Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
An Unrelenting Crisis: At 300,000 one year ago, Syrian refugees now total 2.1 million, and the United Nations predicts their numbers could swell to 3.5 million by the end of the year.
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: November 23, 2013
The New York Times
KILIS, Turkey — As the boom of shelling resounded along Turkey’s border with Syria here on a recent afternoon, Zakaria Deeb had nowhere left to run.
He had traveled 100 miles to Kilis with his family, chasing a false rumor that refugees would be allowed into a Turkish-run camp in the city, about 50 miles north of the Syrian city Aleppo. Instead, along with hundreds of other Syrians, the Deebs were now squatting in a gravel-strewn field across from the camp, sleeping under plastic sheets hanging from the branch of a cypress tree.
Nearly three years of bloody civil war in Syria have created what the United Nations, governments and international humanitarian organizations describe as the most challenging refugee crisis in a generation — bigger than the one unleashed by the Rwandan genocide and laden with the sectarianism of the Balkan wars. With no end in sight in the conflict and with large parts of Syria already destroyed, governments and organizations are quietly preparing for the refugee crisis to last years.
The Deebs fled their home a year ago because of fighting between Syrian rebels and government forces. Recent clashes between Kurdish fighters and the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, pushed them into Turkey. Now, just on the other side of the border here, ISIS fighters were battling yet another rebel group, the Northern Storm.
“We expected the revolution to be over quickly, like in Libya and Egypt, but it’s been nearly three years already, and God knows when this war will end,” Mr. Deeb, 31, said, peering at the plumes of white smoke rising inside Syria. Children shrieked as another large mortar shell exploded across the border.
A stray bullet from Syria had landed inside the camp in the morning, wounding a 5-year-old girl in the foot. “If this camp is full, we’re willing to go to any camp inside Turkey,” he said. “We don’t want to go back to Syria.”
Syrians have been pouring out of their country in recent months, fleeing an increasingly violent and murky conflict that is pitting scores of armed groups against one another as much as against the government. Numbering just 300,000 one year ago, the refugees now total 2.1 million, and the United Nations predicts their numbers could swell to 3.5 million by the end of the year.
“The fighting continues, people are getting displaced and we don’t know how long it’s going to take,” said Amin Awad, the head of the United Nations’ refugee agency in the Middle East. “Therefore, aside from making sure the humanitarian operations are running, we need to support the host communities and governments.”
The exodus has stretched the resources of the region’s host countries — Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and even Turkey, the biggest and richest by far. Camps are full. But so are many neighborhoods in cities, towns and villages, where the Syrians’ presence has raised rents, undercut wages and increased tensions. In Lebanon, the smallest of the host nations and the most politically fragile, Syrian refugees are expected soon to make up a quarter of the population.
The flood has also raised fears that the refugees will import the Syrian conflict into the host countries, and destabilize already fragile borders. Like the other host nations, Turkey, which is actively supporting the Syrian opposition, was struggling to control the mass movements across its border.
In Hatay, Turkey’s southwestern province, hundreds of Syrians could be seen crossing illegally, unchecked by border guards or soldiers. Stretches of the border appeared porous and lawless. Criminal gangs thriving in the cross-border smuggling of gasoline and other goods could be seen working in broad daylight, using walkie-talkies to direct trucks in and out of Syria.
A few miles from one of the biggest smuggling centers, the Turkish border town Bes Arslan, soldiers could sometimes be seen chasing individual Syrians clambering down a hill into Turkey. In a cat-and-mouse game played out over the day, Syrians crouched behind trees and rocks, some successfully slipping into Turkey; others were caught by soldiers and sent back.
Those turned away often try again later in the day. As soon as darkness fell, hundreds of Syrians began pouring out of Bes Arslan onto the highway, where relatives and taxi drivers were waiting. Slipping in and out of the headlights, they stuffed large suitcases into vehicles that quickly took them deeper into Turkey.
One weeping woman was ushered into the back seat of a car as the driver and others took care of her luggage and five children. Her baby, who had been sitting on the asphalt, was finally put inside, and the car whisked the family away. Her husband had died in a bombing earlier that day during the family’s flight.
“She had to leave his body behind in Syria,” said one of the men who had helped her with her luggage. “The driver is taking her into town for free.”
Rising Frustration
Saher Hardan, another squatter in Kilis, fled Syria two years ago with her children. With the money she earned from selling a modest piece of land, the family lived in a $75-a-month apartment here until recently. Now out of money, the Hardans sleep inside a tent with their neatly stacked belongings. A framed portrait of Ms. Hardan’s husband — a former school janitor who fought for the Western-backed Free Syrian Army and was killed, “torn into pieces” in an explosion — sat prominently in the middle of the tent.
