London: Britain may be considering taking in as many as 15,000 Syrian refugees as it draws up plans to launch air strikes within a month in the war-torn country where dreaded Islamic State militants have occupied large swathes of land.
Senior government sources told a newspaper that Prime Minister David Cameron has instructed his aides to draw up plans to expand the vulnerable persons relocation programme under which Britain has taken 216 Syrians from refugee camps.
As part of a wider programme, he wants to launch a military and intelligence offensive against the people traffickers, divert foreign aid to the crisis as part of the Whitehall spending review and persuade Opposition Labour MPs to back airstrikes in Syria in a House of Commons vote in early October.
With details of Britain's refugee resettlement programme being finalised, a figure as high as 20,000 has been discussed in 10 Downing Street (Prime Minister's official residence), but Cameron's "current thinking" will see about 15,000 people in refugee camps on the Syrian border resettled in Britain, the newspaper quoted sources as saying.
Cameron has been under tremendous domestic and international pressure to take in more refugees fleeing from the war-ravaged Syria, after images of a three-year-old Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, found dead on a Turkish beach, surfaced in the news media.
Cameron has said that he was "deeply moved" by the images, and Britain will fulfil its "moral responsibilities". Until now, it has been suggested that Britain would take between 4,000 and 10,000 refugees. But one senior official said that 10,000 was now the "minimum not the maximum".
The UK is not joining an EU quota system to be announced this week by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, but a source said: "We will show that we are pulling our weight".
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