A rubber boat washed up on a beach in Israel on Sunday with no one on board, only what appeared to be the belongings of would-be migrants.

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Israeli authorities said they found the dinghy along the Mediterranean coast near the city of Netanya with nothing but a messy pile of personal items, food, water and travel documents, including three from Somalia.

Video: Violent demonstrations among immigrants erupt in Tel Aviv / Credit: Israel Police

Police said they were searching the waters nearby for signs of survivors and released a photograph of the boat. What looked like clothing, an air pump and several makeshift, inflatable lifebuoys were among the items that covered the boat's floor.

The travel documents are still being investigated, the police said. According to the United Nations' International Organization for Migration, more than 187,000 people crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, and the group has recorded 2,093 deaths along the central Mediterranean route.

The migrants often make the perilous crossing in small, unstable boats. Many come from Africa, fleeing conflict or in search of a better life in Europe.

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Greece said on Friday it had completed a 40-kilometer fence on its natural border with Turkey and installed a new surveillance system amid concerns the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan could lead to increased migration flows to Europe.

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The conflict in Afghanistan has fueled fears in Europe of a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis when nearly a million people fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and beyond crossed to Greece from Turkey before continuing to other EU states.

Greece, on the front line of that crisis, has said its border forces are on the alert to make sure it does not become Europe's gateway again.

Greece, where some 60,000 migrants remain since 2015, has hardened its migration policy in recent months by fencing off its migrant camps and intensifying border patrols by land and sea. Migrant arrivals to Greece have overall slowed to a trickle since 2016 when the EU agreed to a deal with Turkey to stem the flows in exchange for financial support.

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Taliban forces have taken control of Afghanistan's presidential palace, two senior Taliban commanders present in Kabul told Reuters on Sunday, after President Ashraf Ghani left the country.

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Ghani left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

The Taliban, who for hours had been on the outskirts of Kabul, announced soon after they would move further into a city gripped by panic where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the US Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women's rights rushed to leave the country as well, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor − who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital − remained in their thousands in parks and open spaces throughout the city.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the US pullout from Vietnam, as many watched in disbelief at the sight of helicopters landing in the embassy compound.

Ghani flew out of the country, two officials told The Associated Press. Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, later confirmed that Ghani had left.

"The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation," Abdullah said. "God should hold him accountable."

In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the US and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.

Instead, the Taliban swiftly defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the U.S. military. But a peace deal with the U.S. limited direct military action targeting them, allowing them to prepare and move quickly to seize key areas when President Joe Biden announced his plans to withdraw all American forces by the end of this month.

On Sunday, the insurgents entered the outskirts of Kabul but initially remained outside of the city's downtown. Meanwhile, Taliban negotiators in Kabul discussed the transfer of power, said an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. It remained unclear when that transfer would take place and who among the Taliban was negotiating.

The negotiators on the government side included former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah, who has been a vocal critic of Ghani.

Taliban officials told Reuters on Sunday that there would be no transitional government, as the group expected a "complete handover" of power.

Meanwhile, Iran said on Sunday it has prepared accommodation in three provinces bordering Afghanistan to provide temporary refuge to Afghans fleeing their country.

"Camps have been built in border areas in three provinces," Interior Ministry official Hossein Qasemi told Iran's state news agency IRNA.

But he added that: "We expect those Afghan refugees to return home when the situation improves in Afghanistan."

Afghanistan's oil-rich western neighbor Iran has for years been a destination for Afghans seeking work or fleeing war.

But the state of Iran's economy has persuaded Tehran to encourage many of the more than 2 million Afghan refugees in the country to return home.

Last week, Israel Hayom published an interview with an Afghan official in Kabul who called Iran's involvement in Afghanistan "suspicious" and said that the Shiite regime appeared to be working with the extremist Sunni Taliban.

Meanwhile, a NATO official told Reuters on Sunday that NATO was maintaining its diplomatic presence in Kabul and helping to keep the city's airport running.

"NATO is constantly assessing developments in Afghanistan," the official said.

"The security of our personnel is paramount, and we continue to adjust as necessary. We support Afghan efforts to find a political solution to the conflict, which is now more urgent than ever," the official said.

Meanwhile, after reports that Afghan women working in banking jobs had been forced to leave by Taliban forces, the Taliban issued statements on Sunday saying that under their reinstated rule, women would be allowed to work, attend school, leave their homes without male guardians, and wear hijabs (rather than burqas).

