Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has said that out of more than 3 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, 729,000 of them do not live at their registered addresses, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Yerlikaya, who spoke at an event on human rights at ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters in Ankara on Monday, said ministry officials were not able to locate the 729,000 Syrians at their registered addresses, adding that they have been warned in Turkish, Arabic and English to update their addresses within 90 days and were then allowed an additional 60 days. The minister said as long as these people do not update their addresses, they will not be able to benefit from public services including education and healthcare.
Yerlikaya’s statement came in the wake of a recent scandal when foreigners, two military school students from Kyrgyzstan, turned out to have been registered as temporary residents of an apartment in Ankara belonging to him without his knowledge. The incident, revealed by a journalist from the T24 news website, was later confirmed by the country’s migration authority.
An investigation has been launched into the incident, which has cast more doubt over Turkey’s registration system of migrants and efforts aimed at curbing illegal migration, by the interior ministry.
Yerlikaya also denied claims that his government was not taking sufficient action to stop illegal migration into the country, saying that more than 4 million people in Syria’s north, where the Turkish military is conducting military operations against Kurdish groups, have been stopped before they made their way to Turkey.
According to the minister, there are 4,437,000 regular migrants in Turkey and 3,103,000 are Syrian refugees who have temporary protection status.
Yerlikaya said 1,109,000 of the Syrian refugees have residence permits, while 224,000 of them are under international protection, adding that exaggerated figures are just a “loss of reason.”
The exact number of refugees in Turkey has long been a matter of debate, with critics of the AKP claiming that the number of refugees is much higher than the official figures.
They criticize the AKP government and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for pursuing an open-door policy for refugees and allowing them into the country without any controls in place.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees worldwide: some 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees along with close to 320,000 persons of concern from other nationalities.