Honorable Minister,

Distinguished Members of Parliament,

Dear Syrian Friends,

Thank you for your invitaiton to tonight’s Annual Gala Dinner for the Syrian Kids Foundation.

Al-Salaam School has been operating in Reyhanlı/Hatay, Turkey for some years helping Syrian children in Turkey.

As you know, so far more than 30.000 Syrians have arrived to Canada and almost 3.000 of them were from Turkey. Our humanitarian assistance and open door policy as well as our cooperation with Canada and Quebec governments to this end will continue.

Turkey is hosting more than 3 million refugees from Syria and Iraq from all walks of life irrespective of their creed, language and race. Turkey has spent 25 billion USD for those refugees since 2011. However, international support is less than 1 billion USD which is far less than the amount needed to help Syrian refugees. This is not a sustainable situation.

Just to give an example: total number of Syrian children at school age are 835.000. However, the total number of Syrian children continuing to school is 311.000. To educate the future generations we need more international assistance to extend to Syrians.

While continuing its humanitarian assistance to Syrians in Turkey and Syria, we will continue to fight DAESH and help Syrians who try to escape a certain death from the hands of the regime and other terror groups.

On this Mother's Day, we also respectfully remember the mothers of Turkish law enforcement officers who were martyred while fighting terror groups including DAESH in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

Thank you.