In the early morning of Nov. 30, 2024, within hours of the news that Syria’s Assad regime had lost control of Aleppo, Rami Sawas was in his car speeding from his apartment in Gaziantep, Turkey, toward the Syrian border. He was sure the regime would fight to retake the city, but for as long as this liberation might last, he needed to be in a free Aleppo. He had been dreaming of going back home ever since arriving in Turkey in the summer of 2014. To soothe his panic attacks in his exile, he would walk Gaziantep’s old streets, which resembled Aleppo’s, only 60 miles away. Now, because his logistics company occasionally did work in Syria in areas under rebel or Turkish control, he had a permit that would allow him to cross the border into those areas specifically. But as he approached border control, he thought to check his permit and discovered that it would expire at 5 p.m. that very day.
That left him with some 10 hours to see Aleppo and make it back to Gaziantep, lest he be separated from his family. His wife, Hiba, who is also Syrian, had been naturalized as Turkish and had been able to pass citizenship on to their daughter, Pamela, who had just turned 2. Rami, in contrast, lived in constant fear of being kicked out of Turkey. He entered the country 10 years earlier on his Syrian passport and had refused to register as a refugee, as most Syrians did. He instead applied for residency and work permits, for which he had to repeatedly reapply with no assurances that they would be renewed. When the renewals came, it was often only at the very last minute and then for unpredictable durations. He lived in Gaziantep because he wanted to stay as close as possible to Aleppo, in the hope that a day like today might come. Ever since Pamela was born, Rami would play her videos of Aleppo and explain to her: “You have citizenship in this country, but you are not from here. Your origins are from Aleppo. You live here temporarily. One day, you will see Aleppo.”
With the collapse of the Assad regime in December, how many of the more than six million Syrians who fled their country during its 13-year civil war will return? It is a question with enormous implications not only for the displaced Syrians themselves but also for the countries that took them in. Wherever displaced Syrians landed, their politicized presence has become a liability for the governments in power and fodder for their oppositions. While Europe would take in around a million Syrians, most Syrians were actually flung across Syria’s borders to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey; Turkey accepted more than three and a half million Syrians and, since 2014, has been the world’s largest host of refugees.
Syrians were originally welcomed in Turkey, but that welcome had long since changed to hostility. It became common to encounter a xenophobic insistence that Syrians should be returned to their homeland rather than integrated into Turkish society. Turkey’s approach to accepting Syrian refugees was once seen as a model for how to treat people fleeing war, but this supposedly ideal solution had been coming apart for years, and no more so than in places like Gaziantep and other cities in the borderlands that both separate and bind the fates of Syria and Turkey, especially in times of upheaval. Now, after years in which the situation in Syria seemed to have become stagnant, the fall of the regime, for Syrians displaced in Turkey, offered a glimmer of hope amid a precarious existence marked by everyday humiliation and occasional violence in the country of their refuge.
On the day the regime lost control of Aleppo, Rami made it to within seven minutes of his childhood house, according to his car’s GPS, before the rebels in the city began taking heavy fire. At that moment, he had to decide whether to go back to Gaziantep or be stuck inside Syria when his permit expired. He thought of Pamela and turned around. He cleared the Turkish border at 4:50 p.m., with 10 minutes to spare.
For the next seven days, he barely slept; he was febrile, and his moods jumped among joy, anxiety and fear. When President Bashar al-Assad fled the country, Rami celebrated with Syrians in Gaziantep, which erupted with relief and possibility. In the immediate aftermath, thousands of Syrians in Turkey did in fact go home, and many more are preparing to do so. But it quickly became clear that the decision to leave Turkey would be individual and personal, just as the decision to flee Syria was.
For some Syrians in Turkey, the regime was all that stood between them and going home. For others, the calculus around whether to return now is far more complicated. There are many factors at play: Syrians’ legal status in Turkey; their wealth; where they were from in Syria and why they left; what remained of their houses and families there; what appetite they have for the uncertainty and instability ahead in Syria. For many, their houses have been destroyed or taken by squatters — many of them also displaced — or are repositories of memories so terrible that the stark new reality of al-Assad’s being gone is not enough for them to embrace Syria as their home again.
Before the Arab Spring in 2011, Turkey and Syria were enjoying a rapprochement after a near century of, at best, strained relations. The rapport between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President al-Assad was so warm that the men and their families once even vacationed together. When Syrians began peacefully demonstrating for reforms — not even for an end to the regime — Erdogan advised al-Assad to listen to his people’s demands. Al-Assad instead took a much bloodier approach. The rupture in their relationship, and therefore in their countries’ relationship, came quickly.
