By James Reynolds BBC News, Ceylanpinar, Turkey-Syria border
A Syrian refugee ducks wire on the border with Turkey Some Syrians prefer to cross the border unofficially
From the edges of southern Turkey, you can see the smoke of a single cigarette inside Syria. The Turkish town of Ceylanpinar is around 50m away from the Syrian town of Ras al-Ain. The two countries are separated by a barbed wire fence.
On the Syrian side, two children pick up bullet casings and clink them together. A group of opposition gunmen holds up its rifles and grenades for spectators watching from Turkey.
For several days earlier this month the Syrian army shelled Ras al-Ain to try to get rid of the rebels. Thousands of the town’s residents fled to Ceylanpinar. Syria’s war is right next door. This makes the Turkish state nervous.
On the main road facing the border, Turkey has created a small buffer zone with a roll of razor wire. Inside this zone, Turkish soldiers in one-man trenches are positioned every 30m or so.
The soldiers instruct Syrians who want to cross to walk to a nearby military position. From there, the Turkish authorities will register the new refugees and take them to well-guarded refugee camps inside Turkey.
But many Syrians thinking of crossing do not want to be confined to official camps. They have noted that the soldiers’ border duties do not appear to include early mornings.
Burnt houses
Just before 08:00, three men approach a hole in the border fence opposite a Turkish playground. A friend standing in the playground shouts instructions to them. He tells them to cross. The men duck underneath the razor wire and jog across railway tracks into Turkey.
Syrian refugee Karim Karim is separated from his family
One curses the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad.
“Bashar forced us to leave. Bashar has no honour.”
Their friend helps them up a hillside into the small playground guarded by a roll of razor wire.
“We’ll go back very soon – I swear,” says one of men.
“People are hungry,” says Ali, one of the three. “There is no bread on the other side. They are sleeping outside. People were killed when they were in their homes.”
Later in the day, Turkish soldiers arrive to patrol the border fence. A commander fiddling with a packet of cigarettes periodically orders Syrians inside Turkey to keep their distance from the border. On the edges of the small playground, Karim talks to one of his family members on a mobile phone. His daughter clings to his legs.
“How are things over there?” he asks. “Do you have enough food?”
Karim managed to escape Ras al-Ain earlier this month when the Syrian army shelled the town. He is now trying to get the rest of his family across.
“Houses are burned down, they’re destroyed,” he says. “My family needs our help but we’re all afraid of the warplanes flying overhead.”
No place to go
Since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011, official figures show that Turkey has taken in more than 100,000 refugees. The Turkish government in Ankara is nervous about the effects of having so many Syrian refugees on its soil.
BBC map
But the local Turkish authorities in Ceylanpinar see things differently. This region is mostly Kurdish on both sides of the border. The Kurdish-speaking authorities here are keen to provide help for refugees who speak the same language, and share the same culture.
A municipal building in Ceylanpinar normally used as a condolence hall has become a canteen and a hotel. Volunteers serve dozens of refugee families a lunch of bread, rice, yoghurt and chicken.
The children have to make their way through adult-size portions. On a bench in the main hall, there is a bag of second-hand clothes for those who have left everything behind.
In the courtyard, a middle-aged volunteer wearing a suit dutifully takes his place in a circle of children playing a game. Another volunteer, Ali Kirdar, sits on a bench and rolls a cigarette. He spends his time finding newly escaped refugees and bringing them to the hall.
“Many of the refugees have no place to go,” he says.
“So you can find them in nearby parks with their belongings at their feet. They just sit and stare ahead. You can tell that they don’t know anyone and that they need help.”
Syrian refugees at border with Turkey
Local discontent
Not everyone appreciates the new arrivals. At a hairdressers in Ceylanpinar, the barber says that a refugee from Syria recently stole one of the boxes of canaries that he keeps on a ledge above the mirror.
Behind the barber’s chair, Orhan Guven waits patiently for a haircut. He sent the rest of his family away from this area – after bullets from Syria hit their house.