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Syria is a "living nightmare" where about half the children have never lived a day without war and 60% of Syrians are at risk of going hungry, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday to mark the 10th anniversary of the conflict.

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"It is impossible to fully fathom the extent of the devastation in Syria, but its people have endured some of the greatest crimes the world has witnessed this century. The scale of the atrocities shocks the conscience," Guterres said.

"Syria has fallen off the front page. And yet, the situation remains a living nightmare," he told reporters.

A crackdown by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 led to civil war, with Moscow backing Assad and Washington supporting the opposition. Millions of people have fled Syria and millions are internally displaced.

"More humanitarian access is needed," Guterres told reporters on Wednesday. "Intensified cross-line and cross-border deliveries are essential to reach everyone in need everywhere. This is why I have repeatedly urged the Security Council to achieve consensus on this crucial matter."

The 15-member Security Council first authorized a cross-border aid operation into Syria in 2014 at four points. Last year, it reduced that access to one crossing point from Turkey due to opposition from Russia and China over renewing all four.

The council is due to address the issue of cross-border aid again in July.

Throughout the past decade, the Security Council has been divided over how to handle Syria, with Syrian ally Russia and China pitted against Western members. Russia has vetoed 16 council resolutions related to Syria and was backed by China for many of those votes.

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When the British government ordered a lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus, Pinter went door-to-door in northeast London to deliver the public health warning to the ultra-Orthodox Jews in his community. Within days, the 71-year-old rabbi had caught COVID-19 and died.

His sacrifice was just the last chapter of a life spent forging links between the often-isolated community in Stamford Hill and wider British society, whether by working with an Anglican priest to build a community center or visiting the local mosque to grieve when a gunman killed 51 Muslims in New Zealand.

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"He served as a bridge in a broader sense," said Chaya Spitz, a protege of Pinter's and CEO of an umbrella organization for Orthodox Jewish charities. "What he did around COVID was typical of his approach more generally."

The path to becoming a rabbi respected by non-Jews wasn't easy for a man who grew up in Stamford Hill in the 1950s and '60s.

Europe's largest ultra-Orthodox community was founded by Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia, and it grew with the addition of ones who escaped Germany's Nazis during World War II. The experience of anti-Semitism left many Stamford Hill residents suspicious of authority: they paid taxes but sought nothing in return.

Pinter believed total self-segregation was a mistake, especially when it came to education.

He became active in the community, waded into politics and won a seat on the local government council as a member of the Labour Party in 1982.

But his vocation was improving educational opportunities for Orthodox Jewish girls. Pinter and his wife, Rachel, were instrumental in building up the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School. He was the principal and she set the academic trends, introducing the concept of students sitting for a broad range of advanced exams and striving for excellence.

He saw an opportunity when Labour's Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997. Pinter decided to apply for government funding for his school, even if it meant Yesodey Hatorah would have to follow the national curriculum.

Pinter was harangued on the streets and posters went up calling him a traitor, despite winning 14 million pounds to build a state of the art high school.

"For many in the Orthodox community, this was the beginning of the end – we've now involved the state in education of our children," Shimon Cohen, a longtime friend of the rabbi, recalled. "This was going to be a disaster.''

The disagreement continues even now.

The most recent report from the UK's Office for Standards in Education rated Yesodey Hatorah's students as above average in the subjects they study, but judged the school itself "inadequate" because the curriculum is too narrow.

The critique showed Pinter's dilemma. While some in his Jewish community considered him a dangerous modernist, many in the broader society saw him as a crazy extremist, Cohen said.

"But he went off with a bright smile, saying that as he was upsetting everybody, he must be doing something right,'' Cohen said. "We have a phrase – 'I dance at everybody's wedding.' He managed to navigate all communities. That was his greatness."

Pinter found common ground with local Muslim leaders, working with them to ensure that food served at local hospitals and jails met the strict kosher and halal rules of their faiths.

And when the fighting in Syria sent refugees streaming across Europe in 2016, Pinter joined a group of faith leaders on a fact-finding mission to a makeshift refugee camp in Calais, in northern France.

After seeing the situation for himself, Pinter went back to London and raised 5,000 pounds ($6,500) for the migrants. Their faith didn't matter. Their humanity did.

"His ability to show how much he cared was remarkable,'' said Mustafa Field, director of Faiths Forum for London, which organized the trip to France. "His ability to sit down in a tent with refugees – it wasn't a clean place. But he was able to connect at that level and listen.''

And he did it while holding fast to his own identity as an Orthodox Jew.

