With Syrian border officials recently announcing that refugees living in Turkey can temporarily return to their homeland and be re-admitted to Turkey in three to six months, those caught up in the 6 February earthquakes now face a difficult choice.
“Syrian refugees in Turkey face a difficult choice – stay in devastated Turkey even though many have lost their families in the recent quakes, or return to Syria, which continues to struggle with war and a lack of humanitarian aid,” Cordelia Lynch, Sky News correspondent on the Turkish-Syrian border wrote in her special report on conditions at the border crossing in recent days.
Some refugees are driving back to Syria with dead bodies in the car, in an effort to reunite them with family members in their home country.
Describing the situation at the border, Lynch says “Everyone looks shell-shocked. Babies are cold and crying.”
Lynch spoke to Khalid Hussein, a young man who says his brother brought nearly 100 bodies from Turkey to the border, while they both helped to bring children to hospitals. He is now returning to Syria to bury another brother who died during the earthquakes.
Syrian hospitals are overwhelmed and in desperate need of supplies, while their doctors are exhausted, Lynch reports. The country is “wrestling with a disaster it’s woefully under-equipped to manage,” she says.
Syrians are facing hostility in parts of Turkey after reports of Syrians looting shops or aid trucks in the earthquake area, many of which turned out to be false.
Selahattin Demirtaş, the jailed former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said last week that the Turkish government remained silent against the targeting of refugees in the news, and that this created an atmosphere of “distrust and fear”.
