Turkey threatens to let asylum-seekers flood into Europe

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on February 28th that his government would no longer stop refugees from crossing into Greece, Nabila’s parents packed her and her five siblings onto a bus, left their house in the Turkish town of Tokat and headed west.

The 12-year-old Afghan refugee had no chance to say goodbye to her Turkish classmates. No one bothered to tell Nabila and her family that the Greek side of the border would be closed. So they and dozens of other migrants have spent the past five days in a field on the banks of the Maritsa River, which separates the two countries, with armed Greek guards on the far side.

“We have to keep waiting for the border to open,” says Nabila, translating for her father (she learned fluent Turkish at school). “We have no money to go back.”

Nabila and the tens of thousands of other migrants who took up Mr Erdogan’s empty promise of free passage to Europe are now trapped in an international standoff. Turkey is home to 3.6m refugees from the war in Syria, and polls show most Turks want them to leave.

Turkey says it opened the border to Greece in the face of an imminent influx of another 1 m refugees from bloody fighting in Idlib.