Tag Archives: Refugee Crisis

Founding members say European Union is in bad shape

ROME (Reuters) – The European Union faces “critical times” and all its members should set aside selfish interests to tackle problems such as immigration and terrorism, the bloc’s six founding nations said on Tuesday.

A week after the EU accepted that some members may never go further in sharing sovereignty, as part of the price for keeping Britain in the club, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg pledged to pursue “ever closer union” at a meeting in Rome, where they founded the bloc in 1957.

“We are concerned about the state of the European project,” the foreign ministers of the Six said in a statement after their talks. “Indeed, it appears to be facing very challenging times. It is in these critical times that we, as founding members, feel particularly called upon.”

The meeting was held against the backdrop of deep division in the 28-nation bloc over how to handle the flows of hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe fleeing war and failing states in the Middle East and North Africa.

It also came a week after Brussels agreed a draft deal with Britain Prime Minister David Cameron that, among other things, reaffirmed the limitations of a treaty commitment to pursue the “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe, part of a package to help Cameron campaign before a referendum that the EU’s second biggest economy should continue its 43-year membership.

While acknowledging that the Union “allows for different paths of integration”, the original signatories of the Treaty of Rome declared: “We remain resolved to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe.”

Meeting in Italy, which has been in the frontline of a wave of migration to Europe across the Mediterranean, the ministers also stressed the need to overcome divisions on the EU response.

Hungary and Austria this week called for fences on the Macedonian and Bulgarian borders with Greece and between Austria and Slovenia, and several states have called into question the Schengen accord on free circulation inside the EU.

The statement called for better management of the Union’s external borders in order to make them more secure while preserving Schengen and not hampering freedom of movement.

It contained no concrete policy proposals, but said Europe “is successful when we overcome narrow self-interest in the spirit of solidarity”.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer Writing by Gavin Jones; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and James Dalgleish)

U.N. fears for hundreds of thousands if Syria troops encircle Aleppo

GENEVA/DAMASCUS/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a new exodus of refugees fleeing a Russian-backed assault.

The army aims to secure the border with Turkey and recover control of Aleppo, a senior adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Reuters, adding that she did not expect diplomacy to succeed while foreign states maintain support for insurgents.

Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.

It marks one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five-year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes.

Since last week, fighting has already wrecked the first attempt at peace talks for two years and led rebel fighters to speak about losing their northern power base altogether.

The U.N. is worried the government advance could cut off the last link for civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo with the main Turkish border crossing, which has long served as the lifeline for insurgent-controlled territory.

“It would leave up to 300,000 people, still residing in the city, cut off from humanitarian aid unless cross-line access could be negotiated,” the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

If government advances around the city continue, it said, “local councils in the city estimate that some 100,000 – 150,000 civilians may flee”. Aleppo was once Syria’s biggest city, home to 2 million people.

Air strikes continued on Tal Rifaat, Anadan and other towns in the Aleppo countryside, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, and activists said, adding that they were almost certainly from Russian planes.

Independent Doctors’ Association official Mahmoud Mustafa said at least two people had been killed and 30 wounded in air strikes near Tal Rifaat and villages near Azaz. The death toll could be higher since his figures referred only to victims brought to the organization’s hospital on the Syrian side of the Oncupinar border crossing with Turkey.

In a residential area of Damascus, a suicide bomber drove his car into a police officers’ club on Tuesday, blowing himself up, a Syrian interior ministry statement said. The state news agency SANA reported three dead and 14 wounded.

The Observatory said eight police officers had been killed and 20 wounded in the blast. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

While mortar and missile attacks have been a common feature of life in Damascus, this was the first bombing of its kind in many months in the center of the capital.

Last month, at least 60 people were killed, including 25 Shi’ite fighters, on the outskirts of the city by a car bomb and two suicide bombers near Syria’s holiest Shi’ite shrine, the Observatory reported. Islamic State also claimed that attack.