Erdogan saw opportunity in the Arab uprisings. Since its founding as a republic, Turkey had been charting a future based on a clean break with its Ottoman past, a time when Constantinople ruled Syria, but Erdogan openly embraced that past as a means to establish Turkey as a major power. “He has empire fetish,” says the sociologist Kerem Morgül of Elon University in North Carolina. “He promises to make Turkey great again by reviving Turkey’s Ottoman Islamic heritage as a key source of soft power in the region, especially in former Ottoman territories — to recreate Pax Ottomana.” Turkey openly sided with and sheltered the Syrian opposition against al-Assad — both the civilian opposition and the soldiers and officers defecting from the Syrian Army to form the Free Syrian Army. When the first Syrian refugees began fleeing the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on civilians, Erdogan welcomed them with an open-door policy, invoking the time in Islamic history when the first converts (the muhajirin) fled from Mecca to Medina and the host population (the ansar) accommodated and helped them. Syrians were recognized officially as “guests” — rather than refugees or asylum seekers, to whom certain rights attach — and hosted in camps on the border.
In these early days of Syrian arrivals, according to Ayhan Kaya, a political scientist at Istanbul Bilgi University who focuses on migration, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s message to Turks was essentially: Don’t worry, guys, we are going to have 100,000 Syrian refugees at most; it’s going to take only around six months for al-Assad to be overthrown.
By summer 2012, the Assad regime was no longer just shooting at protesters; it had accelerated its aerial bombardment of cities. Russia and Iran soon came in on the side of the regime, supporting al-Assad, who carried out mass arrests and unleashed death by many means on his people. The opposition answered with an increased militarization, armed in part by Turkey. “These were not necessarily your pro-democracy, liberal kind of people,” Morgül says. Inevitably, both the regime and its would-be successors sidelined (or worse) the nonviolent and secular opposition in the territories they controlled. The “red line” that President Barack Obama drew over the use of chemical weapons came in 2012 and went in 2013, when the regime did use chemical weapons against civilians. Just when the country’s abyss seemed bottomless, in January 2014 ISIS established its capital in Raqqa, Syria, drawing to its self-declared caliphate people from the world over, many of whom came to Syria unhindered across the Turkish border. Syrians used that same border to flee the ever-expanding roster of tormentors.
As it became increasingly clear that Syrians were not imminently leaving Turkey, the Turkish government formalized the Temporary Protection Regulation in 2014. It allowed Syrian nationals access to the Turkish education and health care systems and laid the groundwork for them to pursue employment if they could secure work permits.
Syrians moved out of the camps, and aside from sizable populations in Istanbul and other cities, they remained in highest concentration near the border. They opened businesses, rented apartments and were a cheap and skilled labor force. Because work permits were virtually impossible to come by in practice, Turkish bosses could employ Syrians at low cost. “The Syrians were like modern slaves,” Kaya says. “The pious Islamist, conservative economic elite, they were making great money. But then covering up this reality, using this Islamist rhetoric of ansar nonsense.”
Syrians were also restricted to live and seek work only in the province where they were registered; even a day trip required a cumbersome permit-application process, while any changes to where they were registered was truly onerous.
By the fall of 2015, with the situation in Syria only worsening, Turkey would register the two-millionth Syrian, a far cry from the numbers Turks were promised. At the same time, around a million refugees, mostly Syrians, left or only passed through Turkey, cramming onto rubber rafts and wooden boats headed for Greece, most eventually arriving in their principal destinations, Germany and Sweden.
For the European Union, the refugees’ supposed easy access to their borders (though for thousands it proved deadly) was a reminder of the uncomfortable proximity of those countries on the other side of the Mediterranean. The E.U. pursued a deal with Turkey that was formalized in March 2016: In exchange for six billion euros, Turkey would prevent the departures, holding Syrian refugees in Turkey, and accept returns of migrants from Greece. Turkey then terminated its open-door policy, closed its southern border, stopped registering new arrivals from Syria and began building a territorial barrier to prevent irregular crossings from Syria.
“The E.U. had only one important goal: the refugee flow to stop,” says M. Murat Erdogan, a migration expert and author of the annual “Syrian Barometer” study (and no relation to the Turkish president). “Turkish/E.U. relations were transactional. The E.U. didn’t see Turkey as a candidate country, but a strategic partner to stop refugee flow.”
Plenty of Syrians also thought it better to stay in Turkey, closer to family and to Syria, where many hoped to return. And Turkey did in many ways offer more dignity for Syrians than Jordan or Lebanon did. Turkey’s approach was widely lauded, viewed as a new paradigm.
Though the central government in Ankara set the policies regarding the Syrians in Turkey, it fell to the cities where they ended up to accommodate and absorb them. The population of Gaziantep, where Rami lives, swelled by a third with the influx of 500,000 Syrians. “We had to reinvent ourselves,” says Mehmet Abdullah Aksoy, deputy secretary general of the Gaziantep metropolitan municipality.
