Turkey rounds up 3000 migrants planning to cross into Greece

Thirty-five suspected smugglers were also detained while hundreds of migrant boats were seized, it added.

According to United Nations Children’s Fund, since the beginning of this year, more than one in five of the over 870,000 refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean is a child.

European Union leaders signed an agreement with Turkey on Sunday to limit the flow of refugees and migrants in a crackdown on traffickers.

Most of them are fleeing conflict and violence in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the vast majority of them – 738,000 – have landed on the Greek islands before moving up through the continent towards northern Europe.

The migrants will be sent to a detention centre where some could face deportation, Dogan said, without giving details. “This is as illegal as it is unconscionable”, said Andrew Gardner, Amnesty’s Turkey researcher.

During the sweep, authorities also discovered a body which had washed up on the shore, suspected to be that of a migrant.

Volunteers help refugees to disembark from a vessel after their arrival on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos on Thursday.

He stressed that the deal with Brussels is meant to let Turkey join the European Union but because of the progressively volatile situation in the Middle East, the difficulty of the region politically and stability wise “regrettably it won’t be the last migrant crisis that comes out of the Middle East”.

Elsewhere, support for the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats has surged to almost 20 percent over the past six months, a poll showed on Tuesday, as the country turns to tents and ski resorts to house record numbers of asylum seekers.

Turkish authorities have been accused of turning a blind eye on migrants gathering on the coast to take boats to Europe and of ignoring organised smuggling.

“There’s a good chance they could block people entering from Syria”, where a brutal war the has killed more than 225,000 people rages on, he said.

At emergency European Union talks in September, a plan was pushed through to relocate 160,000 refugees around the bloc according to quotas, despite opposition from Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania. Historically, when Europe has tried to keep them out by building fences and upping border security, they have found alternative, albeit slightly more risky, ways of making it in.