“BETWEEN TWO EVILS”

Turkey, already home to 2.5 million Syrians, the world’s biggest refugee population, has so far kept its frontier mostly closed to the latest wave of displaced.

Trucks ferrying aid and building supplies were crossing the border at Oncupinar into Syria on Tuesday, while a few ambulances entered Turkey, sirens blazing.

But the crossing remained closed to the tens of thousands of refugees sheltering in camps on the Syrian side of the border.

“We Syrians will be stuck between two evils if Turkey does not open the doors,” said Khaled, 30, trying to return to Aleppo to rescue his wife and children. “We will have to choose between Russian bombardment or Daesh,” he said, using a pejorative Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The U.N. urged Ankara on Tuesday to open the border and has called on other countries to assist Turkey with aid.

Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban, speaking at her office in Damascus, said the government’s aim was also “to control our borders with Turkey because Turkey is the main source of terrorists, and the main crossing for them”. The Syrian government describes all the groups fighting it as terrorists.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said as many as a million refugees could arrive if the Russian-Syrian campaign continues. Fifty thousand people had reached Turkey’s borders in the latest wave and Ankara was admitting people in a “controlled fashion”, he said.

The U.N. World Food Programme said in a statement it had begun food distribution in the Syrian town of Azaz near the Turkish border for the new wave of displaced people.

“The situation is quite volatile and fluid in northern Aleppo with families on the move seeking safety,” said Jakob Kern, WFP’s country director in Syria.

“We are extremely concerned as access and supply routes from the north to eastern Aleppo city and surrounding areas are now cut off, but we are making every effort to get enough food in place for all those in need, bringing it in through the remaining open border crossing point from Turkey.”

LITTLE HOPE FOR PEACE TALKS

The Russian-backed government assault around Aleppo, as well as advances further south, helped torpedo the first peace talks for nearly two years.

International powers are due to meet on Thursday in Munich in a bid to resurrect the talks, but diplomats hold out virtually no hope for negotiations as long as the offensive continues. Rebels say they will not attend without a halt to the bombing.

Moscow turned the momentum in the war in favor of its ally Assad when it joined the conflict four months ago with a campaign of air strikes against his enemies, many of whom are supported by Arab states, Turkey and the West.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russia on Tuesday to join efforts to bring about a ceasefire. “Russia’s activities from Aleppo and in the region are making it much more difficult to be able to come to the table and be able to have a serious conversation,” Kerry told reporters.

The Syrian president’s adviser said talk of a ceasefire was coming from states that “do not want an end to terrorism” and were instead seeking to shore up insurgents, who are losing territory on a number of important frontlines.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Beirut, Tom Miles in Geneva, Gergely Szakacs and Marton Dunai in Budapest and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Giles Elgood, Philippa Fletcher and David Stamp)

Faced with new influx, Turkey’s open door for migrants may be closing

ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – As the number of Syrian refugees now amassing on the Turkish border swells into the tens of thousands, Ankara’s long-standing open door to migrants may be closing.

An assault by Russian-backed Syrian government forces around the city of Aleppo has sent more than 30,000 people fleeing to the Turkish border gate of Oncupinar in the past few days, and officials say tens of thousands more could be on the move.

The surge has created a bitter irony for Turkey.

Praised on the one hand for taking in more than 2.5 million refugees from Syria’s five-year war, it is also under pressure to stop their perilous onward journeys to Europe, and to prevent radical militants from sneaking over what was long a porous border to carry out attacks in Turkey or abroad.

Yet as it tries to keep the gates shut at Oncupinar and provide aid across the border instead, it now finds itself facing calls to let people in.

“We have much wider considerations now … There are terrorist organizations that weren’t there when the Syrian conflict first began,” a senior government official who deals with immigration issues said, explaining how the situation on the border had changed in recent years.

A growing number of refugees just wanted to use Turkey as a staging post to Europe despite the dangers, he said, leaving Ankara with a responsibility to stop incidents like the drowning of a Syrian toddler last September as his family tried to reach the Greek islands, an image which stirred worldwide sympathy.