In 2018, Turkey’s once-booming economy went bust. Food prices rose so high that municipalities set up food stands where Turks could buy produce at less than half of supermarket prices. Though Turkish economic suffering was worsened by the unorthodox and widely criticized fiscal policies enacted by Erdogan’s finance minister (who was also his son-in-law), Erdogan often cast blame on the Syrians, even if unintentionally, by invoking how much money Turkey was spending on them. The fact that the E.U. was subsidizing these expenditures went unmentioned.
“He says, ‘We fed them, we clothed them, we sheltered them — we spent so much money,’ to claim that Turkey is now the big power under his rule with an active role in a global humanitarian crisis,” Morgül says. “But what is the implication of this to people on the ground? A lot of Turkish people actually became more anti-Syrian when they heard this. They were like: ‘Hey, we are poor. Why didn’t we get any of those things?’”
Syrians became “scapegoats for all ills,” Kaya says. They were also caught in the ongoing intra-Turk battle for the character of the country, one that the non-Islamist, Europe-oriented Turks felt they had been steadily losing ever since Erdogan came to power and then broadened that power in authoritarian ways. For them, Erdogan was importing a constituency that would be loyal to him. These fears only intensified when Erdogan announced that some Syrians would be granted Turkish citizenship, in a process that remains opaque to Syrians and Turks alike. In 2022, Turkey declared that 200,000 Syrians had been naturalized. At the same time, to appease anti-Syrian sentiments, it imposed new “thinning out” measures that would bar additional Syrians from moving to 1,169 neighborhoods in 63 of Turkey’s 81 provinces.
Once pandemic restrictions on travel eased, Syrians again began heading for Europe. Among them were even Syrians with Turkish citizenship who believed they would never be accepted as “really Turkish.” For those who weren’t leaving, the decision to stay was often more about their means than their desire. Most of the illegal routes to Europe, whether by land or sea, were both expensive and dangerous.
Now that the regime has fallen, the decision of whether to uproot their lives has again fallen on the refugees in Turkey. Kinda Hawasli, a researcher at the Syrian Dialogue Center in Istanbul and a Syrian refugee herself, predicts that people will approach returning with caution and start with exploratory trips in multiple waves, with more activity picking up after the school year ends in June. Murat Erdogan also doesn’t foresee large-scale returns in the short term but notes that Turkish society expects Syrians to leave. Morgül agrees that the pressure to repatriate Syrian refugees will most likely increase. “Several opposition figures have already suggested that the refugees no longer have an ‘excuse’ to stay in Turkey,” he says.
Rami was eager to go to Aleppo and begin exploring the possibilities of a future life in Syria as soon as he could get a permit to do so. Many other refugees were less certain. While they shared in the general euphoria around the end of decades of tyranny in their home country, they felt they had to consider the realities and practicalities of what it would mean to relocate yet again. And for many, the trauma of their last days in Syria made it difficult to contemplate returning.
When Syrians took to the streets in the peaceful protests of the Arab Spring, one of them was Ahmad al-Khaldi, a secular pacifist who lived in Deir al-Zour, in the eastern part of the country. He was full of optimism, even after a regime supporter stabbed him in his hand, permanently damaging nerves and rendering it lame. Neither Ahmad nor his wife, Areej, who both worked as teachers, ever thought they would leave Syria. They consistently believed a better future was inevitable, even as what came next would repeatedly disrupt their lives in the present.
The Assad regime’s bombardment of Syrian cities included Deir, which Ahmad and Areej escaped by traveling with their five children to Aleppo to wait it out. Within weeks, that city was also under fire, so they left again, this time for Tadmur, a city known at home and abroad for its glorious ancient Roman ruins at Palmyra. (And, in Syria, also for its notorious prison.) But they still figured that by summer’s end, they would be back in Deir, in time for the start of school. A summer in Tadmur became nearly three years, as ISIS’ capture of Deir in the spring of 2014 made returning home unimaginable. Then, in the spring of 2015, four years into the crisis — a time during which they continued to stubbornly believe in possibility, in human rights and in the international community — a series of events would set their departure in motion.
First, on March 23, in Tadmur, which was under Assad-regime control, military intelligence officers took Ahmad. Only after several torture sessions was he told that they suspected him — the secular pacifist — of being a member of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. ISIS, meanwhile, Nusra’s rivals, were moving on Tadmur. While the international community fretted over what an ISIS takeover would mean for the Roman antiquities and ruins at Palmyra and over how to evacuate artifacts, no similar mission was mounted for the Syrians who were caught between ISIS on one side and the regime on the other — including Areej and the children.
In an absurd mix of bad and good luck, ISIS soon took their neighborhood — as well as the detention center where Ahmad was being held, freeing him and returning him to Areej. When he was left at her doorstep, after just under two months in regime detention, he looked to be in his last days. His skin was black, his eyes protruding.