He wore the broad-brimmed hat, black coat and beard dictated by the ultra-Orthodox. He met people for tea, but brought his own teabag to ensure he kept strictly kosher. And when former Prime Minister Theresa May extended her hand in greeting, he whipped off his hat, held it in both hands and joked about his "strange monastic order" so as not to embarrass her by refusing to shake hands.

While on these outreach missions in later years, Pinter often talked about how he grieved for his wife, who died in 2014. He decided to read the entire Talmud in her memory and believed he might see her again after his own death, according to friend Maurice Glasman, a member of Britain's House of Lords.

"When he died I thought, 'That's Rabbi Pinter, at least he could look at his wife and say that he did his homework,'" Glasman said.

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All that journalist Dalia al-Aqidi was asking for was a brief interview, one-on-one, to air on a TV station in the Middle East. She was, after all, one of the region's best-known and most accomplished international reporters. But then-newly-elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused even to respond to her request. Now al-Aqidi, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in the United States since 1988, is challenging Omar to represent Minnesota's 5^th Congressional district.

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The decision to run for office didn't come easily to the 51-year-old al-Aqidi. But "after Omar was elected, her activities and her statements – it offended me as an American, as a Muslim, and it offended me as an immigrant, and that made me concentrate on her activities," she explained in a recent Skype interview.

Omar's non-response to her interview request, though, was what ultimately set her on her current path. "After that I said, 'I don't want to interview her. I'm going to talk to her district, and talk to her people.'"

In the process, she found that although Omar is herself a Somali refugee, many of her constituents, and particularly those in the Somali community, felt much the way al-Aqidi did. "Ilhan Omar is trying to give a false picture of what immigrants want," al-Aqidi says. "People now think Somalis come to the US to sit and get handouts, and come for free this and free that – it's not true at all. [So] now a large percentage of her own Somali community can't stand her anymore, because they see the damage she is doing to them."

Worse, the former journalist believes, is that Omar insists she speaks for Muslims. "No," al-Aqidi says. "She speaks for Islamists, not Muslims. But people don't always understand that. That's when people like me come to explain: your faith is between you and God, but Islamism is an agenda. Like this she is harming the Muslim communities."

It was this realization, too, that inspired her to run for office. "No one told me, 'Dalia, go run.' I chose it because I really believe she is harming the country, she is harming the state and our district here, by her positions, locally, nationally, and internationally."

Seated in her new home in Minneapolis – al-Aqidi moved to the city from Washington, DC just four months ago, after deciding to join the Congressional race – the elegant blonde cannot disguise her annoyance. But her anger is overpowered by a very clear sense of purpose: to oppose what she sees as efforts by organizations such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others to groom Islamists for local and national elections.

"That is extremely scary for someone like me who fled and ran away from these agendas," points out Al Aqadi, whose work for the past 10 years has focused on exposing radical Islam and Islamist movements. "I think it is my duty to stop it when I see groups starting to develop these agendas here. I mean – where else will I go to? The moon?"

Hence despite their superficial similarities – both Muslim, both refugees, both women – al-Aqidi and Omar couldn't be more different. While Omar hews to the far "radical" left of the Democratic Party, al-Aqidi is running as a Republican. And while Omar pushes an identity politics agenda, al-Aqidi adamantly opposes the identity politics trend.

Similarly, she roundly condemns the Somali-American's frequent anti-Semitic remarks. In a statement to the publication City Pages, she declared: "I love America. Maybe Ilhan Omar also does but you wouldn't know it from her public comments ... Her constant anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric are toxic and serve only to gain attention for herself and position herself as a celebrity."

By contrast, al-Aqidi has already tasted celebrity; she has no need to run for office or speak on controversial subjects to get there. As a child growing up in Baghdad, she went to school with Saddam Hussein's sons. Her parents, both famous in the Iraqi theater world, separated when she was a small child. Hussein, she explained in the Chicago Tribune in 2004, allowed young Dalia to remain with her mother, rather than live with her father, as mandated by Iraqi law. By then, Dalia was already a child television star herself.

"But growing up," she explains now, "probably by the age of 16, 17, when I started looking around and seeing what was happening, say, to my neighbors, to others, not me and my family but what was happening to others in the country, that's when I started thinking this is not right – that these – the Iraqis, and I was one of them – are being brutalized by Saddam Hussein. And that was when my ideas and my political life started to mature. I started noticing and analyzing what was happening around me. You don't have to be a victim of someone to stand against him."