“Let everyone in and you may see another Aylan Kurdi.”

Turkish aid groups are delivering food and supplies to tent villages on the Syrian side of the border at Oncupinar and the local authorities say there is no need, for now, to open the gates. President Tayyip Erdogan has said that, if necessary, the refugees will ultimately be allowed in.

Ankara has long argued that the only sustainable way to manage the migrant flow is to establish a “safe zone” inside Syria, an internationally protected area where displaced civilians can be given refuge without crossing into Turkey.

The idea has gained little traction with Western leaders, who see battling Islamic State in Syria as the main priority and fear protecting such a zone would put them in direct military confrontation with President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

But on a small scale, Turkey is putting it into practice at Oncupinar.

A wounded teenager and his father were let through by foot early on Monday, while a trickle of ambulances ferried the badly injured to hospitals in nearby Turkish towns. But for the majority, the border is firmly closed.

“Unless their lives are in danger, unless there’s an imminent risk, the arrangements on the Syrian side have the capacity to accommodate them,” the government official said.

WAITING TO ENTER TURKEY

In the camps at Bab al-Salama on the Syrian side, where children play in muddy lanes between rows of tents lashed by rain, some are starting to wonder whether they are still welcome in a country they once saw as a guaranteed safe haven.

“I have been here for the past month. I am waiting for Turkey to open the door,” said Dilel Cumali, a woman who fled from Dera’a in Syria’s southwest near the Jordanian border.

“There are no beds, no food, nothing to wear. We had to sleep where it’s wet and there’s nothing to cover ourselves with. There is nothing to feed the kids. We don’t want anything. All we want is to get inside Turkey.”

Under a November deal with the European Union, Turkey agreed to do more to integrate its refugee population – now the world’s largest – and try to lower the number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe after over a million streamed onto the continent in 2015, many by sea from Turkey.

At least 22 migrants drowned after their boat capsized in the Aegean sea off the Turkish coast on Monday, suggesting the exodus shows no sign of abating.

Asked on Saturday about the migrants at Oncupinar, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Turkey had a moral and legal duty to protect refugees, adding EU support to Ankara was aimed at guaranteeing it could cope with them.

FRUSTRATION

Turkey, a NATO member with a 560-mile border with Syria, is increasingly frustrated at the international failure to do more to stop the bombing by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his allies including Russia, which it sees as the root cause of the migrant flows.

“Those who can’t say stop the bombardment are saying stop the immigration wave. If you’re serious, stop the authors of that cruelty,” said Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan, a long-standing Erdogan advisor.

A suicide bombing in Istanbul last month which killed 10 German tourists, carried out by a Saudi-born Syrian who entered Turkey as a refugee, served only to highlight the risks.

Around Oncupinar, eight camps were set up on the Syrian side for some 60,000 people even before the latest influx, according to Oncupinar governor Suleyman Tapsiz. A ninth is being built.

“There is a perception that Turkey has shut its doors and is not doing anything. On the contrary, there are major efforts to accommodate these people on the Syrian side,” a second Turkish government official said.

“It’s not like we’re shutting our doors in their face.”

A flag of the opposition Free Syrian Army fluttered over the road that leads out from a camp at Bab al-Salama to the Syrian city of Azaz, one of the last towns between the Syrian army’s advance and the Turkish border. Opposition fighters holding Kalashnikovs milled around nearby.

“I fled Assad’s and Russia’s bombardment. Please tell them to open the doors so we can move to safety. We have no safety here,” said Sabah al-Muhammed, an elderly woman who said she had walked for 10 hours to reach the border.

Even amid the chaos of Syria’s war, the message that Europe’s borders were closed had reached her.

“I swear to god, we don’t want to go to Europe, we don’t want Europe. We are Muslim people and we want to live in a Muslim country,” she said.

(Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by David Dolan and Philippa Fletcher)

Russian firepower helps Syrian forces edge toward Turkey border

BEIRUT/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – The Syrian army advanced toward the Turkish border on Monday in a major offensive backed by Russia and Iran that rebels say now threatens the future of their nearly five-year-old insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad.

