TURKEY’S tourism minister has said Turkish cities are as safe as London or Frankfurt.
Speaking during a visit to Turkey’s northern Giresun province on Sunday, Yalçın Topçu said: “I can say something to our Western friends: Ankara is safe like New York. Istanbul is as secure as London is.”
Calling on “members of the European Union, BBC, CNN, Der Spiegel, Reuters and media organizations like these,” Topçu said: “They have been trying to depict Turkey as unsafe. I am reminding them: Our capital city is safe, just like yours.”
Topçu, a member of the interim government, said there has been 33 per 1,000 drop in the number of tourists visiting terror-affected provinces but there has been a five percent increase in number of tourists visiting Istanbul or other popular resorts.
Following a suicide bomb attack in July – blamed on ISIS – in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa that killed over 30 people, conflict has escalated between the PKK terrorists who attack Turkish security forces.
ince July, more than 100 members of the security forces have been killed and hundreds of PKK terrorists killed in operations across Turkey and northern Iraq, including airstrikes.
However Turkey saw a very slight decrease in tourist numbers despite all the negativities, he said, adding that these losses were not irreversible with government incentives.
“Amid escalating violence in the country, there has only a 0.38 percent decrease in the number of foreign tourists visiting Turkey in the first seven months of the year. This is not irreversible,” he told Anadolu Agency.
The number of foreign people visiting Turkey increased to 5.5 million in July, a 5.1 percent increase from the same month of 2014, according to data released by the Tourism Ministry on Sept. 2.
And the number of foreign visitors decreased by around 0.4 percent in the first seven months of the year, amid rising geopolitical risks and economic problems in Russia.
Topçu said the number of tourists arriving in the first seven months of the year was 20.3 million, and tourism income was $12.6 billion.
The number of Russian tourists visiting Spain decreased by 40.9 percent, Italy by 33 percent and Greece by 51 percent this year, he added.