Syrians fear reprisals over Turkey bombings

Reyhanli, Turkey: In this southern Turkish town known as “little Syria,” the Syrians now dare not show their faces.

Some 60,000 have fled Syria’s civil war to Reyhanli, a Turkish town near the Syrian border. On Tuesday, many were in hiding, fearing violent reprisals from angry Turks after two car bombs ripped through the town’s main thoroughfare around lunchtime on Saturday, killing at least 50 people.

The sharp escalation in tensions between Turks and Syrian refugees along parts of the neighbours’ 900km border underscores how Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a critical US ally in the Muslim world, is struggling with the Syria crisis, which has sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into Turkish territory and created unusually public friction with Washington.

Erdogan is due to meet President Barack Obama on Thursday at the White House, where the allies are expected to discuss their sharp disagreements on their approaches to Syria and other Middle East issues, as the US is increasingly relying on Ankara as a bridgehead to retain influence in a region from which it has withdrawn its footprint.

Shortly after the bombs detonated 15 minutes apart, some Syrians were attacked by mobs who blamed the community for making Reyhanli a target, according to witness and television accounts. Property identifiable as Syrian has been vandalised and large groups of Syrians have left town. Hundreds of police drafted from across Turkey are patrolling the streets and monitoring tensions as locals bury the bodies of their loved ones.

“Seven or eight policemen came here on the day of the blast to protect us, and they stayed with us until late night,” said Abdullah Gafur Al Khatib, the director of a physical-therapy centre for wounded rebel fighters and civilians, run by Syrians in Reyhanli.

Al Khatib, who was waiting in the centre with a dozen Syrian workers and patients, said he hadn’t been outside since the blasts.

“If it’s tense like this, we cannot stay in Reyhanli any longer and we have to find somewhere else. I don’t know where we’d go,” Al Khatib said, adding that he was afraid to leave the patients to go to his rental apartment nearby.

On Tuesday, groups of Syrians could be seen leaving Reyhanli to cross the border into areas of northern Syria held by opposition groups.

Reyhanli, a Turkish Sunni-majority city of 63,000 residents, has become a lifeline for Syria’s opposition rebels, hosting three major care centres for treating wounded fighters, schools for Syrian children and offices of numerous Syrian organisations, which bring aid, food and other supplies to Syria from the nearby border gate of Cilvegozu.

Turkey hosts roughly 400,000 Syrians in 17 refugee camps and its cities along the border, its disaster-relief agency estimates.

Reyhanli emerged as an opposition hub last fall, when the Syrians were moved from the nearby city of Antakya after local residents there — many of whom belong to the Alawite sect of President Bashar Al Assad — said they were disturbing the carefully maintained peace in the ethnically Arab Turkish city.

Now some of the mourning Turkish residents in Reyhanli say the Syrian residents have turned the once-sleepy town into a target for the Syrian regime, while others accuse the refugees of having staged the attacks.

Syria has denied carrying out the attacks. Interior Minister Muammer Guler, speaking in the Turkish parliament, said on Tuesday that the Syrian refugees had nothing to do with the attacks, and that the victims’ families would be compensated.

The refugee numbers have doubled Reyhanli’s population and tensions have been growing over jobs.

“The Syrians cannot stay here longer than a week. Then they will have to be moved out,” said Sefercan Bede, 21, a student from Reyhanli, as he watched two more bodies being unearthed from wreckage on Monday.

Residents say many are still missing after the blasts, so the death toll is expected to rise.

When Syrian refugees first entered Turkey in 2011, they were largely well received. But attitudes have shifted as the Syrian war has increasingly lapped at Turkey’s border.

In Reyhanli, anger has been building, but Turkish officials have urged people to keep calm. Turkey has tightened controls at the nearby border gate, which was until Saturday a porous crossing point for refugees and opposition fighters, officials said.

One official from Turkey’s foreign ministry said on Monday that Ankara wasn’t planning to move the Syrians elsewhere and didn’t expect the tension to last.

Groups of Syrians were seen leaving for Syria on Tuesday, crossing the border at Cilvegozu, but Turkish officials and Syrian activists said they didn’t expect a massive exodus. Border officials said that while Syrians always come and go, there had been an increase in the numbers on Tuesday.

Syrian activists and doctors said families from Reyhanli had received visits by people who warned them to leave.

“I don’t know who these people were,” said a Syrian doctor who would give his name only as Vahid. “We still don’t go out.”