Iranian backed-militias played a key role on the ground as Russian jets intensified what rebels call a scorched earth policy that has allowed the military back into the strategic northern area for the first time in more than two years.

“Our whole existence is now threatened, not just losing more ground,” said Abdul Rahim al-Najdawi from Liwa al-Tawheed, an insurgent group. “They are advancing and we are pulling back because in the face of such heavy aerial bombing we must minimize our losses.”

The Russian-backed Syrian government advance over recent days amounts to one of the biggest shifts in momentum of the war, helping to torpedo the first peace talks for two years, which collapsed last week before they had begun in earnest.

The Syrian military and its allies were almost three miles from the rebel-held town of Tal Rafaat, which has brought them to around 16 miles from the Turkish border, the rebels, residents and a conflict monitor said.

The assault around the city of Aleppo in northern Syria has prompted tens of thousands to flee toward Turkey, already sheltering more than 2.5 million Syrians.

In the last two days escalating Russian bombardment of towns northwest of Aleppo, Anadan and Haritan, brought several thousand more, according to a resident in the town of Azaz.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war with 2 million people, has been divided for years into rebel and government-held sections. The government wants to take full control, which would be its biggest prize yet in a war that has already killed at least 250,000 people and driven 11 million from their homes.

Rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo are still home to 350,000 people, and aid workers have said they could soon fall to the government.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was quoted at the weekend as saying Turkey was under threat, and Ankara has so far kept the border crossing there closed to most refugees.

There are now around 77,000 refugees taking shelter in camps on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday. He said that a worst-case scenario could see as many as 600,000 at Turkey’s border.

After around a week of heavy Russian air strikes, Syrian government troops and their allies broke through rebel defenses to reach two Shi’ite towns in northern Aleppo province on Wednesday, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “appalled” by the suffering of Aleppo, blaming primarily Russian bombing and suggesting it violated a U.N. Security Council resolution Moscow signed in December.

Kerem Kinik, Vice President of the Turkish Red Crescent, told reporters at the Oncupinar border crossing that Syrians were fleeing Russian strikes in panic. The closure of the road to Aleppo risked a much larger scale repeat of crises in Ghouta, a besieged Damascus suburb, or even Madaya, a blockaded town were residents have starved.

“The route to Aleppo is completely closed and this is a road that was feeding all the main arteries inside Syria. Unless this is reopened, you will see Aleppo falling day by day into a similar situation as in Madaya and Ghouta and you will see a deepening humanitarian crisis,” he said.

“They are hitting any vehicles that are on the move, they are hitting aid trucks,” he added. “We really urge that the Russian attacks on Azaz and Aleppo should stop, because if there is such a policy to clear this area of all human beings… then we may not be able to cope with the influx.”

SUPPLY LINE

The Syrian army’s success in opening a route to the Shi’ite towns of Nubul and Zahraa enabled it to cut a highway that linked rebel held areas in the northern countryside with the eastern part of Aleppo held by insurgents since 2012.

The latest gains by the Syrian government bring it to the closest point to the Turkish border since August 2013, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The capture of the towns of Mayer and then Kafin, just north of Nubul and Zahraa, in the past 24 hrs have opened the road toward Tal Rifaat, the next focus of the army assault. The capture of that would leave only the town of Azaz before the Turkish border itself.

The loss of Azaz, just a few miles from the Bab al Salama border crossing, would virtually wipe out insurgents from one of their main strongholds in northwest Syria, though they still control much of nearby Idlib province.

Russian bombing has for weeks targeted rebel routes to the main border crossing, once a major gateway from Europe and Turkey to the Gulf and Iraq, lately a lifeline for rebel-held areas in Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

The army’s advance has also been indirectly helped by Kurdish-led YPG fighters who control the city of Afrin, southwest of Azaz. They have seized a string of villages in recent days, rebels and the Observatory said.

