Thousands of Syrian Turks, alongside ethnic Arabs, Syrian Kurds and other minority groups in Syria, fleeing the Syrian civil war, came to Austria during the European migrant crisis of 2014–19 as Syrian refugees. This mass migration accelerated on 4 September 2015, when Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria, in conjunction with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, announced that migrants would be allowed to cross the border from Hungary into Austria and Germany.