Slovenia calls army to tightened up as migrants rush to escape winter

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Slovenia on Tuesday called in the army to help it manage a flood of refugees seeking to reach northern Europe ahead of winter, as the small EU state became the latest trouble spot on the migrant trail.

With at least 9 000 people landing on Europe's beaches every day, there appeared to be no end in sight to the continent's biggest migration wave since World War II.

But a vaunted European Union (EU) scheme for relocating 160 000 asylum seekers around the bloc has made no progress, an EU source said.

Since Saturday when Hungary sealed off its border with Croatia, more than 19 460 migrants have arrived in Slovenia, with the nation of two million people warning it was struggling to cope.

"The inflow of migrants over the last three days has exceeded all manageable possibilities," the Slovenian government said.

"The last 24 hours have been the toughest and most demanding since the start of the crisis," it said, warning it was "delusional" to expect small countries to succeed where larger ones had failed.

Parliament will be asked to approve legislation allowing soldiers to intervene in the crisis "under very specific circumstances," the government said.

Under current law, the army can only provide technical and logistical support.

However, "this does not mean a state of emergency," Prime Minister Miro Cerar told journalists.

In Greece, the crisis showed no sign of abating with a clear "spike in arrivals" that left 27 500 people packed on the Greek islands by Tuesday morning, the UN said.