In news from the Middle East, tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing an Assad offensive on the city of Aleppo are massed at the Syria-Turkey border. Turkey has closed this section of the border, leaving tens of thousands of Syrians stranded. There are already 2.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey. The Assad offensive on Aleppo is backed by Russian airstrikes. Russia says its airstrikes have hit about 1,900 targets in Syria—including in Aleppo—within the last week alone. On Wednesday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused the Assad government and Russian military of carrying out a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Aleppo.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu: “We should all accept refugees, but these attacks are also intended to bring about a kind of ethnic cleansing in Syria, so that all people who don’t support the Syrian regime, they are driven out of the country. It’s a systematic ethnic cleansing.”