Turkey to raise refugee crisis before U.N.

• Tweet

DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- Turkish officials said the issue of the growing number of Syrians fleeing to Turkey will be raised before the U.N. Security Council.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkish officials would ask the Security Council to assess the matter as an "international crisis," Today's Zaman reported.

The U.N. Security Council is to meet Aug. 30.

Nearly 70,000 Syrians have fled to Turkey since March 2011 when pro-democracy demonstrations against the government of Bashar Assad began, Davutoglu said. If the number of refugees grows, Turkey may not be able to respond, he said.

"If the number of refugees in Turkey surpasses 100,000, we will run out of space to accommodate them," he said. "We should be able to accommodate them in Syria. The United Nations may build camps in a safe zone within Syria's borders."

Davutoglu said the refugee numbers elevated the issue to an international crisis urged the United Nations to find a solution, Today's Zaman said.

Turkey prefers to avoid military confrontation with Syria but signaled that large numbers of refugees or massacres by Syrian government troops could force it to act, officials said.

Russia said Syria doesn't have any Russian-made chemical weapons in its stockpile, RIA Novosti reported.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday Syria's chemical weapons would be a "red line" that would shift the U.S. position on military intervention into the Syrian conflict.

"Syria is one of the countries that did not sign the chemical weapons convention ... As far as I know, no Russian-made chemical weapons have ever been supplied to Syria," Deputy Director of the Federal Agency for Safe Storage and Destruction of Chemical Weapons Col. Vladimir Mandych said Tuesday.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in July the country may use chemical weapons against a possible foreign military intervention.

Members of the Syrian opposition said the United States failed to deliver promised communications and other equipment for supporters of Assad's overthrow.

Opposition activists say they smuggled satellite receivers and other equipment on their own partially because they haven't gotten significant amount of the gear from the United States, The Washington Post reported.

The Obama administration said it spent millions of dollars on non-lethal aid and provided about 900 satellite phones and other equipment to the Syrian opposition.

"Our groups have not received anything from the U.S. side," Imad Eddin al-Rachid, a former assistant dean at the Islamic Law College in Damascus, told the Post. He met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top U.S. officials in Turkey in recent months.

Rick Barton, assistant secretary of state overseeing the program said it was "fair to say that it's very much a work in progress. ... We are moving as aggressively as possible now that we have cleared many of the cobwebs in our own system and with our allies."

Activist organizations said more than 13,000 people have died in protest-related violence since March 2011.