Turkey’s endless Syrian refugee crisis
There may be a limit to Turkey’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees, one that is taxing Turkey’s economy and society.
With the Syrian civil war well into its third year, and no end in sight to the bloody conflict that has uprooted millions of people from their towns and villages, Turkey finds itself facing a growing Syrian refugee crisis that analysts are predicting will result in social tensions as patience among Turks starts wearing thin and the limits of people's hospitality are reached.
Talking to Public Broadcasting Services’ (PBS) Charlie Rose earlier this week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that there were over 700,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey, adding that only 200,000 were in official camps while the rest were spread out across the country.
But even these numbers are considered by the public to be unreliable, given the government’s open-door policy toward Syrian refugees, with some estimates running as high as 1.5 million. Whatever the actual figure may be the makeshift camps set up by Syrians in Turkish cities — mainly in Istanbul — and the increasing number of Syrian beggars on the streets has started to cause grumblings among Turks, forcing the authorities in some cases to take drastic measures.
Municipal officers from Istanbul’s Bayrampasa district evicted 100 mostly Turkmen Syrian families originally from Aleppo a few days ago from their makeshift camp, burning their tents and leaving some of the evicted with no choice but to take refuge with their families in a local bus station.
