Turkey's wideely read newspaper Hurriyet reported Monday that hundreds of Istanbul residents angered by the presence of Syrian refugees clashed with police early Aug. 25 in a violent protest in a suburb of Turkey's biggest city, reports said.
The paper quoted AFP as saying the clashes were the latest violence amid growing tensions between Turkish locals and Syrian refugees who fled the civil war in their country and whose numbers in Turkey have now swelled to 1.2 million according to the official figures.
The protest in the İkitelli neighborhood in the west of the European side of Istanbul was sparked by claims that young Syrian men had sexually harassed a teenage girl, Doğan news agency reported.
Television pictures showed a group of some 300 people, armed with sticks, knives and machetes, attacking shops and cars belonging to Syrians and shouting anti-Syrian slogans. Cars were smashed and turned upside down while the window panes of shops belonging to Syrians with Arabic lettering on the shopfronts were broken. Read more…
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