Reuters, 17 October 2012 – The number of Syrian refugees housed in camps in southern Turkey has risen to 101, 834, the Turkish Disaster Management Agency (AFAD) said on Wednesday (October 16), in a written statement posted on its website.

The number of refugees reached a level beyond which Ankara had previously said it would struggle to accommodate any more.

Turkey, which has taken on an increasingly leading role in international opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has already called for the United Nations to build refugee camps in a safe zone within Syria’s borders but the plan met with little enthusiasm from world powers.

Syrian refugees continued to flow into Turkey on Wednesday (October 16) morning as dozens of families crossed the border through the Cilvegozu crossing across Syria’s Bab al-Hawa gate.

One of them, Mohammad, asked the world to put pressure on Syrian administration to stop the ongoing violence.

“We just want to stop the fighting and plane attacks against civilians. If people really care they should ask the regime to put an end to air assaults. What is happening in Syria is unbelievable.
People don’t realize that one day what’s happening there and all those killing might happen to them as well,” Mohammad said.

More than 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict which started out as a popular uprising against four decades of Assad family rule then descended into civil war.