The next several weeks revolved entirely around his recovery, but Areej was not hopeful that his body or soul would ever heal. Ahmad would scream in terror, afraid of something beyond his family’s perception. Scabies consumed much of the skin on his arms and legs. When she would apply medicine to his body, Areej could see the mites as they went in and out of the flesh, eating it along the way. She could actually hear them: “tsht, tsht, tsht.” Even the sensation of the fabric of his clothes was excruciating.
Ahmad’s recovery was cut short some six weeks after his release, when two ISIS militants came back to speak to him. After stepping outside, Ahmad, still frail, leaned against the wall to hold himself up. ISIS had banished women from sight, leaving Areej to try to ascertain what they wanted while watching from a small window above the door, unable to hear. As Ahmad listened to the two armed men, Areej saw him begin to slowly slide down the wall, as if from the weight of their words. Once they left, Ahmad crawled back inside. He was hysterical, yelling, “Close the doors, the windows.”
The family gathered around him and asked what was happening. He said, “ISIS wants Mari and Shaghaf” — their two oldest daughters, then 18 and 16 — “to marry them to the emir of Raqqa.” Come morning, they would be back for them. Ahmad and Areej arranged to leave Tadmur immediately.
At 3 a.m., a dump truck smuggled them out with none of their belongings, delivering them to the outskirts of Deir by dawn. They needed the documents they inadvertently abandoned here in 2012 to start a new life outside Syria. Ahmad was now wanted in regime-controlled areas for “escaping” prison, and no way would they live under ISIS. The plan was to transit through Turkey and join Ahmad’s brother in Saudi Arabia.
They found in Deir a ghost city. Deir and their home had both been places of happiness, and Areej wanted to see the river — Deir al-Zour is on the Euphrates — to tell it and the trees, “I will not come back,” if not never, then at least for a very long time. As a family, they visited their house in town one last time, finding the doors open and the windows broken. Inside, Areej lifted the niqab that ISIS made all women wear, so she could better see the devastation, but she made the mistake of not lowering it again before she stepped outside.
At that moment, a car full of ISIS morality police — the hisbah — was passing by. They made a U-turn and yelled out, “Why weren’t you wearing the niqab?” From their accents, Areej knew they were locals, but she didn’t know them. “You feel they’re like demons who came out of the earth,” she says.
The hisbah confiscated Ahmad’s and Areej’s IDs, without which they couldn’t leave Syria. They would get them back only after reporting to hisbah headquarters, where they would pay the fine for lifting the niqab. Ahmad and Areej assumed it would be as they had heard — money, an earful of preaching — and they would be done. So they gathered what cash they could and made their way to hisbah headquarters, a home ISIS had commandeered from a Syrian family. Ahmad and Areej knew it for its big willow tree. They had beautiful memories in that neighborhood’s streets, and they used to walk the one that led to the river when they were first in love.
Inside the house, they were brought to stand in front of a Saudi man who would adjudicate their case — though Ahmad could still barely stay upright unsupported. Next to him, Areej’s face was completely hidden behind her niqab. The judge chastised Ahmad, saying that if he had honor, he wouldn’t have let his wife go outside with her face showing. When the judgment was pronounced, neither Ahmad nor Areej could comprehend the words, let alone imagine carrying out their meaning: Ahmad was to flog Areej — now, in front of them — 25 times on her back.
Ahmad began to refuse, thinking that if he had known this would be the punishment, they would have fled, IDs be damned. But the judge insisted that Ahmad was in charge of Areej, so it had to be him to “discipline her.” Ahmad physically recoiled at the word “discipline.”
He was handed a wooden cane and told to start. “If you don’t whip her, one of us will,” someone said.
Areej began to whisper to him from behind the niqab, imagining that alternative. “Ahmad, obey them. They asked you to whip me, then whip me. We don’t know what the other option will be.” She turned and offered her back to him.
“Hit her well,” the judge said. “If you don’t hit her well, we will restart the count.”
“Areej, I can’t,” he said. The first two strokes were gentle and almost imperceptible.
“This is not how you do it,” one of the men yelled. “Lift your arm and hit,” he said, mimicking how Ahmad should do it.
Areej pleaded with him. “Ahmad, hit me and let me be done.”
He hit her and apologized, hit her and apologized. Each time he said, “I’m sorry, Areej.”
Their captors kept telling him, “Stronger!” After any blow they judged inadequately hard, they would start counting again from the beginning.
Ahmad didn’t dare to cry, lest they perceive him as too compassionate toward Areej. With each blow, he again apologized, until they reached the count of 25. With all the restarting, Areej had borne closer to 50.
Areej could barely move. Ahmad could not look at her. Finally allowed to leave, they drove back to the village in utter silence and shock.
