Almost four million mainly Syrian refugees have arrived in Turkey since the outbreak of war in their country in 2011. Speaking to the Italian news agency ANSA on Wednesday (November 8), the EU's Ambassador to Turkey Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, acknowledged that, "Ankara is doing a lot and we want to support these actions. The European Commission proposed to the European Council to continue this funding."

Since 2016, the EU has been providing funding to Turkey under the EU-Turkey deal. The deal provides that the Turkish authorities continue to maintain closed borders for migrants wishing to enter Europe without the correct papers, in exchange for funds from Brussels to support the large community of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Agreement working

The agreement has stood the test of time for over seven years, with only one significant crisis in 2020 when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked for additional EU funding, and, when he did not receive an immediate answer, he threatened Brussels by opening the land borders between Turkey and Greece for a couple of weeks.

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"At first the funding was for €6 billion, then in 2021 the European Commission added €3 billion, between 2021 and 2023, and now we are about to reach the end of this contractualization of these €3 billion. We already spent over €5 billion of the initial 6," explained Meyer-Landrut during a trip to the southeast of Anatolia, where he visited some refugee facilities in Sanliurfa which are funded by Brussels.

The EU Ambassador in Ankara visited a medical center funded by the EU where refugees can receive medical assistance without the problem of having to face a language barrier. The doctors speak Arabic or are themselves Syrians who escaped the war, and who work at the facility after having left their country.

In another neighborhood of the city, Meyer-Landrut instead visited an elementary school that receives EU funds for the education of Syrian students, with the aim of including them in the education system, also with special lessons in the Turkish language which children learn without too much difficulty.

The highest concentration of Syrians is in Istanbul

With over 300,000 refugees, Sanliurfa is the third province in terms of the number of refugees in Turkey, after Istanbul, where over half a million Syrians live, and Gaziantep with 434,000.

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The city is only a few kilometers from the border with Syria and refugees are approximately 15% of the population in the province. "Local authorities work and are interested in finding what they call social harmony; this means that the Turks and the population of Syrian origin live together peacefully and I believe this to be very important," underscored the EU Ambassador in Ankara.

Following the agreement in 2016, the EU funding was primarily directed toward Syrians, but in the years after other nationalities were also able to benefit from this funding, which now covers around 4.6 million people.

"I believe that at the local level in the provinces which were most hit by the flows of Syrian migrants, it is recognized that European support helps the population and society to face the migration phenomenon. Of course, there was also some criticism, particularly at the beginning, concerning the fact that the aid was not enough or that it had not been given immediately, but today there is the acknowledgment that the EU's support is important," noted Ambassador Meyer-Landrut.

"There is a mutual interest between Turkey and the EU to stabilize the situation. I follow with interest what is being done concretely to support this population to continue to live in harmony with the local population. Turkey is doing something exceptional," he concluded.