In a multi-sided civil war that has drawn in global and regional powers, the Kurds are the strongest allies on the ground in Syria of a U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Turkey supports other rebel groups against Assad and is hostile to the Syrian Kurds, which it sees as allies of its own Kurdish separatists.

Russia joined the war last year with air strikes that it says are aimed at Islamic State, but which Turkey, Arab states and the West say are aimed mostly at other opponents of Assad.

Four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum Assad’s way. With Moscow’s help and allies including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army is regaining areas on key fronts in the west.

United Nations investigators called for new sanctions on Syrian officials as well as leaders of the two most hardline rebel groups, Islamic State and the Nusra Front, accusing the three of mass killings, torture and disappearances of civilians in custody.

Speaking in Ankara, Merkel, under fire at home over the refugee crisis, said Europe needed to follow up quickly on pledges of aid to help Turkey cope with the Syria exodus, and also urged Ankara to act fast to improve the situation for refugees.

(Additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Istanbul, Yesim Dikmen and Ercan Gurses in Ankara and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; writing by Suleiman al-Khalidi and Philippa Fletcher; editing by Peter Graff and Pravin Char)

German spy agency says ISIS sending fighters disguised as refugees

BERLIN (Reuters) – Islamic State militants have slipped into Europe disguised as refugees, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said on Friday, a day after security forces thwarted a potential IS attack in Berlin.

Hans-Georg Maassen said the terrorist attacks in Paris last November had shown that Islamic State was deliberately planting terrorists among the refugees flowing into Europe.

“Then we have repeatedly seen that terrorists … have slipped in camouflaged or disguised as refugees. This is a fact that the security agencies are facing,” Maassen told ZDF television.

“We are trying to recognize and identify whether there are still more IS fighters or terrorists from IS that have slipped in,” he added.

The Berliner Zeitung newspaper cited Maassen on Friday as saying that the BfV had received more than 100 tip-offs that there were Islamic State fighters among the refugees currently staying in Germany.

German fears about an attack have risen since the Paris killings. On Thursday, German forces arrested two men suspected of links to Islamic State militants preparing an attack in the German capital.

Authorities also canceled a friendly international soccer match in Hanover last year and closed stations in Munich at New Year due to security concerns.

Maassen, however, warned against alarm.

“We are in a serious situation and there is a high risk that there could be an attack. But the security agencies, the intelligence services and the police authorities are very alert and our goal is to minimize the risk as best we can,” he said.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Number of migrants registering in Germany falls markedly in January

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany registered 91,671 migrants in January, less than half November’s level, officials said on Thursday as pressure mounted on Chancellor Angela Merkel to deliver on her pledge to reduce the influx.

Support for Merkel has fallen sharply due to her open-door refugee policy, with a poll on Wednesday showing 81 percent of people think her government does not have the situation under control.

An Interior Ministry statement on the latest migrant tally gave no explanation for the notable drop in migrant arrivals, but it said previously that a downward trend seen since late last year was due mainly to freezing winter weather.

Germany has also reimposed spot controls on border points with Austria used by incoming migrants and is seeking to speed up deportations of those not qualifying for asylum.

Merkel has said the number of migrants entering Germany will fall after 1.1 million people arrived last year. Germany was the final destination for the vast majority of migrants who reached the European continent in 2015.

Public unease has grown since a wave of sexual assaults on women in Cologne at New Year that police say were carried out largely by young men of Arab and North African appearance.

The interior ministry said 91,671 people had registered on the so-called EASY system in January, more than double the number in the same month a year ago, although this was more than a third down from December and less than half of November’s total.

Among last month’s total, some 35,822 were from Syria and about 18,000 from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The EASY system records people in reception centers and then distributes them around the country based on each state’s population and tax revenues. Registration on this system is separate from officially applying for asylum.

The official number of asylum applications rose to 52,103 in January, about double the level in the same month last year and a 7.9 percent rise from December, said the ministry.

