UN reports that 70,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees entered Turkey in 24 hours, running from ISIS

This story is dominating the refugee news from Syria today.  Heck, the whole Middle East could fall under Obama’s watch.

September 20, 2014: Turkish soldiers stand guard as Syrian refugees gather at the border in Suruc, Turkey.(AP Photo)

From Fox News:

The number of refugees seeking shelter in Turkey from the Islamic State group’s advance across northeastern Syria has hit 100,000, Turkey said Sunday as clashes broke out on the border between Turkish security guards and Kurds.

The head of Turkey’s AFAD disaster management agency, Fuat Oktay, said the figure relates to Syrians escaping the area near the Syrian border town Kobani, where fighting has raged between IS and Kurdish fighters since Thursday.

The U.N. refugee agency earlier Sunday said some 70,000 Syrians have crossed into Turkey in the past 24 hours, and that it was preparing for the arrival of hundreds of thousands more.

The Syrian refugees — most of them ethnic Kurds — have been desperate to reach Turkey and escape the advance of religious extremists barreling across Syria.

On Sunday, heavy clashes broke out between the Islamic State group and Kurdish fighters only a few miles from Kobani, which is also known as Ayn Arab.

The Islamic State group was bombarding villagers with tanks, artillery and multiple rocket launchers, said Nasser Haj Mansour, an official at the defense office in Syria’s Kurdish.

“They are even targeting civilians who are fleeing,” Haj Mansour told The Associated Press by telephone.

As refugees flooded in, Turkey closed the border crossing in Kucuk Kendirciler, a small village about a mile from Kobani, to Turkish Kurds, with local police saying they were seeking to prevent Kurdish fighters from entering Syria.

Clashes broke out as Kurds trying to approach the crossing from inside Turkey scuffled with security forces, which attacked crowds with tear gas, paint pellets, and water. The state-run Anadolu Agency reported Kurdish protesters had hurled stones at the security forces.

There is more…..

Note to US State Department—-this does not mean we need to bring them to America!

Maine election-year battle over welfare for asylum seekers on-going

We have reported on the problem in Maine for months (years!).  The gist of it is that Maine has had a wonderland of welfare for immigrants (that is what brought the first Somalis to Lewiston years ago) and now the LePage Administration is trying to cut back social services to asylum seekers.  (The federal government does not give welfare to asylum seekers until they have become legitimate legal refugees.)

Apparently the word got out throughout Africa and elsewhere—get to Maine and you can get social services while you wait for your asylum application to be processed.  So they came.

For new readers, asylum seekers get into the US on their own (visa overstays etc.) and then apply for asylum (claiming to be persecuted at home).  If granted asylum they become “refugees” in the full sense of the word and get federal taxpayer goodies and help from a federal resettlement contractor.   But, thanks to the border crashers an already over full asylum court can’t get to cases for years.

Here is a bit of the story at CentralMaine.com, but you should read the whole thing (of course it starts out with a sympathetic ‘star’ of the story, Journalism 101?).  They are all “vulnerable” you know! (but aren’t there Americans who are vulnerable as well?).

Once vulnerable in their homelands, Maine’s asylum seekers, in growing numbers, are left waiting – for permission to work, for their status to change and, now, to see if looming welfare reforms will make them vulnerable all over again.

[….]

Thousands of people from war-torn or politically troubled nations in sub-Saharan Africa have arrived in Maine in recent years on their own with visas that allow them to visit, work or study on a temporary basis, only to seek asylum so they can stay permanently. Asylum applicants wait in a fuzzy legal status in which they are considered to be undocumented but protected from deportation. And at the same time they are prohibited by federal law from working for at least six months – and sometimes much longer.

Meanwhile, the wait for asylum can take years, with a nationwide backlog of applications that is expected to grow because of the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border in recent months.

Read it all.

Moral of the story—if your state gives generous welfare benefits to asylum seekers, they will come.

See our entire Maine archive, here.  Or narrow your search and put ‘Lewiston Maine’ or ‘Portland Maine’ into our search window.

Soul-searching in Scandinavia over Syrian refugees

Wow!  This is a very enlightening piece.  And, it’s in the New York Times no less!

Stockholm under siege in May 2013 as Muslim migrants riot. http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/452746/fourth-night-fires-unrest-stockholm.jpg?w=480&h=270

Swedish counter-terrorism expert:

We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”

Seems that as Sweden opens its doors to Syrians (and the public is expected to stay quiet), in Norway the government is not going to swing its doors open and the “anti-immigrant” political forces are encouraged to discuss their concerns and fears about excessive immigration.  (I wonder did Anders Breivik have something to do with the new-found openness?)