Since Ahmad’s release, Areej had slept next to him but had not touched him, because after the scabies, any pressure was unbearable. Now she, too, could not lie down or lie back. Nothing could touch her either.
“You will find tragedies and abnormal experiences in every Syrian family,” Areej says. “But at the end of the day, life goes on. You have to move forward for your children.”
They arrived in Turkey in August 2015.
By that point, Rami, then 22, had been in Turkey for one year, a time during which he found Turks generally sympathetic toward Syrians. He had arrived straight from a very short stint in regime detention. A university classmate, he says, had ratted him out as an anonymous pro-revolution blogger. The regime had released him — after four days of detention and torture — only because his father (a businessman) was able to pay a $65,000 bribe.
In his first six months in Turkey, he sank into a deep depression; losing Aleppo had left him without a sense of self. He pulled himself out of it by turning to YouTube, where he found the video “Struggle Makes You Stronger,” by the African American motivational speaker William Hollis. It changed him. He took spinning classes, got certified as an instructor and found a job as a media officer at a university in Gaziantep, where he also enrolled in some courses. All along, he planned the company he dreamed of starting someday, even designing a logo. That summer, when friends and relatives took to the sea, he never considered doing it. He didn’t want to be delayed in starting his professional life, stuck living on handouts while moving through the E.U.’s bureaucracy.
Rami weathered the volatility in this new country and even began doing business under his name — mostly logistics for cross-border aid and development. But there were limits to how big he could go, because he couldn’t assume risk in the same way a Turk could, regardless of his appetite for it. Turks could put 10 percent down and get a loan for the rest; Syrians needed to have the full amount in hand. Rami would rent some office space, the most essential trapping of having his own business, and have to move when things fell apart. He estimates that he changed offices six times in four years, sometimes just because a Turkish landlord would break a lease. Other times he would do a job and not be paid. “There is no law here for Syrians,” he says.
Though he liked Turkey and had learned the language, he applied for immigration to Canada, harboring regrets about not accepting earlier that he was a refugee and not leaving for Europe in 2015. In the meantime, though, he kept hustling, in great part out of fear of falling back into depression. That fear “made me do anything to feel my existence,” he says.
But he was constantly reminded that his existence wasn’t particularly welcome in Turkey. Long gone were the days of sympathy for what Syrians had been through. Turks would casually tell him that as a Syrian, anything he had acquired was from “our money.” (Rami never did receive any aid.) Even though Rami had no right to vote and only a relatively small number of Syrians had been naturalized, Turks would tell Rami, “You are going to vote for A.K.P.,” Erdogan’s party. He was even told that Syrians “don’t pay taxes.” (Rami immediately showed the man who said that proof on his phone of the approximately $25,000 he paid that year.)
Then there were the more subtle racist behaviors; he would be speaking Turkish, whether at the mall or a government office, and the Turkish person he was interacting with would immediately claim to not understand once the person heard his Syrian accent. At the airport when he was on his way to Dubai like other businessmen, he would be stopped and told his Syrian passport was fake. Rami would ask how he could have multiple entry stamps from multiple countries, including Turkey, if that were the case. The person would continue to insist it was fake and let him board only at the last minute, if at all. “I’ve missed a lot of planes,” he says.
If his professional aspirations were one step forward and two steps back, his personal life was a joyful crescendo. He fell in love with his best friend, a Syrian woman he met in Turkey. Hiba had graduated from a Turkish university and was working toward a master’s degree; she had been summoned for citizenship during her studies and was naturalized. Together, they opened We+, the company he had dreamed of. During the pandemic, they married and moved in together. But their time in that apartment would be short.
While backing up in the building’s parking lot, a Turkish neighbor tapped Hiba’s car. Though there was no damage to either car, a crowd of at least 10 Turks soon gathered, yelling at Hiba. Their complaints were no longer about the car but rather that Syrians had taken over the country and that they should get out.
One of Rami’s friends, a Polish man who used to play for the Gaziantep soccer team, told Rami about a building where most of the residents were foreigners — such as consular staff or athletes — and Turks from “a tolerant class.” The building had an unwritten “no racism” policy. The couple moved to the ninth floor of the 32-story tower.
While Rami continued to have no luck with any of the embassies he applied to, his company was increasingly successful. In 2022, he did $2.4 million in business. At the end of that year, Rami and Hiba welcomed Pamela. Her birth gave greater urgency to Rami’s desire to leave. “My goal is that she doesn’t live in Turkey,” he says. “Because I try to imagine when she goes to school, someone tells her she’s not allowed to play with them, that ‘you are a foreigner’ — I’d lose it.”
In the predawn hours of Feb. 6, 2023, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake convulsed the ground beneath the Turkish borderlands where more than a million Syrians lived. A second quake, measuring 7.5, struck early that afternoon. By the time the aftershocks finally subsided, this would be one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent Turkish history — the death toll there ultimately hit 53,500 — and its repercussions would reverberate through the country’s politics and further erode Turks’ tolerance for the displaced Syrians among them.
