London : Britain may be considering taking in as many as 15,000 Syrian refugees as it draws up plans to launch air strikes within a month in the war-torn country where dreaded Islamic State militants have occupied large swathes of land.
Senior government sources told ‘The Sunday Times’ that Prime Minister David Cameron has instructed his aides to draw up plans to expand the vulnerable persons relocation programme under which Britain has taken 216 Syrians from refugee camps.
As part of a wider programme, he wants to launch a military and intelligence offensive against the people traffickers, divert foreign aid to the crisis as part of the Whitehall spending review and persuade Opposition Labour MPs to back airstrikes in Syria in a House of Commons vote in early October.
With details of Britain’s refugee resettlement programme being finalised, a figure as high as 20,000 has been discussed in 10 Downing Street (Prime Minister’s official residence), but Cameron’s “current thinking” will see about 15,000 people in refugee camps on the Syrian border resettled in Britain, the newspaper quoted sources as saying. Cameron has been under tremendous domestic and international pressure to take in more refugees fleeing from the war-ravaged Syria, after images of a three-year-old Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, found dead on a Turkish beach, surfaced in the news media.
Cameron has said that he was “deeply moved” by the images, and Britain will fulfil its “moral responsibilities”.
Until now, it has been suggested that Britain would take between 4,000 and 10,000 refugees. But one senior official said that 10,000 was now the “minimum not the maximum”.
The UK is not joining an EU quota system to be announced this week by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, but a source said: “We will show that we are pulling our weight”.
Pope Francis called on every Catholic parish in Europe to take in a refugee family, saying the Vatican’s two parishes would lead by example. Calling for a ‘concrete gesture’ ahead of a Jubilee Year of Mercy starting in December, the pope urged ‘every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe (to) take in a family. “Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers fleeing death (as) victims of war and hunger who are hoping to start a new life, the gospel calls on us and asks us to be the neighbour of the smallest and the most abandoned, to give them concrete hope,” he said, giving the Angelus blessing in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome.
It’s not just about saying “have courage, be patient”, Francis — who has made poverty and migration a key theme of his papacy — told thousands of faithful gathered in the square.
A Turkish police officer who was pictured picking up the lifeless body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose death pricked the world’s conscience, said he thought of his own son when he saw the toddler on the beach.
Speaking to Turkey’s Dogan news agency, Mehmet Ciplak said, “When I approached the baby, I said to myself, ‘Dear God I hope he’s alive.’ But he showed no signs of life. I was crushed,” he said. “I have a six-year-old son. The moment I saw the baby, I thought about my own son and put myself into his father’s place. Words cannot describe what a sad and tragic sight it was.”
