Turkey’s president has said he is ready to bury the hatchet with Bashar al-Assad. He wants voters to believe that rapprochement will pave the way for mass returns of refugees. Many Syrians in Turkey fear they may pay the price
suburb of Ankara, still bears the scars of summer 2021, when local mobs rampaged through the streets, attacking Syrian businesses and homes after the killing of a Turkish teenager by a refugee. Police vehicles patrol the main intersections. Parts of the area feel deserted. In response to the violence, Turkey’s interior ministry decreed that the share of foreigners in some neighbourhoods, starting with Altindag, would be capped at 20% of the population.
Turkey is home to around 15m Kurds, a million Arabs, tens of thousands of Armenian descendants of those spared the genocide of 1915, and a small, dwindling population of Greeks and Jews. But the social and demographic changes the country has undergone because of the war in Syria are unprecedented. At the end of 2010, just before the start of the war, Turkey had only 10,000 refugees and asylum-seekers. Twelve years on, it hosts 3.
Western countries generally praise Turkey for doing a remarkable job for its Syrian refugees. Yet Turks do not want to hear it. Most say the country has become a safe house for foreigners whom Europe does not want to see within its own borders. And many want the refugees to go home. Violence of the kind seen in Altindag remains rare. But as the economy sputters and the election approaches, attitudes to the Syrians have hardened.
Making nice with Syria’s regime could even trigger a fresh exodus. The areas of Syria now under Turkish control are home to some 4m people. Were Turkey to hand them back to Damascus, something Mr Assad will insist on as part of any normalisation agreement, many who fear his tyrannical rule might flee north. A Turkish withdrawal from Idlib province in Syria’s north-west, an opposition stronghold, would surely be followed by a renewed regime offensive, and another refugee wave.
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