When the tremors began, Ahmad was in bed in Sanliurfa, streaming the film “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” which starred his favorite actor, Denzel Washington. Ahmad had made it a goal to see Washington’s entire body of work, but he particularly identified with Washington’s character in that film, who, as Ahmad saw it, was like him — a long-suffering idealist whose faith in those ideals is repeatedly tested.
Just as his laptop started to shake, Areej awoke in the dark. “Earthquake!” she yelled. Ahmad, Areej and their family rushed out of their apartment into the cold in only their pajamas. But within minutes, Ahmad ran back inside. “We had bigger fears than death,” his daughter Shaghaf says. Back in the house were their kimliks, their temporary protection cards. Life in Turkey for Syrians depended on papers. But they had fallen out of the habit of keeping a go-bag by the door, as they did in Syria, where they had to run for their lives abruptly. Here in Turkey, catastrophes tended to be slow building.
By this point, Syrians had already faced horror after horror, each one somehow seeming to try to outdo the last. “The only thing we haven’t seen,” Syrians would say repeatedly in the weeks after the earthquakes, “are dinosaurs and volcanoes.” This catastrophe was nonetheless an inflection point, and it laid bare just how precarious their lives in Turkey were. Across the affected areas of Turkey, more than 650,000 housing units were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by the earthquakes, and tensions quickly escalated between newly homeless Syrians and Turks. Syrians were ousted from shelters or homes they had rented, to make way for displaced Turks. In far-right media, Syrians were accused of squatting in Turkish people’s homes, of looting shops and of stealing humanitarian aid.
Already before the earthquakes, Turkish disdain and animosity were communicated to Syrians by the thousand cuts of everyday interactions. After, across Turkish society, Syrians were, at best, matter-of-factly blamed, or, at worst, scapegoated, for all manner of woes.
“The social cohesion was not enough,” says Murat Erdogan, describing the situation before the earthquakes. “With the earthquakes, we had a second disaster. It was very, very bad for the Syrians. The reaction of Turkish society was much, much more clear than before.”
Any interaction could be loaded. Several days after the earthquakes, a young man with a Turkish aid organization that was distributing food at an informal encampment for people who could not return to their homes offered Ahmad two bags of bread as he passed by. When Ahmad declined, saying, “Give them to someone who needs it,” the young man was surprised, maybe slightly angry. He said, “You’re Syrian, and you’re not in need?” Ahmad understood the implication: Why were they there if not in need?
After leaving their temporary shelters, Turks and Syrians had to compete over a drastically reduced supply of homes. Most Syrians were additionally handicapped; by law, they didn’t have freedom of movement to pursue housing or new work anywhere. (Turkey lifted the travel restrictions on Syrians so they could leave the earthquake zones, but for only 60 days.) Even if they found a solution outside of where their kimliks were registered, they wouldn’t be able to enroll their children in schools or legally reside there without changing their registrations. Desperate Syrians had no option but to return to the same place they were in before the earthquakes and seek housing there. Not surprisingly, rents more than doubled in the earthquake-stricken areas.
The upheaval had political effects as well. Though everyone expected the national elections in May 2023 to turn on the Erdogan government’s response to the earthquakes — which was highly criticized — what actually emerged as the central issue was the Syrian “problem.” In the months before the disaster, the ramp-up to the elections was marked by increasingly anti-Syrian vitriol from the opposition, including third-party candidates’ campaigning almost exclusively on an anti-Syrian platform. After the earthquakes, the rhetoric was downright rabid.
Erdogan’s constituency was also not happy with Syrians. While Erdogan didn’t retract his rhetoric about Syrians’ being their guests or siblings, it had taken on a new tenor. He promised that he would return one million Syrians to northern Syria, but “voluntarily,” and in May 2023, between the first and runoff rounds of the election, Erdogan’s government announced the start of construction of 240,000 houses in northern Syria, to accommodate deported refugees. Turkey could operate in northern Syria as a result of its many incursions there since 2016, which left Turkey or its proxies occupying large swathes of Syria — in many areas displacing Kurdish populations. In addition to “returning” Syrians to areas they are not originally from, resettling the north with a buffer of Syrian Arabs conveniently kept the displaced Kurds away from the Turkish border, a demographic engineering that many Syrians felt shame about.
Turkey had been forcibly deporting Syrians to the north under any pretext and without any real process since 2017, a practice denounced by human rights groups. (The government claims the returns are “voluntary” — forcible returns arguably violate international law — but in practice, the authorities can detain Syrians until they exact a “voluntary” return.) Syrians became terrified to call the police to mediate any conflict; they heard that no matter who was at fault, the Syrians would be blamed and sent back. According to Human Rights Watch, Turkish authorities deported more than 57,000 Syrians and other people between January and December 2023. The campaign to return refugees became so heated that an imam issued a ruling saying Syrians could pray at home and avoid the mosque to protect themselves from being arrested and deported.
