According to the Greek government, only four percent of the alleged refugees who violated the Greek border in recent days are Syrians.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he opens his borders with Europe in response to the threat of a new wave of refugees from Syria – despite the fact that his reason for invading the north of the country was supposedly to create a safe zone for Syrian refugees into which would be populated.
However, the Greek government reports that only a small minority of migrants who have violated the borders since Erdogan “opened the gates” are from Syria – and even then many of them are said to be people who have long settled in Turkey, not new migrants fleeing the fighting between Turkey and the Syrian government.
The vast majority of migrants detained in Greece, the government claims, are actually Afghans, accounting for 64 percent of the total.
Almost a fifth of the detainees are migrants from Pakistan (19 percent), and in third place are migrants from Turkey itself (5 percent).
Syrians are said to be in fourth place – only 4%, followed by Somali migrants – 2.6%, with migrants from Asia and Africa, including Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Morocco, Bangladesh and Egypt, accounting for a total of 5.4%.
The Turkish government, however, disputes the figures of the Greek government, suggesting that more than one hundred thousand migrants arrived in Europe, and not just a few hundred, as the Greeks suggest.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis insists that “Europe will not be blackmailed by Turkey” and that his government has “every right to defend our sovereign borders”, which is also part of the common external border of the borderless Schengen zone of the European Union.