Refugees’ helpers now their killers
The smuggler’s main business was ordinary people – not fighters or extremists, he insisted, but the men, women and children desperate to escape the war in Syria.
For two years, he said, he had been part of a small gang providing a route across the border into Turkey for 100 Turkish lira a head. Four months ago, the killings started.
‘‘Turkish soldiers used to help the refugees across, carry their bags for them,’’ he said. ‘‘Now they shoot at them.’’
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, has documented the deaths of 16 refugees, including three children, at the hands of Turkish security forces on the border over the past four months, as the government in Ankara moves to seal what was an open highway to and from the civil war next door.
The smuggler said the real number was far higher, but almost impossible to pinpoint, because the bodies of those who fell on the Syrian side of the border were dragged back to be buried in the war zone.
The luckiest, he said, were those who were injured on the Turkish side; they were taken to a Turkish hospital for treatment, and then allowed to stay.
The frontier crackdown reveals a policy reversal that has hamper- ed Islamic State’s operating capacity in the borderlands, but has also left tens of thousands of Syria’s most vulnerable people trapped inside the war zone at a time when any hopes for a peaceful settlement have faded.
For almost five years, the porous western half of the 800-kilometre frontier was a key supply line for the rebel militias battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in the north of the country, and an escape route for millions of civilians.
However, it is the flow of foreign jihadists in the other direction, swelling the ranks of Isis and other extremist militias, that has forced Turkey’s hand.
The Turkish government
is accused of turning a blind eye to the jihadist traffic and has come under increasing international pressure to seal the so-called ‘‘Marea line’’, a 100km stretch of border territory that is Isis’s last gateway from Turkey into Syria.
With the United States threatening to use the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia, to snatch Isis’s last border fiefdom – a proposal that infuriates Turkey – President Tayyip Erdogan has finally cracked down.
A senior Turkish official insisted yesterday that the open border policy for Syrian refugees remained unchanged – but things look very different on the ground.
A huge concrete wall is being thrown up along the border, replacing the low rolls of barbed wire that could be easily traversed. More security forces have been drafted in.
The capture of 10 Isis members as they crossed the border last week, laden with explosives, was the latest in a string of recent successes publicised by Turkish media.
The Syrian smuggler said he had earned more than NZ$1000 a week shifting cigarettes, hashish and people back and forth across the frontier. ‘‘Now I am searching for a job,’’ he said. ‘‘The smuggling trade is finished.’’
For his family, trapped in the Syrian town of Azaz along with thousands of others, the lifeline has been cut.