SANLIURFA, Turkey — Samira hears the same message from Turkish
politicians on the television day and night:
Syrian refugees like her must
return home. But her home near Damascus is still not safe, she says.
اضافة اعلان
The 44-year-old
from Ghouta is one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey’s
Sanliurfa province, which shares a long border with Syria. Civil war in
Samira’s homeland is estimated to have killed nearly half a million people and
displaced millions since it began with a brutal crackdown of anti-government
protests in 2011.
Turkey has
fervently opposed
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backing rebels calling for
his removal and opening its doors to refugees. But a new wave of economic
turbulence, which has seen inflation spike and the value of the lira drop, has
put Turkey’s 3.7 million Syrian population under enormous strain.
Samira said she
has never felt so much pressure since she fled to Turkey in 2019. “I don’t
think about going back, they destroyed our house. The situation is bad over
there,” she told AFP from her modest ground floor flat in the city of
Sanliurfa, which is home to around half a million Syrian refugees — a quarter
of the province’s population.
Refugees fear
they will be used as a scapegoat for Turkey’s problems in the 2023 electoral
campaign, as
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces rising public anger over
their presence.
‘Very scared’
The main
opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has promised to send them back
to Syria, while the leader of the far-right Victory Party has admitted funding
a viral social media video aimed at scaring Turks about a “silent invasion” of
migrants. Earlier this month, Erdogan said Ankara was aiming to encourage a
million Syrian refugees to return to “safe zones” on the Turkey-Syria border by
building them housing and local infrastructure.
“’Send Syrians
back, send
Syrians back!’ This is what we hear on television from morning to
evening,” said Samira, sitting on a cushion on the floor and unwilling to give
her full name. Despite pressure from opposition parties, Erdogan has pledged
that Turkey will not force Syrian refugees back and “will not throw them into
the lap of murderers”. But his assurances are not allaying their fears.
A few metres from
Samira’s house, 43-year-old Umm Mohamed, who runs a grocery store selling
Syrian bread, fava, and olives, cannot understand the turn of the tide in
society. “We are very scared”, she said, standing behind the counter, her eyes
looking timid beneath a black veil. “We feel the pressure. As a foreigner, we
have to be polite all the time.”
Syria not an
option
Mohamed’s husband
defected from Assad’s army. “We can’t go back,” she said. “They would kill us.” Fatima Ibrahim, in her early 30s, married a
Syrian refugee after fleeing to Turkey nine years ago. The economic fallout is
hitting them just as hard as the Turks, she said. Her husband lost his job as a
blacksmith during the Covid pandemic. Two weeks ago, he found a job as a farmer
in central Konya province — 700km (435 miles) from Sanliurfa. “Employers pay us
less, so locals are annoyed, blaming us for accepting a wage less than theirs,”
she said, sitting next to her three young sons. “Sometimes we hear from the
locals that we should go back, that we have caused them to lose their jobs” she
said.
But returning to
Syria is not a possibility for Ibrahim. “I will never go back. I will either
stay here or flee to Europe. There’s no third option,” she said.
‘Don’t mingle’
Ibrahim said she
maintains a low profile in public to avoid trouble, keeping contact with locals
to a minimum. “I don’t visit my neighbours, and they don’t visit my home. We
don’t mingle,” she said.
Haifa, a
39-year-old English teacher from
Aleppo, has fluent Turkish after nine years
here, and avoids speaking Arabic in public so as not to attract attention. “I
want to keep myself safe,” she told AFP, after she was exposed to verbal
assaults on the street. “Political issues affect us more than the economy,” she
said.
Haifa said: “You
think it is easy to leave everything behind you? Your memories, your house,
everything. You cannot even visit your mother or father’s grave.”
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