“A piece of shrapnel grazed my grandmother as she was sitting in our courtyard,” he recalls.
“The government has evacuated nearby villages but there are houses here only 30m from the border which have not been evacuated. We are left on our own – that’s how we feel.”
The Turkish military wants to keep the border quiet. Throughout the day soldiers try to break up crowds of Syrians shouting to their friends across the border. A water cannon is deployed to get the crowd to disperse.
The Turkish state may host tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, but it does not want them to make too much noise.
via BBC News – Syrian refugees slipping into Turkey.
Russia has warned against NATO’s possible deployment of Patriot missiles near Turkey’s border with Syria.
Patriot anti-missile batteries installed at the Diyarbakir military airport in southeastern Turkey (AFP Photo / Mehdi Fedouach)
Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Thursday that Turkey’s request for deployment to the Western military alliance “would not foster stability in the region.”
NATO ambassadors met Wednesday to consider Turkey’s request, which followed weeks of talks between Ankara and NATO allies about how to shore up security on its 900 kilometer border to avoid a spillover from the Syrian civil war.
The alliance’s secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the deployment would augment alliance member Turkey’s air defense capabilities and “would contribute to the de-escalation of the crisis along NATO’s southeastern border.”
Turkey said Tuesday it had found allies who agreed to supply it with an advanced Patriot missile system. Only the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have the appropriate system available. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said he had told his country’s ambassador to NATO to approve Turkey’s request.
Turkey’s border villages have been hit by artillery fire from Syria as forces loyal to Damascus battle rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Rasmussen has said that any missile deployment would be a defensive measure to counter mortar rounds, and not to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. Syrian rebels have called for a no-fly zone as they are almost defenseless against Syria’s air force.
via Russia Opposes NATO Missiles on Turkey-Syria Border.
The Air Defence Missile Squadron 2 with a Patriot missile launcher during an exercise at training site Warbelow near Gnoien, northern Germany. (AFP Photo / Bernd Wustneck)
NATO has confirmed that it received a request from Ankara to deploy Patriot missiles on Turkish territory. The coalition said it would process the appeal soon.
“I have received Turkey’s request for NATO to deploy Patriot missiles. Allies will discuss this without delay,”
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said via his Twitter account.
“The situation along the Syrian-Turkish border is of great concern,” Rasmussen said earlier at a meeting with the European Union’s foreign and defense ministers. “We have all plans in place to defend and protect Turkey if needed.”
The confirmation comes two weeks after Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that he had requested that NATO install the surface-to-air missiles near the Turkish border with Syria. Prime Minster Recip Tayyip Erdogan later denied that Turkey had made such a request.
Davutoglu said that the missiles were needed to bolster defenses on its border with Syria. The surface-to-air missiles will be able to shoot down aircraft up to 160 kilometers away.
The Patriot is a long-range, all-weather and all-altitude defense system capable of countering tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and advanced aircraft.
Within NATO only the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have Patriot missile systems available.
Reports say Germany has already spoken in favor of the request. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, that he ordered the German Ambassador to Turkey “to positively receive such a request.”
“It would be a serious mistake if we were to refuse defensive support to a NATO member country in a moment when this member country feels that it is exposed to attacks from outside,” he said.
NATO installed Patriot systems by Turkish request two times, during the first and second Iraq wars in 1991 and 2003. The systems, however, went unused and were removed from the country shortly after the wars. In both cases the deployment was carried out by the Netherlands.
via NATO confirms receiving Turkey’s Patriot missile request — RT.
Syrians continue to cross into Turkey, fleeing from the dangers of what is now a 20-month conflict. For those unable to leave, Turkey has served as a lifeline for basic supplies. Margaret Warner reports from the refugee camps and internally displaced camps, where the struggle to survive remains a constant concern for civilians.
JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to another deadly conflict in the Middle East, the Syrian civil war. According to one activist group, the battle between government forces and rebels has claimed the lives of more than 37,000 people.
