Turkey is at breaking point and the time could come when the country would open the gates for refugees to travel to Europe, the Turkish president has threatened.Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the West's handling of the refugee crisis in a speech which sees the Turkish leader step up the pressure on Europe to act. He also repeated his criticism of Brussels and comments he made to EU leaders in leaked minutes, which he said he was proud of.
"I am proud of what I said. We have defended the rights of Turkey and the refugees. And we told them (the Europeans): 'sorry, we will open the doors and say 'goodbye' to the migrants'," Mr Erdogan said in his speech on Thursday.
During his speech, Mr Erdogan attacked calls for Turkey to accept more refugees and accused the UN of insincerity over inaction in Syria. In recent days, the UN, EU and other organisations have called on Turkey to take in Syrian refugees fleeing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Russian air strikes on its southern border.
Tens of thousands have fled from Aleppo after Russian war planes continued to bomb Aleppo in support of a regime offensive to capture the Syrian city.
"In the past we have stopped people at the gates to Europe, in Edirne we stopped their buses. This happens once or twice, and then we'll open the gates and wish them a safe journey, that's what I said," Mr Erdogan said in a speech to a business forum on Thursday.
"There is a chance the new wave of refugees will reach 600,000 if air strikes continue. We are making preparations for it," Mr Erdogan said in Ankara.
Turkey has already become home to more than half a million Syrian refugees, although numbers of Syrian citizens in the country is closer to three million. In November last year, Brussels and Ankara agreed on a €3 billion (£2.3 billion) deal for Turkey in exchange for stringent border controls on the west coast and allowing Turkish citizens to visit EU member states later this year.
He defended Turkey's handling of the refugee crisis, saying: "We do not have the word 'idiot' written on our foreheads. Don't think that the planes and the buses are there for nothing. We will show patience up to a point and then we'll do what's necessary."
On Monday, minutes of a stormy meeting he had with Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, were leaked in which he first made the threat to "open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria".
The minutes, which showed Mr Erdogan openly mocking EU leaders, said: "Erdogan said that Turkey didn’t need the EU’s money anyway, ‘We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria any time and we can put the refugees on buses’”, according to the minutes published by the Greek website Euro2day.
The president also repeated Turkey's call for the creation of a safe zone in northern Syrian for internally displaced civilians without the need for Turkey accepting them as refugees.
After the president's speech, Nato confirmed it would be sending a naval group to stop people smugglers in the Aegean Sea, after Turkey, Germany and Greece made the request. Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said Nato was "now directing the standing maritime group to move into the Aegean without delay and start maritime surveillance activities" at a press conference.
"This is about helping Greece, Turkey and the European Union with stemming the flow of migrants and refugees and coping with a very demanding situation," Mr Stoltenberg said.