The number of Syrian refugees currently in Turkey exceeds 3.7 million, the country's Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Friday.
"There are currently 3 million 768,000 Syrians in Turkey. About 500,000 have voluntarily returned, they moved to the safe areas we created," the minister said on NTV. As an example of such areas he cited Idlib where briquette houses were built for returning Syrians from Turkey.
The interior minister said that as of March 31, 200,950 refugees from Syria had been granted Turkish citizenship, of whom 87,000 were children.
Soylu also said Turkish authorities "detain all illegal refugees in the country."
"If we had not taken measures, the number of refugees would have exceeded 10 million," the Turkish Interior Minister said.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan previously reported that there are about 5 million refugees in the country.
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Based on materials from TASS