Margaret Warner is on a reporting trip to the region filing stories for our website and our broadcast. Tonight, she gets an inside look at the opposition in Syria and Turkey’s role supporting it.
MARGARET WARNER: It was a reunion six years in the making. Thirty-three-year-old Syrian Oubab Khalil embraced his younger brothers last week on a street corner in the Turkish town of Rehanle, just three miles from the Syrian border.
Oubab left Syria in 2006, after his civil society activities drew a warning from President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
But from his comfortable life in Dallas, he recently engineered his younger brother’s escape. En route to their meeting, he spoke of his mixed feelings at having to meet them in Turkey.
OUBAB KHALIL, Syria: Very excited to see them, but at the same time, I cannot take, like, the back images that we’re meeting in a foreign country, in a neighbor country, not meeting at home.
MARGARET WARNER: And where was this, Majid?
Majid Khalil had been serving compulsory military duty in intelligence until his assignment changed.
MAJID KHALIL,Syria (through translator): We had to flee because the rise of the regime would have forced us to fight against the people. The orders we got were to crush demonstrations by any means possible, even if we had to run them over with cars or shoot them.
MARGARET WARNER: Wajd Khalil, who was teaching French in Latakia, felt he had to flee too.
WAJD KHALIL, Syria (through translator): Because my brother had escaped, they might arrest and torture me to get information about him.
MARGARET WARNER: Through the help of the U.S.- and Canada-based Syrian Support Group, Oubab got his brothers out to Turkey through a network of sympathizers.
Though the rebellion is often described as a conflict between Assad’s ruling Alawite sect and Syria’s majority Sunnis, the escape of the Khalil brothers, who are Alawite, tells a different story.
OUBAB KHALIL: It’s worth mentioning that the whole operation was done by Sunni. There are, like, Sunni people who risk their lives to rescue and make sure there are, like, Alawites — one of them is a defector, soldier defector in the security forces.
MARGARET WARNER: But millions are still trapped as the rebellion rages on. We traveled to the rebel-liberated zone in northwest Syria to see what 20 months of conflict had wrought.
Syrian ground forces have left, but the devastation remains. Residents get by on a makeshift economy, relying on watered-downed petrol dispensed from oil drums and locally grown vegetables for sale on a roundabout.
Many remain defiant. Friday, demonstrators of Haratan, outside Aleppo, site of a four-month battle for control, mocked Assad and called on the Arab world to help them.
But the regime’s bomber jets thunder daily overhead.
SALEH HAWA, Local Administrative Council, Haratan, Syria: When the airplane comes, children start crying and start shouting, and everybody goes to his mother or father. It’s a very, very, very bad feeling for us.
MARGARET WARNER: English teacher Saleh Hawa leads the local administration council of Haratan, a civilian group working to restore basic town services after government forces and officials withdrew.
SALEH HAWA: We had to take care of everything as educated people, as people who started this revolution against this brutal regime. So, we had to take care of electricity. We had to take care of telephones, of streets, of spreading bread.
MARGARET WARNER: The goal, says Hawa, to keep life bearable enough that people will stay.
SALEH HAWA: Without electricity, everybody would leave home. And we have to stay here to resist this brutal on — and this brutal regime.
MARGARET WARNER: For others, staying home isn’t an option. This camp for Syria’s internally displaced was built two months ago by a young Aleppo man named Farouk. We agreed to shield his face.
A Libyan benefactor bought the tents and tarps, but he’s received little assistance since then, aside from daily half-rations of food from a Turkish NGO.
Now, what’s going to happen here if you don’t get more help?
FAROUK, camp manager: I don’t know that. We are working every day. And we don’t know what happens tomorrow. If the food was finished, I don’t know what I can do. But that’s my work. And I’m so happy.
MARGARET WARNER: Why are you happy?
FAROUK: To help these people, because nobody, nobody take care of them.
MARGARET WARNER: But life is hard in the camp, especially with children; 40-year-old Kadiya Al-Darwish and her 11 were barred official entry to Turkey.
