Making the disclosure to Associated Press (AP) on Monday, Turkey's deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus warned that the number could rise further. He however insisted that Turkey was ready to react to "the worst case scenario."
His words: "I hope that we are not faced with a more populous refugee wave, but if we are, we have taken our precautions. A refugee wave that can be expressed by hundreds of thousands is a possibility."
The refugees have been flooding into the country since Thursday, escaping an Islamic State offensive that has pushed the conflict nearly within eyeshot of the Turkish border. The conflict in Syria has pushed more than a million people over the border in the past 3½ years.
ISIS, which is an al-Qaeda breakaway group, has established an Islamic state, or caliphate, ruled by its harsh version of Islamic law in territory it captured straddling the Syria-Iraq border. It has, in recent days, advanced into Kurdish regions of Syria that border Turkey, where fleeing refugees on Sunday reported atrocities that included stonings, beheadings and the torching of homes.
As refugees flooded in, Turkey on Sunday closed the border crossing at Kucuk Kendirciler to Turkish Kurds in a move aimed at preventing them from joining the fight in Syria. A day earlier, hundreds of Kurdish fighters had poured into Syria through the small Turkish village, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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