Quake Is Disaster Within a Disaster
First, Syria’s civil war drove Hind Qayduha from her home in Aleppo. Then, conflict and joblessness forced her family to flee two more times. Two years ago, she came to southern Turkey, thinking she had finally found safety and stability.
But when a powerful earthquake struck on February 6, it destroyed their apartment in the Turkish city of Antakya and the family was displaced again. They sought safety nearby, braced against the side of the mountain around a medieval monastery and exposed to a cold rain; like many other survivors, they were too shaken to stay under any roof.
Two days later, they were living in an unfinished carwash.
“This is my room for me, my husband and three kids,” Ms. Qayduha said then, laughing as she outlined with her hands a small circle on the black-andwhite patterned blanket, a meager cushion atop the gravel floor. She pointed to another part of the same blanket: “And there’s my mother’s room.”
She said other relatives who had been living near her were still buried in the rubble.
For Syrians, both refugees like Ms. Qayduha and those still living back home, the earthquake was a disaster within a disaster. Over the past 12 years, their lives have been uprooted by civil war and the mass displacement and death it brought. Syrians know all too well the loss of homes — walls felled in mere seconds, people trapped under the rubble for days. But the refugees who fled to Turkey thought they had left those traumas behind.
Now, some say the wholesale destruction wrought by the earthquake was far worse than anything they had seen in more than a decade of war.
The civil war displaced over half of Syria’s 21 million people, and nearly four million of them ended up in Turkey. Many lived in the swath of territory most heavily affected by the earthquake, which killed more than 29,000 people in southern Turkey and more than 3,500 across
the border in northwestern Syria — tolls that keep rising.
At first, the refugees were largely welcomed in Turkey. The Syrians had relatively decent opportunities to make new lives. But over time, they have faced growing pressure to return home, especially in recent years as the Turkish economy has taken a downturn. The humanitarian crisis created by the earthquake has reignited and heightened those tensions.
“And now we are under threat from the Turks, who could kick us out of the country,” said Ms. Qayduha, 37.
Turkish residents of Antakya have leveled unsubstantiated accusations at the Syrians of looting.
Tulin Kuseyri, a 62-year-old Turkish woman, stood by the Orontes River on a recent day, watching searchers remove a body from a building. Near her lay the body of someone she had known, wrapped in a blanket — one of many relatives and friends she had lost in the
quake, along with her family’s cotton factory and her home. “I don’t want Syrian immigrants in Antakya anymore,” she said. “Instead of paying for Syrian people from our taxes, we want them to take care of Turks.”
Yet the relationship between Turks and Syrian refugees is more complex than fear, blame and resentment. In Antakya and other affected areas, some Syrian families said Turkish ones had shared whatever shelter and food they had with them. Other Syrians said that the government-run response had not discriminated.
“Thank God, Turkey isn’t distinguishing between us,” said Jamal Ezzal Deen, a 30-year-old Syrian, as he held his 2-year-old daughter, Fatima. “Even if there is some racism from the people.”
Ms. Qayduha said she still had family in Syria, including two sisters in northwestern Idlib Province and an aunt in Aleppo — two areas hard hit by the quake. But she has not been
able to connect with them.
Her family was desperate to leave the carwash, which has a large opening that allows in bitterly cold air. They want to find shelter in the tent camps the Turkish government has been setting up. But they were spooked by rumors that they would not be allowed in, or that groups of armed Turks were looking for Syrians to attack.
And they dread another earthquake. At night in the carwash, the parents put their children to sleep dressed and wearing shoes, in case an aftershock should force them to run.
It was too much for Ms. Qayduha and her extended family. They used some of their last money to pay drivers to take them west, outside the earthquake zone.
“Back when we were living in the war, we would flee to another area and we would feel safer,” said Ms. Qayduha’s mother, Dalal Masri, 55. “But here, we don’t feel like there’s anywhere safe to go.”