Do you have food?
WOMAN (through translator): Today, they gave us only six tiny meals of old bread.
MARGARET WARNER: And are there bathrooms?
WOMAN (through translator): For all the women in the camp, there are only six toilets.
MARGARET WARNER: And have you needed any kind of medical care for your children?
WOMAN (through translator): If a child gets sick, they prescribe medicine for us, but it’s not available.
MARGARET WARNER: One thing the camp does have, a makeshift mosque. Despite the apparent calm, anger bubbles beneath the surface.
MAN (through translator): We have no shelter, no food. There is no heat. Children are cold and getting sick. This is what Bashar and his people did.
MARGARET WARNER: What help they do get comes through Syria’s neighbors. Turkey is a lifeline for civilians and for the fighters of the rebel Free Syrian Army, or FSA. Money, guns and medical supplies all make it through official and unofficial crossings from Turkish border towns like Antakya.
Along this busy shopping street, locals here in Antakya can buy everything from clothing to fast food to cell phones. But just around this corner, down this cobblestone street, is a back alley where you can find a whole underground economy, an underground economy that helps keep the Syrian resistance going.
A Syrian activist calling himself “Abu Joudy” collects donated medical supplies from Turkish pharmacies, everything from bandages to antibiotics.
So do you feel Turkey is allowing this, enabling this?
“ABU JOUDY,” Turkey (through translator): Turkey helps my group. And when we need it, the Turkish government lets the supplies go through the border, even at official border crossings.
MARGARET WARNER: Also being sheltered in Turkey, Syrian attorney Ahmed Hassoun in Antakya. His Free Syrian Lawyers Association is documenting cases of regime atrocities for trial one day. He concedes rebel forces have been accused of abuses too, and says they will be subject to prosecution.
AHMED HASSOUN, President, Syrian Free Lawyers Association (through translator): In the future in Syria, the laws will be applied to all, regardless of their religion, doctrine or position. The Syrian people didn’t rebel against the dictator to bring another one. They rebelled for freedom, democracy, dignity and the application of the law to everyone.
MARGARET WARNER: Yet even this idealistic attorney dismisses talk from the West of a negotiated end to the conflict.
Do you think there’s a peaceful solution to the conflict in Syria?
AHMED HASSOUN (through translator): I don’t think so. Dictators don’t have a midpoint. It’s either they stay or no one else does.
MARGARET WARNER: So, what is it going to take to solve this conflict?
AHMED HASSOUN (through translator): I think the only solution is arming the organized Syrian opposition.
MARGARET WARNER: A prominent commander in that armed opposition is Colonel Abdul-Jabbar Akidi who heads the Aleppo Region Military Council. We were taken to meet him at a secret command center where he decamped after a targeted airstrike against him two weeks ago.
He outlined for us the scope of the territory his unit holds on the ground, hundreds of square miles bordering Turkey.
COL. ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI, Aleppo Region Military Council (through translator): We are advancing each new day and winning new battles. We have almost full control of the ground, though they are superior in the air.
MARGARET WARNER: He moved his wife to Turkey for safety and is free to travel there when needed.
ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI (through translator): Turkey is a friend and neighbor. We won’t forget this good stand by Turkey and its people toward the Syrian people. The Syrian people won’t forget any country that provided them with support and won’t forgive any country that helped the Assad regime.
MARGARET WARNER: But Akidi says he needs more from Turkey and the West: a no-fly zone and anti-aircraft weapons for his men to take down fighter jets and helicopters.
ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI (through translator): We need the world and the international community to stop supporting Bashar al-Assad. But we are determined to overthrow this regime by any means, even if the whole world is standing by his side and supporting it.
MARGARET WARNER: Do you think the whole word is supporting this regime?
ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI (through translator): Yes, headed by the USA.
MARGARET WARNER: How so?
ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI (through translator): Because they are watching Syrian blood being poured out in the streets by this criminal regime. If a cat or a dog were killed in any place in the world, the world would react more than it did to the death of nearly 100,000 Syrians.
