At least 13,000 people gathered on Turkey’s land border with Greece, the United Nations migration organization said on Sunday.
This came after Turkey officially declared its western borders were open to migrants and refugees hoping to head into the European Union.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration said that by the previous evening, its staff working along the land border “had observed at least 13,000 people gathered at the formal border crossing points at Pazarkule and Ipsala and multiple informal border crossings, in groups of between several dozen and more than 3,000.”
Turkey's decision to open the borders with Greece came amid a military escalation in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province that has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians to flee fighting there, with many of them heading toward north toward Turkey, The Associated Press reported.
Greek authorities fired tear gas and stun grenades through Saturday to prevent repeated attempts by a crowd of more than 4,000 people who gathered at the border crossing in Kastanies to cross, and fought a cat-and-mouse game with groups cutting holes in a border fence along the border to crawl through.
"Yesterday there were 9,600 attempts to violate our borders, and all were dealt with successfully," deputy defence minister Alkiviadis Stefanis told Greece's Skai TV.
"Not only are they not stopping them, but they are helping them," Stefanis added, Reuters reported.
At least three dinghies carrying migrants arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos Sunday morning.
Greece was a gateway for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers into Europe in 2015 and 2016. There are already more than 40,000 migrants on the Aegean islands, living in severely overcrowded camps and filthy conditions.
For his part, Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi told Greece's Ant1 TV said: "We don't want this influx in our country, this country is not a free-for-all."
"They are all Afghans, no Syrians," one army officer said.
"Are these the Syrians, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was talking about?"