Celebrity found her, too, as a journalist: she reported for The Voice of Free Iraq from Saudi Arabia, for Voice of America from Washington, DC and later became a White House correspondent for various Middle Eastern venues, including Al-Arabiya, until entering the Minnesota race.

Along the way, while working in Saudi Arabia, she met the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens. "He was the one who convinced me my future was in America, and he was the one who made it possible for me and my family to come to the United States," she recalls.

It is perhaps the same sense of injustice that drove her as a teen to oppose Saddam that has made her so vehement in her opposition now to Ilhan Omar: Although she is not Jewish, she is deeply offended by Omar's many anti-Semitic statements and strong anti-Israel stance.

Similarly, Al-Aqidi spent last Thanksgiving helping to feed 250 of Minneapolis' homeless, while Omar, she told the New York Post, "doesn't even talk about homeless situation in Minneapolis, which is extremely cold and there are not enough places of shelters for them to sleep in [sic]."

She is also particularly concerned about Muslim women in America, especially immigrants, who are often subjected to oppressive, patriarchal rules and traditions of their lands of origin.

"Sometimes when immigrants come to the US, or any Western country, they don't integrate with the community and with the country," she explains. "They have their own rules that they brought from back home. And that puts pressure on girls and young women growing up. I'm not calling on them to leave their beliefs," she adds, "but to understand the values of the country they've moved to. "

What's more, she says, many of these women are often afraid to reach out. Consequently, she believes they will continue to be endangered – the more so as long as non-Muslims refuse to address these issues in the name of political correctness. "You have to be politically correct," she laments, "and I will never be politically correct. If I see something that is wrong, I will be clear. I will call things by their real name. It's the journalist instinct in me, which I think will make me a very good politician."

This, too, distinguishes the Iraqi-born candidate from the Somalia-born incumbent: Omar has long used identity politics, born of the emphasis on political correctness, to silence discussion about such uncomfortable topics as honor killings and domestic abuse in American Muslim families. "She uses that system designed to push any serious discussion or debate by using her identity as a shield," al-Aqidi argues. "She has this defense mechanism that if you criticize her for her stance or her statement or not doing her job, you are 'Islamophobic' or 'anti-colored women' or 'anti-immigrant.'"

At the same time, she notes, laughing, "I am also exactly like her. I am a woman. I am Muslim. I am a refugee. I am not a white supremacist." This, she believes, makes it possible for her to debate Omar on the issues and the problems of both the community and the nation.

Yet for all her talk of Ilhan Omar's unpopularity, al-Aqidi has her work cut out for her. She has been criticized heavily for the fact that she only just moved to the state, while Omar has lived there for nearly a decade. But the candidate counters that she has been coming to the area for a while – since, following Omar's refusal to sit for an interview, she first started speaking to the congresswoman's constituents and community leaders in her district. "That was how I started coming here," she notes, "and I fell in love with this district and I fell in love with this city. Sometimes you love a city for its buildings or it bridges, but this city has a soul, and that's why I fell in love with it. I loved this city even before I moved. I was waiting for any chance I had to come here. It's a city of music and art and food. Prince was from here. I love Prince."

But is love of the city of Minneapolis enough? She is among six Republicans listed for an August primary. And the state's 5^th district, which she hopes to represent, is heavily skewed for Democrats. It voted heavily for Omar, and according to Jewish Insider, "the last time a Republican served as its representative was in 1962."

Moreover, she is likely to receive some pushback from other Republicans, most notably for her insistence that Saudi Arabia, as she told the Investigative Project on Terrorism, "works with the United States to fight extremism" and that support for Saudi Arabia is in the interest of the United States – a position that contradicts the beliefs of many in the counterterrorism community.

Despite these hurdles, al-Aqidi remains undaunted. "It's not for me," she says. "This is the first time in the US political history that Muslims stand against Islamists. And it should be just the beginning. It will be the beginning of many to come."

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism, will be published by Potomac Books. 

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The fighting has also wounded more than 650 people, the statement from its health authority said.

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Abandoned by their US allies, the Kurds turned to Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russia for protection, and over the past two days, Syrian and Russian forces have moved into several towns and villages as the US has pulled its remaining troops from the region.

So far, most of the displacement has been within northern Syria, but hundreds of refugees have crossed into Iraq in the past week, mostly through unofficial border points. On Wednesday, a first group of 890 people was bused to a camp in Bardarash, in northern Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, which up until two years ago housed displaced people from the Iraqi city of Mosul.

