Syrians in Turkey do not have official refugee status. For this reason, their conditions do not comply with international standards of protection. About 1,000 Syrians are temporarily protected every day. Asylum expert Yavcan says more than 3.5 million Syrians are protected. This status gives them the right to education and health care. In 2016, Ankara and Brussels signed a refugee agreement, which aims to stem the flow of illegal entry into the EU via Turkey. Now both sides are unhappy with the agreement, but a revision seems difficult. On 20 March 2016, a formal agreement between the EU and Turkey to deal with the migration crisis came into force. The agreement is expected to limit the influx of irregular migrants entering the EU via Turkey.
A key aspect of the agreement is the return to Ankara, the Turkish capital, of irregular migrants, who are found to have entered the EU via Turkey without having already been the subject of a formal asylum application procedure. Those who have bypassed the asylum procedure in Turkey would be returned and placed at the end of the application line. As part of the agreement, Syrian refugees are exchanged between Turkey and EU countries. The agreement provides for the EU to send back to Turkey all Syrians who arrived illegally on the Greek islands after 20 March 2016. In exchange, legal Syrian refugees are admitted to the EU. “It has certainly stemmed the influx of migrants across the Aegean Sea,” Amnesty International wrote, “but at a considerable cost to Europe`s commitment to upholding the fundamental principles of refugee protection and the lives of the tens of thousands of people it has captured on the Greek islands.” According to the UN Refugee Agency, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world: nearly 4.1 million, including 3.7 million Syrians and nearly 400,000 asylum seekers and refugees of other nationalities. Damascus and Moscow say the military operation aims to remove “terrorists” from the region, in accordance with a 2018 de-escalation agreement between Russia, Iran and Turkey. The number of asylum seekers returned to Turkey as a “safe country” under the agreement was negligible, so thousands of Syrian refugees are on hold in Greece. The result has been a high overcrowding in hotspots like Moira, where 19,000 asylum seekers are placed in centres for 3,000.
Aksoy said that if the situation in northwestern Syria were to be concealed, the risk of a massive influx of refugees at the Turkish border would continue to rise.
