EU governments threatened sanctions against Turkey on Friday over its offensive in Syria, angrily rejecting President Tayyip Erdogan’s warning that he would “open the gates” and send 3.6 million refugees to Europe if they did not back him.
Turkey has stepped up its air and artillery strikes on Kurdish militia in northeast Syria, escalating an offensive that has drawn warnings of a humanitarian disaster and also raised the prospect of new US sanctions on Ankara.
The European Union, which Turkey still formally aspires to join despite its growing criticism of Ankara’s human rights record, had already condemned the Turkish offensive but has been infuriated by Erdogan’s threats to send refugees to Europe.
“We will never accept that refugees are weaponised and used to blackmail us,” European Council President Donald Tusk, who chairs EU summits, said on Twitter. “President Erdogan’s threats … are totally out of place.”
Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also accused Erdogan of blackmail and said the military operation should immediately end.
France proposed economic sanctions on Turkey, a Nato ally, while Sweden’s parliament demanded an EU arms embargo.
A senior EU official said the European Union was spending 6 billion euros ($6.63 billion) on supporting the Syrian refugees currently living in camps inside Turkey, adding that “to use this as leverage is totally unacceptable”.
Ankara says the aim of its assault in Syria is to defeat the Kurdish YPG militia, which it sees as linked to militant Kurdish separatists in Turkey. It says it wants to create a “safe zone” to return millions of refugees to Syrian soil and that Europe should pay for it, a plan the EU has rejected outright.
