Peace envoy to visit Syrian refugees in Turkey

The international peace envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi will travel to Turkey on Tuesday to visit a refugee camp near the Syrian border, a Turkish foreign ministry official told AFP. Brahimi, who just spent four days in neighbouring Syria, will meet the refugees at the Altinozu camp in Hatay province, the official said Monday on condition of anonymity. The UN/Arab League envoy stopped over in Cairo on Monday which hosted a contact group meeting involving high-level representatives from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as he seeks ways to end the bloodbath in Syria. Brahimi, who took over as envoy earlier this month from former UN chief Kofi Annan, met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the first time on Saturday, warning after the talks that the worsening conflict in Syria poses a threat to the region and the whole world. Annan quit the post after a hard-sought peace deal he brokered became a dead letter. Turkey, which threw support behind Brahimi's mission, is already home to some 80,000 registered refugees in several camps in the southeast region bordering Syria, but has said it can handle no more than 100,000 refugees. As the numbers keep growing and approach that threshold, Ankara has called for establishing safe zones to protect people on Syrian soil. But that proposal fell on deaf ears at a UN Security Council meeting last month.