Europe is braced for three million migrants streaming out of Syria to flee a devastating new air and ground offensive by Russia and the Assad regime.
Russian warships fired 26 cruise missiles yesterday from the Caspian Sea into Syria as President Assad’s ground troops launched an all-out assault on the rebels. The missiles, the first to be used by Russia in a war, travelled 900 miles over Iranian and Iraqi airspace before hitting targets in northern Syria.
Both Brussels and Turkey have warned that President Putin’s deepening involvement in the four-and-a-half-year Syrian conflict will provoke a new exodus of refugees. Donald Tusk, president of the EU Council, has now warned MEPs that “according to Turkish estimates, another three million potential refugees may come from Aleppo and its neighbourhood”.
Two million Syrians have already fled the country’s catastrophic civil war into Turkey, with hundreds of thousands then walking from there into Europe. According to the first survey conducted among Syrian refugees in Germany, most had been driven out of the country by Assad’s scorched-earth tactics, and only a minority had fled from Isis jihadists.
Amid Europe’s worst migrant crisis since the Second World War, Brussels is drawing up new plans — reported by The Times yesterday — to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers. The EU will threaten African states with the withdrawal of aid and trade deals if they refuse to take back their citizens.
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Moscow claimed yesterday that its new cruise missile was accurate to within nine feet and was aimed at Isis strongholds. Under the cover of the Russian air force, Assad’s troops launched an offensive designed to cut through rebel-held territory that was encroaching on one of the regime’s last redoubts. The attack was also co-ordinated with Hezbollah militias backed by Iran.
The Assad regime has repeatedly used barrel bombs packed with explosives and shrapnel to clear civilian populations from regions that support the rebels. Assad’s air force has also used chemical weapons against cities opposing him.
Aleppo, Syria’s second city, has been bitterly fought over by all sides in the complex conflict. Both regime bombers and Russian cruise missiles were in action over the skies of Aleppo province yesterday.
Theresa May, the home secretary, repeated the European Union threats at the Conservative party conference yesterday, saying that Britain would impose visa restrictions on countries that did not take back their citizens.
Her plans mark a tougher approach to refugees and illegal migrants in Britain and form part of her “retaliatory” action against overseas nations whose citizens were rejected for asylum in Britain.
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Mrs May’s approach is aimed at countries that deny the nationality of their citizens when they have either destroyed or lost travel documents, including passports. She will insist that in the absence of a passport they recognise biometric visas issued to people who travel to Britain legitimately and then claim asylum when the travel document expires.
The carrot-and-stick approach is expected to form part of the government’s new asylum strategy, which ministers hope to publish next year.
European-wide deportation plans are expected to come unstuck in Italy, the country often used by migrants as a launchpad to reach northern Europe, officials in Rome have warned.
The scheme will hinge on taking migrants’ fingerprints when they land and locking up those who refuse, before sending them home. Detention facilities are often full in Italy, meaning that migrants are freed, and officials fear that they will frequently refuse to be identified.
“The Syrians and the Eritreans don’t want to be identified and it can get difficult,” an immigration officer said. “If you have to physically compel someone to give prints, the prints can be messy and unusable.”
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Among the 130,000 migrants and refugees arriving on Italian shores this year many have declined to be identified, knowing that because of European rules they will then be compelled to claim asylum there. Instead, many try to reach relatives in Germany, Britain or Sweden. Britain has nervously watched the migrant crisis unfold in the EU.
Alongside anxieties about the logistical problems of processing migrants, the cost of housing and caring for them, and the possible risk to national security of hosting unidentified refugees, Whitehall is also aware of the violence that is breaking out between migrants of different nationalities who have reached Germany.
Police in Germany accused the authorities yesterday of playing down reports of violence at refugee shelters, including rape, over fears of provoking retaliation against asylum seekers.