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ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey's deputy prime minister says the number of Syrian refugees who've reached Turkey in the past four days after fleeing the advance of Islamic State militants now totals 130,000. And, he says, that number could rise.
The refugees have been flooding into Turkey since Thursday, escaping an Islamic State offensive that has pushed the conflict nearly within eyeshot of the Turkish border. More than a million Syrians have been pushed over the border in the past 3½ years.
The deputy prime minister (Numan Kurtulmus) says Turkey is faced with a "man-made disaster." He says, "We don't know how many more villages may be raided, how many more people may be forced to seek refuge."
As refugees flooded in, Turkey on Sunday closed a border crossing to Turkish Kurds in a move aimed at preventing them from joining the fight in Syria. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that a day earlier, hundreds of Kurdish fighters had poured into Syria through the small Turkish village.
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