Influx, clashes at border

Waves of Syrian refugees line up at the Turkish border in an effort to escape violence at home as the drums of war beat closer to Turkey’s southern frontier

While heavy clashes between government troops and rebels raged Thursday in northern areas of Syria near the Turkish border, around 1,000 Syrian refugees fleeing the violence in Syria poured across the Turkish border at the Öncüpınar gate in the Kilis district.

“Five thousand Syrian refugees have poured into Turkey in the last three days, and around 1,000 are waiting at the border; we can’t take them now because there is not enough space in the camps to place them,” a Turkish official told Hürriyet Daily News Aug. 9.

Clashes between government troops and rebels raged Thursday in opposition bastions of the besieged city of Aleppo, The Associated Press (AP) reported. The regime pressed its new assault on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial hub, for a second day. But blistering attacks on rebel positions from the ground and the air appear to be only slowly chipping away at the opposition’s grip on its strongholds.

The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) withdrew completely from the embattled district of Salaheddin in Aleppo on Thursday, as regime forces advanced, a rebel commander said, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report.

“We have staged a tactical withdrawal from Salaheddin,” Hossam Abu Mohammed told AFP by telephone. “The district is completely empty of rebel fighters. Regime forces are now advancing into Salaheddin.”

The rebels are still in the streets near the key neighborhood, said Abu Mohammed, who commands the Dara al-Shahbaa Brigade. “We are in the Saif al-Dawla and Mashhad districts” east of Salaheddin, he said.

He cited the violent bombardment by regime forces as the reason behind the FSA withdrawal. “The artillery and aerial bombardments are very heavy, and they are targeting all rebel-held areas surrounding Salaheddin,” said Abu Mohammed.

Another Aleppo-based activist, Mohammad Saeed, said troops were using warplanes and tanks to shell the towns of Hreitan and Tel Rifat, some 35 kilometers north of Aleppo and 20 kilometers south of the Turkish border; from where most of the rebels converged on the city, AP reported.

“They are trying to cut the main lines from Tel Rifat to Aleppo,” Saeed said.

Syrian fighter jets launched airstrikes Wednesday on Tel Rifat, hitting a house and a high school and killing six members of one family, residents said.

Entries and exits at the Yayladağı border gate in the southern Turkish city of Hatay have almost stopped because of the clashes between Syrian government forces and rebels occurring in areas near the Turkish border.

More than 5,000 Syrian refugees fled to Turkey last week from the violence in Aleppo. The refugees have been placed in the newly constructed shelter camp in the Akçakale district of the southern city of Şanlıurfa.

The governor of Şanlıurfa, Celalettin Güvenç, said an extraordinary effort was made to construct the shelter camp at Akçakale quickly, and the work went on both day and night in order to be able to finish it, Anatolia news agency reported. However, around 1,000 refugees had to wait at the zero point between the Turkish and Syrian borders due to a lack of space in the shelter camps.

The construction of the Şanlıurfa camp has not yet been completed, but it should be finished within a few days, according to a Turkish official. Turkey is working to increase the capacity of its camps to shelter Syrian refugees to a total of 100,000 in the following weeks. Five new shelter camps with a total capacity of 50,000 people are being built in cities in southern and southeastern Turkey.