“The hate is not anymore that ‘this person is taking my job,’” Suhail al-Ghazi, a Syrian researcher with expertise on refugees in Turkey, says. “The hate is like in the U.S., like in Europe. It’s ‘great replacement’ fear,” which he blames social media and political leaders for fomenting. “Many Turks are actually thinking there are 10 million refugees there,” he says — refugees who are supposedly being sent to replace Turks by, depending on the ideology espoused by an individual, anyone from Erdogan to Iran to George Soros.
The tensions culminated in the summer of 2024, in Kayseri, when Turkish mobs assaulted Syrians in the city and vandalized and torched Syrian businesses, vehicles and property, enraged by allegations circulating on social media that a Syrian man had sexually abused a young girl. The violence quickly escalated nationwide, with ultranationalist groups and gangs organizing further attacks across several cities, prompting some Turkish outlets to characterize the events as pogroms. Across Turkey, Syrians — documented and undocumented refugees, legal residents and naturalized Turkish citizens — locked themselves in their homes, terrified to go out.
Erdogan condemned the violence, and police detained nearly 500 Turks in connection with the riots. The main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (C.H.P.), blamed Erdogan for creating and then mishandling the refugee situation, while the leader of the right-wing Victory Party faulted the “pampered” Syrian refugees themselves. A study released last year by the United Nations high commissioner for refugees revealed that Turkey had the highest rate of anti-refugee sentiment across the 52 countries polled, and according to the 2023 “Syrian Barometer” study, nearly 40 percent of Turks believed that Syrians were simply a people who didn’t protect their homeland, while only 26 percent saw them as a victimized people fleeing persecution.
Partly to enable him to send Syrians back, Erdogan stepped up efforts to normalize relations with al-Assad, as did others in the international community. In 2023, the Arab League (then representing 21 countries) had readmitted al-Assad after shunning him for some 12 years. This past July, Italy announced that it would reopen its embassy in Damascus, as a coalition of E.U. countries pushed for renewed E.U. relations with al-Assad in the hope of speeding up deportations of Syrian refugees. Just two weeks before the November rebel offensive on Aleppo began, Erdogan repeated his commitment to reconciliation with the Syrian regime. All these efforts came as human rights groups reiterated that Syria was not safe for those who had fled al-Assad.
“We lost our life, our future, the accumulation of our history, the future of our kids because of conflicts of interests — regional and global interests,” Ahmad says. “We, as a people, paid the price for this conflict. We paid in Syria, and we are still paying it now in our countries of refuge.
“We were left out,” he says, “like loose change.”
For all the anger Turks have shown Syrians in recent years, Hawasli noted a positive change once the regime fell and Turkish media covered in depth its inner workings, showing viewers the labyrinthine prisons and medieval torture devices. She says that the state of long-disappeared detainees emerging into light for the first time in decades struck a chord with Turks. “They used to tell us, ‘You didn’t defend your country, go protect your country,’” she says. “The picture has changed now.”
It may change further once the impacts from Syrian departures begin to be felt in Turkey. Rami Sharrack, who fled Syria in 2012 and is the former executive director of the Syrian Economic Forum in Gaziantep and now a private consultant, says that the Turkish economy will take a hit in the case of any mass exodus. Working off Turkish government estimates that two million Syrians will return, he estimates that is 400,000 households of five, with at least two adult workers in each, which means 800,000 laborers will exit the Turkish economy. “These are cheap workers that employers would have to replace with much more expensive Turkish workers, which in turn will drive up production and consumer costs,” he says. Similarly, he points to the rents that will be lost to those landlords who took advantage of Syrians’ limited freedom of movement to move after the earthquake to charge exorbitant rates that, he says, no Turk will pay.
Many of those who have returned so far include the undocumented, who were in Turkey illegally and lived under constant threat of deportation, and who had very little in the way of personal possessions or furnishings, typically living in youth housing. For those with kimliks (under temporary protection), the choice to leave without permission meant they would forfeit their registration in Turkey. (The Turkish government’s laws and procedures regarding how Syrians can return and not lose their legal status in Turkey are in flux, but Erdogan has already said that Syrians in the country can stay.) If they did go back, it was because many of them had homes to go back to, and even if they couldn’t work immediately, they figured it was better than working for next to nothing in Turkey while paying high rents. Many, especially those from Aleppo, could return to or reopen the factories and workshops they had reconstituted in Turkey when they fled.
