Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country would set up a safe area between Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad (northern Syria) if it did not find support from other parties, waving the immigrants' paper again to the Europeans.
Erdogan said in a speech to a crowd of a sports club in Istanbul that his country would establish in the safe area a shelter that meets all the needs of Syrian refugees.
He warned that if the so-called terrorists did not withdraw from northern Syria at the end of the 150-hour deadline, his country would take over, clearing the region of them.
Ankara halted its military operation "Spring of Peace" last week under a US-brokered ceasefire. Erdogan then negotiated an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin under which Syrian border guards and Russian military police began to drive the YPG from the Syrian-Turkish border for about 30 kilometers within 150 hours.
Erdogan said: What we expect from the international community is to respect our firmness with regard to the security of our borders, and support our projects on the return of Syrians in our country.
He stressed that Turkey would have no choice but to open its borders for Syrian refugees to move to Europe if the projects it had developed to secure the return of between one and two million Syrians out of about three and a half million residing in Turkey were not supported.
In response to reports of human rights violations by Turkey against Syrians, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday that his country would not tolerate any violations in northeastern Syria.
At a joint news conference with his German counterpart Haiku Mas, Ihsanoglu said Turkey was providing humanitarian aid to civilians in the region, but added that his country considered Germany's proposal for a "safe" international zone in northeastern Syria "unrealistic."