"Where can go except here?" said Omar Boobe Hose, a refugee from the northern Syrian town of Ras al-Ayn, which has seen heavy fighting. "We can't go to Turkey, because they are our enemy, and the other side is also our enemy, the Syrian [government] side. Where can we go? We have only here. There are no other places for Kurds."

Doctors Without Borders, which operates in war zones around the globe and is known by its French acronym MSF, said Tuesday it had decided to suspend most of its activities and evacuate all its international staff from northeastern Syria.

"The highly unpredictable and fast-changing situation at present has made it impossible for MSF to negotiate safe access to deliver healthcare and provide humanitarian assistance to people in distress," it said in a statement. "Given the numerous groups fighting on different sides of the conflict, MSF can no longer guarantee the safety of our Syrian and international staff."

The International Rescue Committee also said it has suspended its health operations in the northeast because of "hostilities and uncertainty."

Humanitarian groups in northeastern Syria are scrambling to provide aid to hundreds of thousands of people as rapidly shifting battle lines make it increasingly difficult to reach them.

Nearly all foreign aid workers have been evacuated because of security concerns, and there are fears that local staff could face reprisals, either at the hands of Turkish-led forces pushing in from the north or Syrian troops fanning out across territory held by the embattled Kurds.

The front lines are being rapidly redrawn as more than 160,000 people flee the fighting, including many who were displaced by earlier battles in Syria's eight-year civil war. The offensive has created a new refugee crisis in a region where some 1.6 million people already rely on humanitarian aid.

Sonia Khush, the Syria response director at Save the Children, which was operating in the camp, now says it is "nearly empty," with most of the residents having fled further south and the Islamic State supporters melting away. She said the aid group can no longer access its office in Ein Eissa, and that most of its local staff have themselves been displaced.

"We have to leave as the battle lines change," she said.

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Since Trump pulled US troops out of the way following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the incursion has opened a major new front in the eight-year Syrian war and drawn fierce criticism internationally.

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"We have one of three choices: Send in thousands of troops and win Militarily, hit Turkey very hard Financially and with Sanctions, or mediate a deal between Turkey and the Kurds!" Trump said in a Twitter post on Thursday.

"I hope we can mediate," Trump said when asked about the options by reporters at the White House.

Without elaborating, Trump said the United States was "going to possibly do something very, very tough with respect to sanctions and other financial things" against Turkey.

On Friday morning, Turkish jets and artillery struck around Syria's Ras al-Ain, one of two border towns that have been the focus of the offensive. Gunfire could also be heard inside the town, said a Reuters journalist in Ceylanpinar, on the Turkish side of the border.

He said a convoy of 20 armored vehicles carrying Syrian rebels entered Syria from Ceylanpinar on Friday. Some of them made victory signs, shouted "Allahu akbar" and waved Syrian rebel flags as they advanced towards Ras al-Ain.

Some 120 km (75 miles) west, Turkish howitzers resumed shelling near the Syrian town of Tel Abyad, a witness said.

Turkey's Defense Ministry said that in overnight operations the Turkish military and its Syrian rebel allies killed 49 Kurdish fighters. It says it has killed 277 fighters in total.

The ministry said one Turkish soldier was killed in a clash on Thursday during the offensive, which is targeting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia.

Kurds said they were resisting the assault. At least 23 fighters with the SDF and six fighters with a Turkish-backed Syrian rebel group had been killed, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war.

NATO member Turkey says the operation is necessary for border security against the YPG militia, which it designates a terrorist group because of ties to militants who have waged a decades-old insurgency in southeast Turkey in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.

Ankara has also said it intends to create a "safe zone" for the return of millions of refugees to Syria.

The SDF have been the main allies of US forces on the ground in the battle against Islamic State since 2014. They have been holding thousands of captured IS fighters in prisons and tens of thousands of their relatives in detention.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called for an emergency meeting of the coalition of more than 30 countries created to fight Islamic State.

SDF forces were still in control of all prisons with Islamic State captives, a senior US State Department official said in a briefing with reporters on Thursday.

The United States has received a high-level commitment from Turkey on taking responsibility for Islamic State captives but had not yet had detailed discussions, the official said.

US lawmakers have said Trump gave Erdoğan the green light to go into Syria but the official disputed that. "We gave them a very clear red light, I've been involved in those red lights and I know the president did that on Sunday," the official said.

The SDF said Turkish airstrikes and shelling had killed nine civilians. In apparent retaliation by Kurdish-led forces, six people including a 9-month-old baby were killed by mortar fire into Turkish towns, Turkish officials said.