Some 1,623 people from Morocco were entered on the EASY system and the top-selling Bild daily cited government sources saying a basic agreement had been reached with North African countries about returning rejected asylum seekers there.

At the end of January, there was a backlog of some 371,754 asylum applications at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the interior ministry said on Thursday. That was around 7,000 more than at the end of December.

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers and Holger Hansen; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Billions pledged for Syria as tens of thousands flee bombardments

LONDON (Reuters) – Donor nations pledged on Thursday to give billions of dollars in aid to Syrians as world leaders gathered for a conference to tackle the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with Turkey reporting a new exodus of tens of thousands fleeing air strikes.

With Syria’s five-year-old civil war raging and another attempt at peace negotiations called off in Geneva after just a few days, the London conference aims to address the needs of some 6 million people displaced within Syria and more than 4 million refugees in other countries.

Underlining the desperate situation on the ground in Syria, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the meeting that tens of thousands of Syrians were on the move toward his country to escape aerial bombardments on the city of Aleppo.

“Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but on our border – how to relocate these new people coming from Syria?” he said. “Three hundred thousand people living in Aleppo are ready to move toward Turkey.”

Turkey is already hosting more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees. Jordan and Lebanon are the other countries bearing the brunt of the Syrian refugee exodus.

Several speakers said that while the situation of refugees was bad, that of Syrians trapped inside the country enduring bombardments, sieges and, in some places, starvation was far worse.

“With people reduced to eating grass and leaves and killing stray animals in order to survive on a day-to-day basis, that is something that should tear at the conscience of all civilized people and we all have a responsibility to respond to it,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the conference.

A U.N. envoy halted his attempts to conduct Syrian peace talks on Wednesday after the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, advanced against rebel forces north of Aleppo, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey to the city.

Kerry told the conference he had spoken to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov about the situation.

“We have agreed that we are engaged in a discussion about how to implement the ceasefire specifically as well as some immediate, possible confidence-building steps to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he said.

In a blunt attack on Russia, Turkey’s Davutoglu told a news conference that those supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were committing war crimes and called on the United States to adopt a more decisive stance against Russia.

EDUCATION, JOBS

United Nations agencies are appealing for $7.73 billion to cope with the Syrian emergency this year, and countries in the region are asking for an additional $1.2 billion.

Conference co-hosts Britain, Norway and Germany were the first to announce their pledges, followed by the United States, the European Union, Japan and other nations.

Britain and Norway promised an extra $1.76 billion and $1.17 billion respectively by 2020, while Germany said it would give $2.57 billion by 2018. The United States said its contribution this fiscal year would be $890 million.

The almost five-year-old conflict has killed an estimated 250,000 people and stoked the spread of Islamist militancy across the Middle East and North Africa.

For European nations, improving the humanitarian situation in Syria and neighboring countries is crucial to reducing incentives for Syrians to travel to Europe.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the first steps in the Geneva peace talks had been undermined by a lack of sufficient humanitarian access and by a sudden increase in aerial bombing and military activity on the ground.

“The coming days should be used to get back to the table, not to secure more gains on the battlefield,” he said.

The conference will focus particularly on the need to provide an education for displaced Syrian children and job opportunities for adults, reflecting growing recognition that the fallout from the Syrian war will be very long-term.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke and Arshad Mohammed, writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Raissa Kasolowsky)

U.S. rejects 30 Syrian refugees amid tightened security

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has recently rejected 30 Syrians out of thousands seeking to enter the country, Obama administration officials told a congressional panel on Wednesday, as the United States tightens vetting of immigrants and other visitors following attacks in California and Paris.

In addition, hundreds of applications from Syrian refugees have been put on hold and many might ultimately be rejected, Leon Rodriguez, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services unit of the Department of Homeland Security, told the committee.

A spokesman for Rodriguez later said that the 30 Syrian refugee applications had been rejected over the last 16 months.

