Europe...:EU Summit to Push Turkey on Migrants

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European Union leaders will on Thursday try to thrash out solutions to the continent's spiraling migrant crisis and step up a diplomatic offensive aimed at winning Turkey's help in stemming the flow of Syrian refugees.

The summit will focus on working with countries outside Europe's borders to help tackle the worst crisis of its kind since World War II.

The leaders will also discuss creating a possible safe zone in the north of Syria.
The key issue will be efforts to get a reluctant Turkey's approval for an EU plan to assist it in hosting over two million refugees, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel heading to the country on Sunday for talks.

EU Vice-President Frans Timmermans and other senior officials meanwhile arrived in Turkey on Wednesday to push the government on the plan, having postponed their visit after deadly suicide attacks in Ankara at the weekend.
"An agreement with -- and concessions to -- Turkey only make sense if it effectively reduces the influx of migrants," European Council President Donald Tusk said as he prepared to host the summit.
European leaders hope that helping refugees inside Turkey, giving it money and aiding the country to strengthen its coastguard will discourage Syrian refugees from taking perilous sea and land routes into the continent.

But Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Brussels last week, wants more cash and rejects proposals for more refugee camps.

Tusk, who visited Turkey and Jordan last month, said that the EU summit would also discuss "complex" issues "including the question of a safe zone in Syria. Turkey wants it. Russia is openly against."

Turkey has called for a safe area and no-fly zone in northern Syria.

"It's a real dilemma -- and the intervention of Russia and Iran makes the situation even more difficult," a European diplomat said.

Arguments over the redistribution of 160,000 refugees from the frontline states of Greece and Italy have given way to fears that Europe's passport-free Schengen zone could collapse as some countries try to curb the huge numbers of migrants criss-crossing the continent.

The EU leaders will on Thursday discuss a possible EU border guard system and other ways of strengthening the bloc's external borders, Tusk said in his invitation letter for the summit.

They will also discuss how to work with non-EU Balkan countries through which many migrants transit, and with African countries whose leaders they are due to meet at a migration summit in Malta in November.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team