The International Rescue Committee aid group said 64,000 people in Syria have fled since the campaign began. The towns of Ras al-Ain and Al-Darbasiyah, some 60 km (40 miles) to the east, were largely deserted.

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Turkey, which hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees, controls parts of north Syria where it says 350,000 Syrians have already returned. It is setting up a "safe zone" with the United States in the northeast where Erdoğan said many more could be moved.

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"Our goal is for at least 1 million of our Syrian brothers to return to the safe zone we will form along our 450 km border," Erdoğan said in a speech in Ankara.

The comments come as Turkey mounts pressure on Washington for further concessions on the depth and oversight of the planned safe zone in the northeast, and as it comes under increasing pressure in Syria's northwest Idlib region where a Russian-backed government offensive has pressed north.

Only a small minority of Syrians in Turkey are from the northern strip roughly proposed for resettlement, according to Turkish government data.

"We are saying we should form such a safe zone that we, as Turkey, can build towns here in lieu of the tent cities here. Let's carry them to the safe zones there," Erdoğan said

"Give us logistical support and we can go build housing at 30 km [20 mile] depth in northern Syria. This way, we can provide them with humanitarian living conditions."

"This either happens or otherwise we will have to open the gates," Erdoğan said. "Either you will provide support, or excuse us, but we are not going to carry this weight alone. We have not been able to get help from the international community, namely the European Union."

Under a deal agreed between the EU and Turkey in March 2016, Ankara agreed to stem the flow of migrants into Europe in return for billions of euros in aid.

However, the number of migrant arrivals in neighbouring Greece spiked last month. A week ago, more than a dozen migrant boats carrying 600 people arrived, the first simultaneous arrival of its kind in three years.

Last month, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said only 17% of refugees in Turkey hail from northeast regions controlled by the US-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara considers a terrorist group. Of that region, the proposed safe zone would cover only a fraction.

Last week, senior Syrian Kurdish official Badran Jia Kurd said it is necessary to resettle refugees in their home towns. "Settling hundreds of thousands of Syrians, who are from outside our areas, here would be unacceptable," he said of the northeast.

In Idlib, where Turkey has troops and where Ankara in 2017 agreed with Moscow and Tehran to reduce fighting, months of renewed conflict intensified in recent weeks and raised prospects of another wave of refugees at Turkey's borders.

After a truce collapsed in early August, the Russian-backed Syrian army has gained significant ground against rebel forces, some of whom are backed by Turkey.

Nicholas Danforth, Istanbul-based senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, said warning about refugees in the context of the safe zone allows Erdoğan to pressure both Europe and the United States at once.

"What seems clear is that it would be impossible to settle that many refugees in any zone achieved through negotiations with the United States and the YPG," he said.

"This looks like an attempt to build pressure for more US concessions on the safe zone, where some refugees could then be resettled for purposes of domestic [Turkish] public relations."

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The fierce fighting killed more than 50 fighters on both sides, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It also underscored that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces will face a long, hard fight as they try to chip away at the last rebel-held territory.

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The counterattacks began early in the morning and government forces called in Syria's air force to repel them, the Observatory said. It said that 29 Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen were killed, as well as 23 insurgents.

The insurgents captured two villages, Salloumieh and Abu Omar, and pushed into the nearby village of Sham al-Hawa, it said.

The Ibaa media outlet of the al-Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group said its fighters were attacking Syrian positions east of Khan Sheikhoun, a major town that was held by rebels until they lost it last week.

Pro-government activists said on social media that Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen are repelling the attack.

Syrian government forces captured wide areas from insurgents over the past weeks in an offensive that began on April 30. The areas taken include all rebel-held parts of Hama province as well as villages on the southern edge of Idlib, the last remaining rebel stronghold in Syria.

Tuesday's clashes came after Syrian warplanes pounded the rebel-held town of Maaret al-Numan and nearby villages over the past two days – their likely next target for a takeover.

Maaret al-Numan, like Khan Sheikhoun, sits on the highway linking Damascus with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest. Government forces are trying to eventually open that highway.

Taher al-Omar, a citizen journalist with the al-Qaida-linked militants, wrote on social media that they have carried out several suicide attacks so far.

The months of fighting have displaced more than half a million civilians toward northern parts of Idlib, already home to some 3 million people, according to UN humanitarian officials.

Elsewhere in northern Syria, a bomb exploded on a minibus, killing two people and wounding nine near the town of Azaz. The town is controlled by Turkish troops and Turkey-backed opposition fighters, according to pro-government media and the Azaz media center, an activist collective.

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