MARGARET WARNER: The U.S. government says they’re reluctant to provide anti-aircraft weaponry because of the fear that it will fall into the wrong hands.
ABDUL-JABBAR AKIDI through translator): This is an excuse used by the west. We pledge to the international community that these weapons will be in safe hands, in the hands of specialized officers. There are only a few extremists or jihadists, but the West is directly empowering some of them by not supporting the organized groups.
MARGARET WARNER: Meanwhile, civilian leader Saleh Hawa works hands in glove with Akidi’s FSA unit which protects his town.
SALEH HAWA: We didn’t get anything, any single, — any penny from any people.
MARGARET WARNER: What about from Western governments or NGOs?
SALEH HAWA: Well, we haven’t received anything at all. We are tired now. We are tired now of war. We are tired of shelling every day.
MARGARET WARNER: He’s not sure how long this town can hold out without Western help.
SALEH HAWA: I think not a very long time, not for a long time. Now winter is coming. We have thousands of displaced people who came from Aleppo. We don’t have anything. So I think that our ability to withstand that is very, very, very small.
MARGARET WARNER: Yet, so far, it hasn’t paid to bet against the resilience of the Syrian people. And activists like Oubab and Majid Khalil say they will continue aiding the resistance from outside.
OUBAB KHALIL: I want to reach out to the elements, specifically Alawite, that they don’t have blood on their hands. And we want to make sure that they are on the right side of history. And there are some good people in the regime that they want to cooperate and they want to work with us. And we’re going to reach out to these people.
MARGARET WARNER: Together, they hope all will be welcome in the new Syria they want to build.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In her next report, Margaret looks at the more than 100,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Turkey.
DJIBOUTI, Nov 15 (Reuters) – Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called on Muslim nations to recognise a fledgling Syrian opposition coalition on Thursday and warned Turkey had both the will and capacity to defend its borders if violence continued to spill over.
Speaking at an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) ministerial meeting in Djibouti, Davutoglu hailed the formation of the new opposition grouping as an “important achievement” and said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was on its last legs.
“Turkey … once again reiterates its recognition of the Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people and calls upon all our brothers in the OIC to do so,” Davutoglu said, according to the text of his speech.
Members of Syria’s fractious opposition, including rebel fighters, veteran dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities, forged a coalition on Sunday to try to end the in-fighting that has hampered their struggle against Assad.
France and some Gulf Arab states have fully recognised the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces but the United States, Arab League and most European countries have been more cautious.
Turkey, which is housing more than 120,000 Syrian refugees, has led calls for the creation of a buffer zone to protect civilians inside Syria and has grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of international consensus.
It has bolstered the military presence along its 900 km (560 mile) border with Syria, fired back in response to mortar shells flying into its territory, and is talking to NATO about the possible deployment of Patriot surface-to-air missiles, a potential prelude to enforcing a no-fly zone.
“We do not want escalation. But everyone should be well aware that Turkey has the capacity and determination to protect its citizens and borders,” Davutoglu said.
“Turkey’s border security has been jeopardised. Our towns on the border have been targeted by the Syrian army,” he said.
via Turkey Urges Muslim States To Recognize Syria Opposition.
Rebels clean their weapons and check ammunition Wednesday at their base on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria. Khalil Hamra — AP Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2012/11/14/4279104/obama-says-he-wont-embrace-syrias.html#storylink=cpy
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Unlike France, Saudi Arabia and several other U.S. allies in the Gulf, President Obama Wednesday held back from recognizing a new Syrian opposition group as the core of a government-in-exile, a caution that appeared to reflect concern over issues that have emerged since its formation on Sunday.
Questions have arisen about the views of the head of the group, moderate cleric Moaz al Khatib, and the influence of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood on the new organization, which since Sunday has operated under the ungainly name: the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.
Obama said he wanted to make sure that the opposition is “committed to a democratic Syria, an inclusive Syria, a moderate Syria” to replace the regime of Bashar Assad and added: “We have seen extremist elements insinuate themselves into the opposition.”
