Leaders at the first Global Refugee Forum in Geneva on Tuesday said that a lack of international solidarity with populations facing conflict was one of the core causes of a rising number of people fleeing their homes globally.

German foreign minister Heiko Maas said that the international community faced not a “refugee crisis” but something deeper, arguing that the global refugee population was only a "symptom of another crisis, namely a deep crisis of international cooperation".

“More and more people are fleeing their homes, because we, the international community, are not finding solutions for the long-term crises and conflicts, such as those in Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia to name but a few,” the German foreign minister said. 

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the international community for a lack of intervention in Syria.

He sought to justify Turkey's military incursion into northern Syria, arguing that it had prevented many more deaths in the region.

“There is a piece of graffiti in Aleppo that sums up the situation in Syria. If there was oil, rather than blood, bleeding from the children who die in Syria, the world would have intervened immediately,” he said. 

Turkey has taken in more than three and a half million Syrian refugees.