From The New York Times (emphasis is mine):

 THE narrow victory of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party in Sweden’s elections last Sunday marked a broad shift in its politics. But a new coalition government is unlikely to reconsider one of the country’s most challenging policies: its response to the Syrian civil war.

Sweden has taken an open-door approach to people fleeing the conflict, accepting more Syrians than any other European country.

Never mind that Sweden has double-digit youth unemployment. That there have been riots in immigrant neighborhoods in Stockholm. That there is a severe housing shortage for new arrivals. Or that the Swedish Migration Board, which handles asylum seekers, needs a drastic budget increase — almost $7 billion — to cover soaring costs over the next few years.

And never mind that the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats won 13 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, their best showing ever. They more than doubled their seats in Parliament — from 20 to 49 — and are now the third-biggest party in the country.

“We are the moral guardians of the world,” Magnus Ranstorp, a specialist in counterterrorism at the Swedish National Defense College, told me a few days before the election, referring to Swedes. “We haven’t fought a war in 200 years. We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”

As the Syrian conflict has turned into a regional humanitarian crisis, more European countries are accepting Syrian refugees preselected by the United Nations. But apart from Germany, a much larger country, only Sweden is welcoming tens of thousands of Syrians who come on their own and request asylum.

Some 40,000 Syrians have arrived in Sweden since the conflict began. And following a decision to offer permanent residency to all Syrians, Sweden is expecting more than 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014, many of them from Syria.

In its largess, Sweden diverges from countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark, which have taken in far fewer Syrian asylum-seekers — generally granting them only temporary residency — and just several hundred United Nations-sponsored refugees each. Even more dramatic is the contrast with Norway……

There is much much more, read it all.

All of our posts on Sweden (chronicling its death spiral) are here.

Watch for it!  We are going to learn that open borders in a welfare state will result in chaos and ultimately death for the country.

Reminder!  The US is about to welcome tens of thousands of Syrians!

Israel could be overrun by refugees says professor

If ISIS moves on parts of Jordan, Professor Arnon Soffer, sees the real possibility that Israel could be overrun.

Professor Arnon Soffer: Israel must prepare for demographic turmoil.

From the San Diego Jewish World:

HAIFA (Press Release) — “In a region of collapsing countries that are in states of internal and external war, Israel must prepare for waves of immigrants from Arab countries to its territory, which may endanger its existence,” maintain Prof. Arnon Soffer, who holds the Reuven Chaikin Chair in Geostrategy, University of Haifa, and Dr. Anton Berkovsky, in a new article by the Chair. According to Soffer and Dr. Berkovsky, waves of immigrants already constitute a real danger to the future of Jordan, and the worst-case scenario would be if ISIS gained control of territories in Jordan and added them to its caphilate.

According to the data presented in the article, 2013 showed a global record of immigrants in the world of more than 232 million people, who constitute about 3.2 percent of the world’s population. However, according to Soffer, the picture in the Middle East is particularly clear: “We have a globally unique demographic event occurring. The population of the region doubled within 30 years (1950-1980), and doubled itself again within the 30 years following that. That is one of the main reasons why the Middle East has entered a demographic, economic and political spiral, resulting in disorder and instability.”

Read it all.

See our category ‘Israel and refugees’ for more information.

Report from Malta: Most of the hundreds who drowned trying to reach Europe last week were Palestinians

They were pretending to be Syrians. 

And, of course their deaths will be blamed on Israel.  We wrote about this sinking incident here yesterday.

Sure looks like US taxpayers helped fund their voyage. The US is the top donor of UNRWA (the special UN agency just for Palestinians).

Just one of many maps showing migration routes to Europe. http://www.stratint.nl/2013/08/migration-routes-europe.html

 

Many paragraphs in to this article from the EU Observer we learn this:

The Palestinian men told the IOM [International Organization for Migration] they paid a “travel office” in Gaza $2,000 each using money from grants to rebuild their homes.

Haaretz reports, citing an anonymous trafficker, that some pay up to $4,000. They enter Egypt through tunnels under the Rafah crossing point, where buses drive them through the Sinai desert to safe houses.

The sea voyage to Europe can take a week because they are forced to keep changing boats.

The smugglers bribe Egyptian officials. They also have agents in south Europe who help migrants get out of detention facilities. Some tell the Palestinians to claim they are Syrians escaping the civil war.

The survivors told IOM their boat was deliberately rammed by traffickers in waters south of Malta on 11 September when the migrants refused to board a smaller vessel.

“After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing”, one survivor said.

The traffickers had their money, and like most Middle Eastern Muslims they must see the Palestinians as pawns in their more important war with Israel.

See our ‘invasion of Europe’ series here.