He no doubt had in mind the presence of Islamists among the Syrian fighters on the ground, including some with reputed ties to the al Qaida terror organization, but U.S. officials in the past have also voiced concern over the influence over émigré politics of members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
During the presidential election campaign that ended two weeks ago with Obama’s re-election, Republican challenger Mitt Romney repeatedly referred to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a major setback to U.S. interests. In their foreign policy debate, Obama did not dispute the characterization.
In its first major organizational decision on Wednesday, the new National Coalition announced it was setting up its headquarters in the Egyptian capital. The Egyptian foreign ministry said it would place “all our capacities at their disposal.”
While the new Coalition undoubtedly was signaling a break with the Syrian National Council, the single biggest émigré political body, which had been based in Turkey, the move to Cairo ensures that the Brotherhood-led government in the most important Arab state will have more than a minor influence on the Syrian opposition.
Members of the Brotherhood already had gained substantial influence on the Council, including its decision last Friday to reorganize and revamp its operations and to elect George Sabra, a Christian geography teacher, as its president.
“A lot of Syrian opposition people were down on the Sabra appointment,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist and director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “They saw it as a trick and a hypocritical move, because Sabra wasn’t even elected to the Secretariat General” of the Council, he told McClatchy.
Brotherhood members did this by committing their bloc of 10 votes in the 41 seat General Secretariat first to add Sabra to the executive committee and then to elect him president. Christians comprise only about 10 per cent of the Syrian population, and lacking a sizable constituency of his own, Sabra could only feel beholden to the Brotherhood, he said.
While the United States and other western powers want the new Coalition to supplant the Council, the Brotherhood is sure to retain its influence. A leading Brotherhood member told McClatchy that no more than six of the 63 in the Coalition’s membership are from his group. Yet with 22 of the Coalition seats occupied by members of the Council, and given that the Brotherhood has a significant influence on the Council, it seems likely to retain a substantial role in émigré politics.
Amr al Azm, a Syrian American who teaches Middle East history at Shawnee State University in Ohio, calculates that the Brotherhood effectively controls half of more of the seats in the new Coalition.
Analysts of Syrian politics point out that the Brotherhood has had almost no role or presence in Syria, since Assad’s father, Hafez, conducted a murderous crackdown against the Brotherhood in Hama in 1981, killing at least 10,000 civilians. Since Syrians took to the streets in March 2011 to demand Bashar Assad’s overthrow, Brotherhood members have proved the most astute of the émigré politicians in the tactics of political organization.
There are other reasons for Washington not to jump too fast into supporting the Coalition, even though open U.S. pressure was a reason that it was set up to replace the Council. “The Coalition is fairly fragile,” said Azm. “It’s a totally untested entity. Plus the fact is the people themselves are untested.”
The third cause for concern appears to be Khatib, a widely respected cleric, whose views on Syria’s future do not square with the U.S. government’s preferred course of action. In July, shortly after émigrés met in Cairo and drafted two documents of intent on running Syria, Khatib posted a statement on his web site, expressing disappointment that the documents did not refer to Islamic Sharia law.
“It was part of a wider Brotherhood campaign to stir up anti-Cairo feelings,” Azm recalled. “It wasn’t just about Sharia. They were worried that the plan was too secular.” He said the posting “may come back to haunt” Khatib.
Unless there’s a screen-save out there with the full text, it would be difficult to prove that Khatib said that, however. There was a gap in the postings on the site yesterday – from November 2011 through September 2012.
Members of the Coalition and the Council will meet western leaders in London Friday to discuss western government plans to step up humanitarian aid to Syrians fighting to overthrow Assad and possibly open the way to an increased flow of weapons.
But the meeting of real importance is a conference in Marrakesh in early December between a U.S.-sponsored group, the “Friends of the people of Syria” and the new Coalition. Should the United States still be unable to endorse the Coalition at that meeting, Syria observers say the Coalition will be severely weakened.
