Syrians in Turkey Agonize Over a Return Home

In the early morning of Nov. 30, 2024, within hours of the news that Syria’s Assad regime had lost control of Aleppo, Rami Sawas was in his car speeding from his apartment in Gaziantep, Turkey, toward the Syrian border. He was sure the regime would fight to retake the city, but for as long as this liberation might last, he needed to be in a free Aleppo. He had been dreaming of going back home ever since arriving in Turkey in the summer of 2014. To soothe his panic attacks in his exile, he would walk Gaziantep’s old streets, which resembled Aleppo’s, only 60 miles away. Now, because his logistics company occasionally did work in Syria in areas under rebel or Turkish control, he had a permit that would allow him to cross the border into those areas specifically. But as he approached border control, he thought to check his permit and discovered that it would expire at 5 p.m. that very day.

That left him with some 10 hours to see Aleppo and make it back to Gaziantep, lest he be separated from his family. His wife, Hiba, who is also Syrian, had been naturalized as Turkish and had been able to pass citizenship on to their daughter, Pamela, who had just turned 2. Rami, in contrast, lived in constant fear of being kicked out of Turkey. He entered the country 10 years earlier on his Syrian passport and had refused to register as a refugee, as most Syrians did. He instead applied for residency and work permits, for which he had to repeatedly reapply with no assurances that they would be renewed. When the renewals came, it was often only at the very last minute and then for unpredictable durations. He lived in Gaziantep because he wanted to stay as close as possible to Aleppo, in the hope that a day like today might come. Ever since Pamela was born, Rami would play her videos of Aleppo and explain to her: “You have citizenship in this country, but you are not from here. Your origins are from Aleppo. You live here temporarily. One day, you will see Aleppo.”

With the collapse of the Assad regime in December, how many of the more than six million Syrians who fled their country during its 13-year civil war will return? It is a question with enormous implications not only for the displaced Syrians themselves but also for the countries that took them in. Wherever displaced Syrians landed, their politicized presence has become a liability for the governments in power and fodder for their oppositions. While Europe would take in around a million Syrians, most Syrians were actually flung across Syria’s borders to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey; Turkey accepted more than three and a half million Syrians and, since 2014, has been the world’s largest host of refugees.

Syrians were originally welcomed in Turkey, but that welcome had long since changed to hostility. It became common to encounter a xenophobic insistence that Syrians should be returned to their homeland rather than integrated into Turkish society. Turkey’s approach to accepting Syrian refugees was once seen as a model for how to treat people fleeing war, but this supposedly ideal solution had been coming apart for years, and no more so than in places like Gaziantep and other cities in the borderlands that both separate and bind the fates of Syria and Turkey, especially in times of upheaval. Now, after years in which the situation in Syria seemed to have become stagnant, the fall of the regime, for Syrians displaced in Turkey, offered a glimmer of hope amid a precarious existence marked by everyday humiliation and occasional violence in the country of their refuge.

On the day the regime lost control of Aleppo, Rami made it to within seven minutes of his childhood house, according to his car’s GPS, before the rebels in the city began taking heavy fire. At that moment, he had to decide whether to go back to Gaziantep or be stuck inside Syria when his permit expired. He thought of Pamela and turned around. He cleared the Turkish border at 4:50 p.m., with 10 minutes to spare.

Image