Turks on Syria Border Oppose US Military Strike
Many Turkish residents of the border town of Reyhanli — hit by twin car bombings May 11 — worry that they are in jeopardy as a result of a US miltiary strike on Syria.
REYHANLI, Turkey — As President Barack Obama intensifies his lobbying efforts to win congressional support to launch a US military strike in Syria, I thought the place to be today was nowhere else but Reyhanli in Hatay province. This is because many of its residents believe they were the first to pay the price of the policy of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of siding with the Syrian opposition and calling for the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad.
Erdogan is now asking the US not to confine itself to a limited strike but to actually make it a large-scale one that will end the Assad era.
On May 11, this place suffered Turkey’s worst terrorist attack — the official death toll was 53, but residents say 62 actually died. I visited the two sites where the explosions took place just three to four minutes apart, and asked survivors the following: What do they believe happened on that day here? What do they think about the US using its military might to punish Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons to kill at least 1,429 of his own people? What do they think the repercussions of such a strike might be in their town?
Two things were hard to miss in all these conversations. First, although a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been elected mayor the past two elections, and despite this being a district where the AKP receives 70% of the vote — the greatest such support in the country compared with other districts — people are critical of Erdogan’s call for the US to bomb Syria. Second, they believe that the influx of refugees, which has doubled the population here, is having a negative effect on their community — particularly on its culture, its schools and its economy.