Ahmad and Areej were at home in Sanliurfa with their children, ages 13 to 27, as the rebels pushed toward Damascus. No one had slept in days, and each was triangulating information across multiple platforms — broadcast TV, social media, different chat groups and relatives and friends inside and outside Syria. When official word came before sunrise that the regime had fallen, Areej began to run around the apartment. “I didn’t know where to go, what to do,” she says. “I was happy, scared, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like a dream, a dream.” They started opening the doors and windows and ran out onto the balcony even though it was still dark outside. “The happiness was bigger than the house could contain,” says their daughter Shaghaf, now 25.
But this elation, for Ahmad and Areej, does not — cannot — translate into an intention to return to Deir al-Zour, at least in the foreseeable future. ISIS has remained active in eastern Syria, and U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who control large parts of the region, are currently clashing with the Syrian National Army, a Turkey-backed proxy. Ahmad and Areej see ethnic conflict ahead. And they aren’t considering returning to other parts of Syria.
“The problem is not in geography,” says Ahmad, who wants to live in a secular state and does not want to live under a government led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. “Can these people who are now in charge take the right steps to build a civil state — one that respects human rights — secure lasting peace and deliver full services?” He notes that Israeli forces are only kilometers outside Damascus, that U.S. planes still fly over Syrian skies and that many countries are calling the shots in Syria. It’s not the Syria he dreamed of when he joined the early demonstrations or that he has been striving for in his near decade in Turkey, where he has worked with civil-society organizations focusing on initiatives that include peace building, human rights advocacy, youth and female empowerment and planning for a political and democratic transition of power in Syria. And of course, there is the trauma of having lived under ISIS, which Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of H.T.S., once had ties to. “Our experience, personally and as a family, are among the main reasons we are not going back,” Ahmad says. “We are seeing signs that look a lot like ISIS. In how they are running the country and treating the people. Maybe not as intense or as obvious, or the same high level of severity, but the thoughts are one and similar.” The family still hopes to be resettled outside Turkey, where their attempts to build their lives have not been easy for any one of them. Since 2021, their application for asylum has been pending at the United Nations’ refugee agency.
For his part, Rami quit waiting for permission from the Turkish government to cross legally into Syria via the countries’ shared border. He flew from Gaziantep to Istanbul to Beirut and drove to the Syrian border, arriving at midnight on Dec. 27. The checkpoint — once a place of corrupt border guards and officials who regularly expected bribes at best, or at worst abducted and disappeared Syrians entirely — was unmanned. The road to Damascus was now open.
Rami reached the capital at 1:30 a.m., nearly 30 hours after leaving Hiba and Pamela. His plan was to stay a few nights before heading north to Aleppo. On his first afternoon, he attended a somber gathering, a vigil of sorts, for the disappeared Syrians, who still number in the thousands. In silence, relatives stood holding their loved ones’ photos, demanding to know their fates. When Rami saw a young woman with her father’s picture, he thought of Pamela, imagined her in such a situation and realized he didn’t have it in him to delay.
It would take him another 10 hours to make the 220-mile trip to his city, just on the other side of the border from Gaziantep. He was in an old car, and the road had no lights, no signs. “It was like a horror film,” he says. When he arrived at the entrance of Aleppo, again at midnight, there was no electricity, so the city was completely dark. It didn’t matter. “The beauty was, I didn’t need GPS,” he says. “I know all the roads.” He memorialized the moment, filming it on his phone. In the footage, he can be heard laughing hysterically, interrupted by gasps that could be sobs.
He went straight to his grandmother’s house, where his two aunts and their two daughters also live. He hadn’t seen his “Nanna” since the day he left Syria, though he had been sending the all-female household remittances from Turkey for years. He set his phone up on a tripod to film the moment. Wearing a black hoodie with “Aleppo” written across its front in white Arabic calligraphy, he rang them from the building call box below the apartment, then began hopping around giddily.
When they realized it was Rami, they screamed. So did he. “You want to laugh, to cry, to curse, to shout,” he says. “They all mix with each other.”When they finally embraced, he realized it had been 10½ years since he felt his grandmother’s arms around him. After everyone calmed down, they all spoke about the last moment they saw one another. “Remember when you left, you were crying,” his aunt said. “And you said it wasn’t tears, just wind in your eyes.”
His grandmother refused to let him sleep anywhere else but her house. She pulled out the same little mattress she would lay out in the living room when he slept over as a child.
But since he has been back in Syria, he just can’t sleep all that much. “I’m afraid to lose any more time,” he says. “I want to stay awake as much as possible so the time in Syria won’t finish. I miss Pamela, I want to see her, but I just can’t sleep. What if the time is over? What if I leave again and then I can’t come back?”
Alia Malek is the author of “The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria” and guest-edited “Aftershocks,” an issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly featuring contemporary Syrian prose. Rena Effendi is a photographer and an author based in Istanbul. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and is a member of its cultural-leadership network.
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