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20-07-2022
DAMASCUS: Syrians living in Turkey have expressed fear and concern about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s proposal to repatriate about one million of them to the northern region of Idlib, as the Turkish government continues to insist that it will carry out a military operation in northern Syria.
In May, Erdogan announced that the government was working to return Syrian refugees to the areas under Turkish security control in northern Syria. The plan includes building 250,000 housing units and equipping them with infrastructure that will extend between the cities of Azaz, Jarablus and al-Bab, all the way to Tal Abyad and Ain Issa.
“We support the ongoing migration strategy with projects to encourage voluntary returns,” Erdogan said at the time.
“Not only have we opened our doors to enable the oppressed to save their lives and dignity, but we also make every effort so that they can return to their homes,” he added.
However, many Syrians are wary of returning to their country, saying that the northern region is still a heavily militarised war zone and that they would be uprooting the lives they had built for themselves in Turkey during Syria’s 11-year bloody war.
“We all would love to return to our country and build it up again,” Mohammed Hawasli, a sales manager of a mobile phone company living in Istanbul told media but “we left for a reason, because Syria is at war with itself and we wanted to live in dignity.”
The 32-year-old, who is from Damascus, arrived to Istanbul in 2012 and in the space of a decade, established a successful business that brings in hundreds of millions of liras in profits to the leading Turkish telecommunications company, Turk Telekom. He also got married and has two young children, who are enrolled in Turkish schools and barely speak a word of Arabic.
According to Turkey’s interior ministry, there are 3,762,000 Syrians who were granted temporary protection living in Turkey. A fraction of that figure – some 295,000 – have obtained Turkish citizenship.
A large number of Syrians in Turkey, Hawasli said, have been in the country for at least 10 years and have rebuilt their lives by finishing their education, setting up businesses and starting families.
“How can we restart our lives after we came a long way to establish ourselves again?” he asked. “How can we go back to a territory that is supposedly safe but in reality, is controlled by several armed factions belonging to different ideologies and rife with guns?” (Int’l News Desk)
