Turkish police on Friday detained as many as 27 people in the simultaneous operation in five cities aimed at cracking down on the trafficking of refugees seeking to reach the European Union. Four of them were released while the remaining are still in custody.
The operations were conducted in İzmir, İstanbul, Adana, Mersin and Mardin province.
The suspects were to provide illegal transportation to 400 refugees from Turkey's Aegean seaside town of Çeşme to Italy. Each of the refugees were reported to have paid $4,000 to the smugglers.
Reportedly, eleven of the total suspects were Syrians, one is Palestinian and seven are Turkish.
The leaders of the human smuggling gang were reported to be two men of Turkish and Syrian-origin.
The refugees who intended to sneak into Europe included singers, who perform in a wedding organization in Izmir to earn a living.
In December of 2016, the European Union took a contradictive move to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) mission which has been engaging in discovery, monitoring and surveillance activities to prevent the passage of refugees into Europe via the Aegean Sea.
The decision made by the European Parliament (EP) is to pay an extra 6 billion euros for the extension of the mission, instead of paying 3 billion euros in cash to Turkey, as a part of the 2015 deal of Turkey and the EU to stop migrants from traveling to Europe.
The EU's move is contradictive to all the efforts that aimed to prevent the killings during the refugees' illegal passage, while Turkey is putting all its effort into protecting the refugees; as more than 3 million Syrians have sought refuge in Turkey from civil war in their country.
In 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded around 200,000 refugees in Italy, while Italian security forces reached the dead bodies of 4,655 refugees. The same figure was 3,771 in 2015.
Turkey and the EU agreed in November 2015 to stop migrants from traveling to Europe, in return for 3 billion euros in cash, a deal on visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the Schengen zone and renewed talks on joining the 28-nation bloc.
More than 3 million Syrians have sought refuge in Turkey from the civil war, now in its sixth year.
Turkey hosts the world's largest amount of refugees, amid the greatest global movement of refugees ever recorded.
Millions left Syria and more than 600,000 people have been killed in the Syrian Civil War.