At a time when millions of refugees are arriving in Europe and elsewhere from the Middle East and Africa, Democratic President Barack Obama’s pledge to take in 10,000 people fleeing war-torn Syria has come under fire, especially from Republicans. The United States so far has admitted 2,000 refugees.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said at a hearing that authorities have identified about 40 violent militants who had attempted to enter Europe posing as refugees.

Other committee Republicans at the hearing questioned why the Obama administration wanted to admit any Syrian refugees, given that the Syria-based Islamic State movement has pledged to attack the United States and other western countries.

“Our intelligence community has … told me that individuals with terrorism ties in Syria have already tried to gain access to our country through the refugee program,” McCaul said.

“What’s even more concerning is that top officials have testified before this committee that intelligence gaps prevent us from being able to confidently weed out terrorists,” he said.

Rodriguez and other Homeland Security and State Department officials told the committee that U.S. procedures for vetting Syrian refugees were among the most rigorous in the world.

U.S. agencies have tightened procedures for checking backgrounds of would-be U.S. immigrants and visitors after a recent arrival from the Middle East was one of two shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

Francis Taylor, the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence chief, said his department was routinely doing social media checks on would-be immigrants and visitors.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Lisa Shumaker)

Differences in Islam play role in refugee crisis, says UK ex-foreign minister

LONDON (Reuters) – Civil wars crippling many Muslim states and fueling a global refugee crisis are driven in part by major struggles within Islam that cannot be ignored, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Wednesday.

This “implosion” in about two dozen Muslim-majority countries has forced people from their homes in “unheard-of” numbers, Miliband, now head of the New York-based humanitarian group International Rescue Committee, said in a speech.

Miliband spoke at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House in London, where he will take part in a major conference on Thursday that aims to raise billions of dollars from donors to respond to the Syrian crisis.

“More people are fleeing conflict, they’re fleeing conflict significantly in Muslim-majority countries, so the implosion in the Islamic world, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, is driving it,” he said.

Venturing into what he called “tricky territory”, he added it would be dishonest not to report that his organization’s work was increasingly focused on crises in Muslim-majority countries.

“It seems to me there are big questions, big debates happening within Islam about the reconciliation of Islam to modernity, to democracy, of different segments within the Islamic tradition,” he said.

“To pretend that that’s not part of the story wouldn’t be right,” he added, without elaborating.

In several war-torn countries, militant Sunni literalists such as the Taliban and Islamic State are battling other Muslims who want the faith more adapted to the modern world or belong to a minority sect such as Shi’ism.

Miliband added his analysis did not apply to the whole of the Muslim world, citing Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, and Bangladesh as two examples of countries that did not fit into the narrative.

“It’s not right to pretend that all Muslim-majority countries are undergoing this implosion,” he said. “But I think if you look at the story in South Asia over the last 30 years and the story in the Middle East over the last 20 years, then that’s part of the story.”

Miliband said the Syrian crisis was a long-term issue, with large numbers of refugees likely to be living in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and other countries for many years, and this called for a change in the scale and nature of the response.

Refugees were increasingly living in urban areas, he said, where the fact they are not separate from the general population creates new demands very different from those of refugee camps.

Dozens of heads of state and government are due to attend the London pledging conference.

The United Nations estimates that $7.73 billion is needed to meet Syrian humanitarian needs this year, with an additional $1.2 billion required by countries in the region.

(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Trying to stem refugee influx, Sweden asks: When is a child not a child?

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Under huge strain from an influx of unaccompanied children seeking asylum, the Swedish government faces political pressure to undertake medical tests like X-rays to vet the age of young refugees despite opposition from doctors and lawyers.

The controversy reflects tensions over surging immigration into the Nordic country of 10 million after a public backlash that saw controls reimposed on the border with Denmark, from which most migrants have entered Sweden.

Sweden took in 163,000 asylum seekers last year, the most per capita in Europe. They were among more than one million who streamed into the continent, fleeing increasing conflict and deprivation in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

More than a fifth, 35,000, of those reaching Sweden have been unaccompanied children, stretching services like schools.

