace for any flights or drones across the country's northwestern region. It said any aircraft that penetrates Syrian airspace will be treated as hostile and shot down.
The announcement came after two days of Turkish drone attacks in Idlib province that Syrian activists said caused heavy losses to Syrian government forces. These confrontations have added to soaring tensions between Turkey and Russia, which support opposing sides of the Syrian civil war.
"Any jet that violates our airspace will be treated as a hostile target that must be shot down and prevented from achieving its goals," the Syrian military statement said. It was not immediately clear whether the statement referred to friendly Russian jets in addition to Turkish aircraft.
The statement came shortly after the Syrian army shot down a Turkish drone over the town of Saraqeb in Idlib, according to military-run media.
Turkish Defense Minsiter Hulusi Akar, speaking from military headquarters near the Syrian border, said Turkey aimed to confront Syrian government forces rather than Russian troops. He called on Moscow to persuade Syrian President Bashar Assad to withdraw to 2018 cease-fire lines on the edges of Idlib.
Referring to losses inflicted on Syria, he said Turkey had "neutralized" more than 2,200 Syrian troops, 103 tanks and eight helicopters.
"The Spring Shield operation, which was launched following the abominable attack in Idlib on Feb. 27, continues successfully," Akar said, referring to air strikes that killed 33 Turkish soldiers.
The operation is Turkey's fourth in the war-torn country since 2016.
The heavy fighting in northwest Syria has also triggered a humanitarian catastrophe and the single largest wave of displacement in the nine-year Syrian civil war.
Ankara is worried it might come under renewed international pressure to open its now sealed border with Syria and offer refuge to hundreds of thousands more Syrian civilians. Turkey already hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decision to open his country's borders with Europe made good on a longstanding threat to let refugees into the continent. His announcement marked a dramatic departure from the current policy and an apparent attempt to pressure Europe into offering Turkey more support in dealing with the fallout from the Syrian war to its south.
The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration said Sunday that by the previous evening, its staff working along the Turkish-Greek land border "had observed at least 13,000 people gathered at the formal border crossing points at Pazarkule and Ipsala and multiple informal border crossings, in groups of between several dozen and more than 3,000."
Greek authorities fired tear gas and stun grenades through Saturday to prevent repeated attempts by a crowd of more than 4,000 people massed at the border crossing in Kastanies to cross, and fought a cat-and-mouse game with groups cutting holes in a border fence along the border to crawl through.
Erdogan's communications director Fahrettin Altun later said Turkey had changed its focus to preparing for the possibility of new arrivals from Syria "instead of preventing refugees who intend to migrate to Europe."