ANKARA
Turkey is setting up a new refugee camp to house 20,000 Iraqi Turkmens near the northern Iraqi city of Duhok, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said Wednesday.
"We were going to establish the camp in the town of Sinjar, as most of our Turkmen brothers migrated there. But it is now a danger zone," Atalay said during a ceremony in Ankara to mark the departure of a convoy of aid trucks bound for Iraq.
He added that Turkey would pay for the camp, which he said, it was decided the previous day, should be built in Duhok instead of Sinjar.
More than 10,000 Turkmen families have fled their homes since self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- ISIL -- militants extended their offensive against a number of Turkmen-populated cities and towns including Tel Afar and Tuz Khormato since early June, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The latest wave of ISIL advances that began on Sunday has seen a number of towns near Iraq's second largest city Mosul fall to the militants. The towns include Sinjar, the ancestral home of the Yazidi minority, an eclectic religious sect fusing Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and Islamic elements.
Meanwhile, the main political umbrella group of Iraqi Turkmens announced that another refugee camp would be built in the city of Kirkuk with the help of Turkey's official disaster management authority AFAD.
Work has started on the camp, which will accomodate Turkmens who fled the village of Bashir 15 kilometers south of Kirkuk in the face of an ISIL-led assault, the Iraqi Turkmen Front spokesman Ali Mehdi told Anadolu Agency Wednesday.
He said there were Turkmens made up 7,000 of the 30,000 displaced people seeking refuge in Kirkuk.
The three million-strong Turkmens represent the third-largest ethnic group in Iraq, constituting 13 percent of the population.
ISIL, which have already developed into a formidable force inside Syria, extended its reach in Iraq since early June, triggering a massive wave of internal displacement of around a million Iraqis.
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