Reports of violence and assaults at centers for minors have added to the public disquiet and hardened anti-immigrant sentiment in a country long renowned for its humanitarian open-door policy toward the wretched of the earth.

Many have arrived without IDs, leaving Sweden the task of checking their real ages to ensure adults – defined as age 18 or over – were not pretending to be minors to secure asylum.

Worried young adults may be swelling these ranks, many of Sweden’s opposition parties are calling for medical tests. Even the government has called for more non-medical testing while it awaits reform proposals in April to break the deadlock.

There is a great incentive to claim to be a minor. Applicants have greater access to housing and schools and less chance of being deported.

“At the moment, very few, if any, age assessments are being done in Sweden,” Fredrik Beijer, Director of Legal Affairs of Sweden’s Migration Agency, told Reuters.

Efforts to confirm ages have been hampered by the inability of authorities to carry out medical tests – such as X-rays of teeth and hands. The government said in November it wanted medical tests. But while such tests are not illegal, doctors have refused, saying they are inaccurate.

“We believe that for a decision that has such large consequences in an individual’s life, one must require higher precision,” said Anders Hjern, a spokesman for the Swedish Paediatric Society.

But doubts have not stopped the center right Moderates, Sweden’s biggest opposition party, calling on the migration agency to hire doctors for medical checks in an effort to lower the number of children arriving without families.

“Unaccompanied minors make up around 20 percent of asylum seekers but they cost about half the migration budget,” said Hanif Bali, an Iranian-born lawmaker for the Moderates. Bali himself came to Sweden as an unaccompanied minor at age three.

“Out of my own experience, because I have lived in these kinds of homes, the environment becomes much harsher when you have older people there. You get prison rules and many children get caught up in the older people’s trouble-making.”

Many other European Union countries do carry out medical tests. Austria, for example, allows doctors to do “age determination reports” that include checks on teeth as well as genital development. In Italy, medical-age assessments, such as X-rays, can be carried out by court order.

SWEDEN SHOCKED BY ASSAULTS

The issue of refugee minors is especially sensitive in Sweden. Reports of assaults in overcrowded minors’ centers – including a 22-year-old female Swedish employee of one center who was stabbed to death last week – have contributed to a sense authorities are overwhelmed.

“The risk of disputes and discontent is obvious, and some small detail may trigger conflict,” said Thomas Svensson, head of social affairs for the Emmaboda municipality in southeastern Sweden, where staff at a home for unaccompanied minors locked themselves in a room as 19 migrant youths rioted.

The influx of minors also carries big fiscal costs. Sweden last year had to find an extra 70,000 school places due to asylum seekers, on top of the 100,000 pupils that normally enter the school system for the first time in any given year.

Half of unaccompanied minors have been registered as between 16 and 17, often making age confirmation difficult and sparking accusations from the likes of the far-right Sweden Democrats – the third biggest party in parliament – that adults are taking advantage of soft controls to enter the country.

Even without medical tests, some 667 minors had their age “adjusted” between January and November last year, according to the justice ministry. The data does not show if it was adjusted to above 18. That compares to 363 cases for all 2014.

Proud of Sweden’s decades-old tradition as a self-proclaimed “humanitarian superpower”, the government regards most refugee minors as bona fide refugees fleeing war.

Immigration supporters say Swedes have been unduly influenced by a media frenzy linking migrants with crime that has little to do with reality. For example, despite reports of refugees being associated with sexual assaults, reported rapes fell 12 percent last year in Sweden. Thefts were down 2 percent.

The debate is part of a crisis that has cut center-left Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s support to record lows in polls due to a popular sense that his government is largely helpless to stop a migrant influx seen as threatening Sweden’s generous welfare state and vaunted social stability.

In a sign of mounting political frustration, Migration Minister Morgan Johansson called on Sunday for the migration agency to carry out more non-medical tests, such as interviews with children.

(Additional reporting by Johan Ahlander and Johan Sennero in Stockholm, Shadia Nasralla in Vienna and Steve Scherer in Rome; Editing by Mark Heinrich)