Turkey no longer able to face new refugee flow: Erdogan

By Sevil Celik and Nurettin Coskun

ANKARA (AA) - The Turkish president said on Tuesday that Turkey would not be able to shoulder a new potential migration wave on its own.

Speaking in Istanbul at the 6th Ministerial Conference of the Budapest Process on Migration, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that building higher walls with barbed wire was no way to prevent irregular migration.

There are around 260 million migrants, over 68 million displaced people, and more than 25 million refugees worldwide, he said.

Turkey has spent over $37 billion of its own national resources sheltering refugees, he added, citing UN figures.

Touching upon the allegations of a so-called Armenian genocide, Erdogan said Turkey would leave the issue to the historians, regardless of propaganda spread in the west.

He went on to say that Turkey had never committed genocide in its history.