“We tried four times to get into a camp, but they keep telling us that there is no space,” Ms. Hardan, 45, said.
Turkey has already spent $2 billion sheltering 200,000 Syrian refugees in 21 camps. But an estimated 400,000 live in Turkish communities, and many, like Ms. Hardan, have exhausted their savings and are turning to Turkey for help. Turkish officials, who have been praised for their well-run camps, are expressing frustration.
“The Syrian refugees want more than what we can provide,” said Suleyman Tapsiz, the governor of Kilis. “So we’re caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, if we provide good services, more and more people will come. On the other hand, if we don’t provide good services, we risk being labeled a government that doesn’t provide humanitarian help properly.”
The United Nations has asked for more than $5 billion in humanitarian aid this year for Syria, its biggest financial appeal ever for a single crisis. Officials say the high costs result not only from the scale of the crisis but also from the difficulties of catering to a refugee population used to middle-class conditions.
Dry food rations have been typically distributed inside refugee camps during crises in Africa, while registered Syrian refugees are given vouchers or debit cards to buy food at supermarkets. The cost is greater, but the Syrians prefer the freedom of preparing their own meals. The practice also injects money into the host communities — $160 million from the World Food Program has trickled into local stores in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt so far this year.
Governments and humanitarian groups are increasingly working under the assumption that the crisis will be a long-lasting one.
The Danish Refugee Council recently established two community centers in Turkey where refugees can study Turkish and English, as well as take computer lessons and learn other skills. In the center in Altinozu, in Hatay Province, the Syrians and Turkish locals have also mixed in cooking classes and soccer matches.
“We need projects to bring host and refugee communities together,” said Sarah Saleh, the council’s Turkey director.
At a Turkish language class offered by the city of Gaziantep, a couple of dozen Syrian men and women were being taught the pronunciation of vowels and the differences with Arabic.
Anas Hejazi, 26, was attending the class with his father. They both worked as dentists in Damascus before coming to Turkey six months ago. Acquiring some Turkish, he hoped, would increase his chances of eventually earning a license to practice.
“I need to enter the Turkish community because my life is now here,” he said. “I need to speak their language.”
Divisions and Risks
At the main border crossing in Reyhanli, a southwestern town in Turkey, Khaldun Ibrahim, 20, a black backpack slung over his right shoulder, was going back to Syria. He had spent a week with his parents, refugees inside Turkey, to celebrate the recent Muslim new year, Eid al-Adha.
“I ate too much,” he said with a pat on his belly. Then turning serious, Mr. Khaldun, whose facial hair — bushy beard but no mustache — reflected the Islamist leanings of his brigade, Ahrar al-Sham, added: “I’m a fighter out of his homeland. So I’m happy to be going back to Syria.”
The ease with which fighters are crossing in and out of Syria, as well as their strong ties with the refugee population in the region, underscores the fears that the refugees will inevitably bring the conflict with them, as refugees have often done in the past.
The Assad government, led by Alawites who are considered an offshoot of Shiite Islam, is supported by Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia; Syria’s Sunni opposition is backed by Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The host countries themselves have carved out positions on the Syrian conflict along sectarian lines.
The refugee population in the region reflects that divide and carries its risks.
In Sunni-led Turkey, which backs the Syrian opposition, most of the Syrians in the camps and cities are believed to be Sunni. Alawite and Shiite Syrians have gravitated to southwest Turkey, a religiously mixed region, or tried to melt away in the Istanbul megalopolis. Syrians of both sects have fled to Lebanon, a country with a weak central government and a fragile balance between its Sunni and Shiite populations.
Syrian Kurds have gone to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Young refugee men are joining Kurdish militias that are increasingly locked in battles along the Turkish-Syrian border with Sunni-led Islamic extremists, who move easily between eastern Syria and western Iraq.
Jordan, a Sunni country that supports the Syrian opposition, has received Sunni Syrians. But the kingdom, an American ally, fears the contagion of an increasingly potent dimension of the Syrian conflict: the battle between moderate and radical Islam.
“The longer the conflict continues, the more we see Jordan becoming a destination for extremists,” said a high-ranking Jordanian government official.
Jordan is worried not only about extremists among the Syrian refugees but also about their effect on its own jihadist Salafists. “More and more young Jordanians are becoming extremists because of Syria,” said Osama Shihadeh, a prominent moderate Jordanian Salafist. His own nephew, he said, had gone to fight inside Syria despite his parents’ opposition.
A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Syria Seen as Most Dire Refugee Crisis in a Generation .
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