THIS Sunday, as we mark nine years since the start of the conflict in Syria, I will join with faith groups and many of the Syrian families who have resettled in Edinburgh for a short remembrance service on the Mound at 1.45pm.

Nine candles will be lit: one to remember the dead from each year of this terrible conflict. Nine years on, and now with the direct military involvement of Turkey, what has become a messy international stand-off between international and regional powers looks no closer to resolution.

Scotland has played its part in helping cope with the fallout of this terrible situation. Figures from 2019 showed that a fifth of refugees resettled by the UK have been welcomed in Scotland, and the Scottish Government has called on the UK Government to do more to help resettle people. Whilst not without issues, the Scottish resettlement programmes have been particularly successful in helping integrate new Syrian Scots in Dundee, Edinburgh, Fife, Glasgow, Inverclyde and Bute.

Syrian families I meet at my constituency surgery are now thriving and confident, so much so that they are able to guide later arrivals through the process and help them connect with the local community. People who have had their lives interrupted and witnessed the horrors of war are beginning to find new purpose in their adopted home. Friendships are being forged and new businesses have been created. Visitors to Bute can now enjoy delicious patisserie and award-winning apple tarts in Helmi’s Patisserie in Rothesay.

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But these are the lucky few. The number of people who have taken part in refugee resettlement schemes across Europe is vanishingly small, and the contrast between the lives of people who have been allowed to move out of camps and those left behind could not be starker.

Many Scots have seen this first-hand as volunteers with NGOs struggling to help highly vulnerable refugees in dangerously overcrowded camps in Greece and elsewhere. Last Friday, I met with my constituent Sally Wainwright who, like many ordinary citizens, has volunteered helping refugees and migrants on the Greek islands.

I heard her powerful testimony about her experiences working in the camps around Greece including the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos. Mytilene, the municipal capital of Lesbos, has a population of 37,890 – the same as Stirling – yet is hosting some 20,000 refugees without proper facilities or infrastructure. Recently, as tensions rise, mobs have attacked press and aid workers, refugee facilities have been set on fire, and NGOs have had to pull out.

The National: Refugees and asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are struggling without proper infrastructure to house themRefugees and asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are struggling without proper infrastructure to house them

In 2016, the European Union struck a deal with Turkey to offer money and aid in exchange for Turkey hosting refugees fleeing war-torn Syria and stopping them from moving on to Europe. However, thousands of refugees who have made it to Greece are now trapped there while their asylum claims are processed. Turkey has accommodated approximately 3.6 million Syrian refugees.

The 2016 deal had included £6 billion in aid for Syrian refugees in Turkey, re-energising Turkey’s bid to join the EU, and relaxing visa requirements for travel to Europe for Turkish citizens – but the deal is now breaking down. Turkey says that the EU did not disburse the promised money, and last week President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey will no longer be “Europe’s gatekeeper” and that he is “opening the doors” for refugees to enter Europe.

Turkey has now opened its borders with Greece and even bussed refugees close to the north-western border. Turkey is using the survivors of war as pawns in a geopolitical game. There have been troubling pictures of hundreds of refugees or migrants attempting to land small boats on the Greek islands. Tens of thousands have headed for the land border and become trapped between Turkey and Greece.

Greece has halted all asylum claims for a month, sent riot police and border guards to turn back people trying to enter the country illegally, and taken aggressive measures to deter them, including firing tear gas into crowds and deploying razor wire. There have been reports of young men stripped and beaten, a refugee shot dead by live ammunition, and a child dying at sea.

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Erdogan visited Brussels for talks earlier this week, and we heard that the EU is considering taking in up to 1500 child refugees to ease pressure on overwhelmed camps on the Greek islands. France, Portugal, Luxembourg and Finland offered to join Germany in a coalition of the willing.

In his Greenwich speech on February 3, Boris Johnson said that “the UK is not a European power by treaty or by law but by irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and sentiment”. Unfortunately, such sentiment seems to be sadly lacking when it comes to child refugees on the European continent. Scots like Sally have done what they can. In the House of Commons earlier this week, I called on the UK Government to do something concrete now to help deal with this humanitarian disaster.

The UK Government has insisted that “protecting vulnerable children will remain our priority after Brexit”. It’s time for them to prove willing and join efforts to alleviate this dire situation.