Meeting with the foreign ministers of countries bordering Syria on Sept. 4 in Geneva, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stated, “The number of Syrians in Turkey was around 50,000 last year, [and now that] number has reached 500,000 this year.” 

The fact is, though, that there were at the least more than 130,000 Syrians living in the makeshift camps on the border even a year ago, and the Turkish government has been denying full access to these border camps to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which prevented the international community to fully come on board in helping the Turkish government in sharing the burden of taking care of these people. Davutoglu complained that the international community’s support has remained at minimum. 

“We have agreed to establish a joint working group regarding the activities to be held with a view to creating global awareness and increasing this support,” he said. The reason Turkey did not allow full access to UNHCR and other reputable international non-governmental organizations was that the Ankara government was concerned about espionage as well as the safety of the refugees.

The international community could not fully collaborate with Turkey when it was not possible for it to be able to thoroughly check where and how its aid funds were spent. Moreover, Turkey had declared with great pride at the beginning that it has the necessary means to take care of these Syrians. Troublingly enough, there have been allegations that the Syrian opposition used these camps as training schools for their fighters, and that they were free to leave the camps to fight against Syrian regime forces and return to safety there, a practice totally against any norms of international refugee camps.