Thousands of Syrians who fled Turkey from the 12-year conflict in Syria returned to their homeland on Wednesday after the devastating earthquakes that affected both countries.
Syrian border officials recently announced that refugees living in Turkey can temporarily return to their homeland and that Turkey had agreed to re-admit them in three to six months, New York Times reported.
If the Syrian officials’ announcement is confirmed by Turkish authorities, there will be policy changes for border crossings. Currently, when Syrians that live under temporary protection in Turkey return to Syria, their temporary protection identity cards in Turkey are cancelled and they have to apply to the immigration office again in order to return.
The specific pass and return permit would only be valid for the Bab al-Hawa border crossing that opens into opposition-held territory in northwestern Syria.
The 6 February earthquakes occurred in Turkey’s southeast near the Syrian border, a region which is also home to Syrian refugees.
About 3,700 Syrian refugees lost their lives in Turkey due to the devastating earthquakes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). More than 1.7 million of the over three and a half million Syrians that fled the war and took refuge in Turkey live in the earthquake zone. The figures consist only of registered Syrians under temporary protection status. 71.3 percent of Syrians living in Turkey are women and children.
SOHR reported on Wednesday that the number of bodies transported from Turkey to Syria has risen to 1,636.
After the disaster, reports of Syrians looting shops or aid trucks in the area, many of which turned out to be false, fueled hostility towards Syrian refugees.
Although there was also a strong nationwide backlash against the hostility towards Syrians, some on social media have started hashtag campaigns urging the government to send Syrians “back home”, as reports of looting in the earthquake area implied refugees were the culprits. Such reports have generally proven to be inaccurate.
Selahattin Demirtaş, the jailed former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said last week that the Turkish government remained silent against the targetting of refugees in the news, and that this created an atmosphere of “distrust and fear”.
The Kurdish politician argued that the Turkish government was attempting to use ethnic and religious conflict to legitimise the state of emergency declared in earthquake-hit provinces.
