You can’t write about Turkey these days without mentioning the Syrian conflict and the refugee crisis it has created in the region. In sheer numbers, Turkey is hosting the largest number of refugees: 2.8M registered, and it’s anyone’s guess how many more are unregistered. There are another 1M in Lebanon, which is massive considering how small the country is. In comparison, for all the hand-wringing across Europe & the rest of the Western world about the crisis they’re dealing with, only about 900,000 of them applied for asylum in Europe from mid-2011 to mid-2016!
Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian conflict — like that of the US and Russia — is complicated. As Sunnis the Turks displayed early sympathy for the anti-Assad Sunni forces. They opened up their borders to allow their Sunni brothers to pour in, thinking it would be a short exile as Assad’s fall was imminent. But a lot has changed in the intervening 5-6 years. Turkey has been accused of not only supporting moderate Islamic opposition to Assad, but also covertly supporting the extremist al-Nusra Front & in some cases the devil ISIS, even as it’s actively fighting them on other fronts. Erdogan’s government has also been accused of using this crisis to act against Kurdish forces — which are aligned with the west in opposition to ISIS — both within Turkey and also in Northern Syria. For writing about this and other unflattering aspects of the Erdogan government, Wikipedia has been banned in Turkey.
But the biggest change has been Turkey’s attitude towards Syrian refugees, which has gone from welcoming to slamming the door shut. In a move that Trump would approve of, it’s building a wall along the 900 km border, more than 500 kms of which are already completed. Once finished, it will be the longest structure after the Great Wall of China. Erdogan has stated that he plans to extend the wall along the borders with Iraq & Iran, presumably to keep the Kurdish populations in the three countries isolated, the better to deal with the PKK within Turkey. With a closed-off, militarized border with Armenia, much of it fenced by barbed wire, soon it’s only open border to the Asian continent will be the one with Georgia.
To be fair, Turkey has clamped down on the flow of Syrian refugees mostly due to EU pressure. And it has worked. Since the peak in 2015, migration between Turkey & Greece is down more than 90%.
But refugees are a visible presence in Istanbul today. On several occasions matronly older women in scarves would stop me and ask for money, murmuring what I can only imagine was a benediction, particularly given that it was the month of Ramadan. Men in worn coats, sometimes accompanied by children, shoved passports in my direction, trying to convince me that they’re Syrians. I was later told by a local that many of them are Roma simply taking advantage of the refugee situation to make money. One of the men did admit to being a gypsy, but he insisted he was Syrian. ‘Passport, passport!’ he exclaimed, sputtering with indignation & waving a blue booklet in my face, making sure I didn’t get a good look at it.
The carpet salesman I met on my first evening in Istanbul had claimed that he knew someone who smuggled refugees to Greece. He didn’t actually smuggle them. He simply took their money, put them on rubber boats, gave them fake lifejackets & hoped Allah would see them through on their voyage. ‘He’s very rich now,’ the carpet salesman said with a tinge of envy. ‘But I don’t like making a profit from other people’s misery. How can I? They’re my Muslim brothers and sisters. And the world is doing nothing for them. The Europeans don’t want them, but lecture us on human rights. They don’t want to get rid of Assad. But where will all these people go? They’re stuck here. The Europeans & Americans don’t care. They only pretend to care. But they do nothing.’
I’ve always been uncomfortable with sympathies based on religion. It is clear that Turkish sympathy for Syrian opponents of Assad is based at least as much on their Sunni kinship with them as it stems from their humanity. Most Turks unwittingly find themselves supporting one side in the much larger struggle between Saudi Arabia & Iran, the torch-bearers of the two main streams of Islam. With the Saudis sending large amounts of money around the world, including Turkey, to spread their Salafist worldview, they’re recruiting, and indeed outsourcing a lot of the dirty work in their fight against Iran, resulting in ever-increasing Islamization — particularly of the Sunni kind — and social upheaval in previously moderate and secular countries like Turkey, Indonesia & the Philippines.
Later that night, after I managed to get out of his store and wandered around the neighborhood of Eminönü, in the doorway of a closed store sat a family on a piece of cloth spread out on the dirty step, ill at ease, trying not to attract attention. The man in a skull-cap looked highly-educated, even distinguished. His wife looked forlorn, their daughter, who was probably no more than 6 or 7, radiant, with large, sparkling eyes. Both mother and daughter had a blanket spread across their laps. The father was poring over a book with the daughter when I passed them by. I stopped. The man looked up. He spoke no English. Nevertheless I asked him where they were from. He said something in Arabic that I did not understand. Finally, paring down the conversation to the very basic, he said, ‘Idlib.’
‘How long have you been in Turkey?’
I don’t know if he understood my question, but I certainly didn’t understand his response. I looked around to see if anybody could help us communicate. There weren’t many people in the street, and the few that were there were hurrying home in the fading hours of the day. The chances of finding someone who knew both Arabic & English were slim. But to my surprise a young man who spoke English laboriously stopped to help. ‘They’re from Idlib,’ he translated. He was a professor in a college before they had to leave. They now depended on the charity of others, sometimes living on the streets. The translator, who was Syrian himself, was eager to leave and did so abruptly. There was not much else I could think of asking, not much I could do to help. I pressed some money in the professor’s hand. He accepted it reluctantly. His wife said something for the first time, and all I caught was a reference to Allah. The girl smiled shyly as I got up to leave.
A few days later, quite by accident I happened to be Akyarlar, a village near Bodrum on the Aegean coast, that was the epicenter of this migration. The view was idyllic: deep blue skies, balmy weather, hillside villages with whitewashed homes framed by jacaranda and bougainvillea. I was told by a local Dutch couple that in 2015 the beaches were filled with refugees trying to get out. It’s the point that’s closest to the Greek island of Kos, a short 2-mile dinghy-ride away. In September 2015, a rubber dinghy being steered by one of the refugees capsized in the dark waters of the night, just like dozens of others had previously. The man — a Kurdish refugee from Kobani in Syria — managed to survive, but the bodies of his wife, daughter & son washed ashore not far from where I stood. The 3-year old son was Aylan Kurdi, the photo of whose lifeless body, face down on the beach, made news worldwide & brought attention to the refugee crisis.
*
My original plan was to spend little to no time in Istanbul, and instead to travel to the southeastern part of the country, through former Assyrian & Armenian territories, both of which experienced genocides in the early twentieth century as the Ottoman rule crumbled. I had planned on flying into Mardin and proceeding by road to Midyat, Van, Ercis, Dogubayezit & the ancient Armenian capital of Ani (now in ruins) before ending up in Kars from where I would travel to Armenia via Georgia. Large sections of my intended route are close to the Syrian border, areas through which not only did refugees stream out of Syria, but also where anti-Assad forces –including, it’s alleged, extremist al Nusra & ISIS — retreated for supplies, money, ammunition and reinforcements.
So, naturally, I was warned by several people that I would be traveling through areas where terrorists sometimes blend into civilian and refugee populations, not to mention the occasional flare-ups between Kurds, particularly the PKK, and government forces. And if I still insisted on going, I was to avoid Diyarbakir at all costs. I’m sure the risks are greatly exaggerated. Given how friendly and helpful everybody I encountered in Turkey was, I would have been fine and the trip would have been interesting. But in the end the impact the remote chance of my getting into trouble would have on my family and the fact that neither did I have enough time to do the entire trip, nor had I done the necessary planning — particularly since I also had to go to Georgia to fly out of Tbilisi (which is how I’d booked my ticket) — meant that I’d have to leave out the most interesting parts of Turkey for another trip.
But now with Erdogan’s Great Wall of Turkey in place, I wonder if it will be even half as interesting.
