Syrians are "guests" because Turkey doesn't want to submit to the jurisdiction of both the U.N. Refugee Agency and the European Court of Human Rights, where judges in Strasbourg often rule against the government's heavy-handed treatment of Kurds, journalists and human rights campaigners. Last month, Turkish officials were accused of having deported back to Syria at least 130 occupants of the Suleymansah camp in the border-town of Akçakale. A melee had broken out inside the camp and Turkish military police had been pelted with rocks before responding with riot hoses. The Foreign Ministry claims that these refugees all returned to Syria "voluntarily." The UNHCR wasn't impressed.
Nonetheless, the guest designation means that residents are free to come and go as they please. Ismail Cousa does that almost weekly.
Like most Boynuyogin inhabitants, Cousa is from Jisr al-Shughour. He agreed to talk to me briefly on the dirt driveway just outside the camp perimeter as we watched a Syrian-driven lorry full of garbage pass through the main vehicle gate and make a deposit at a nearby dumpster. As he relayed his story to me, two of Ozan's fellow camp guards sidled up to listen in on our conversation. I'd been warned not to chivvy anyone who didn't want to talk lest there be "complaints."
Cousa didn't have too many of those, although he said life in those white tents during the freezing winters was especially difficult. He has lived here for a year and nine months with his wife, kids, mother and brother, and he travels back into liberated areas of Idlib every few days, mostly to check up on friends and family but never, he insisted, to visit his own house, which had been looted. "I will return soon, inshallah. The regime will fall by God's permission," Cousa said, making a striking motion with his hand that seemed more reflexive than willed.
Yet he confirmed Ozan's story about the bombing of Salqin just days earlier, and the continuous presence of the regime in both Jisr al-Shughour and Idlib City, the provincial capital. As I write, the regime has managed to penetrate the longstanding rebel blockade of the Wadi al-Deif and Hamidiya military bases, just outside the town of Maarat al-Nuaman. This gives the Syrian Army a chance to retake a main supply line into Aleppo. So long as the rebels are unsupported, and so long as the regime's air and ground arsenal is being replenished by Russia and Iran, the war will proceed in the same fashion, as a stalemate in flux.
***
Fifteen minutes' drive down the road from Boynuyogin lies Hacipasa, a border town at the southern end of Hatay. This used to be a smuggler's paradise. It is still, only in reverse. Prior to the uprising, one could earn a decent living shipping inexpensive Syrian petrol through this hazy beige burg to sell the stuff at below-market prices in Turkey. Now the traffic goes the other way: with Syrian petrol both scarce and expensive, revolutionaries are buying the stuff in Turkey to send to their compatriots across the border. From what I was told, Hacipasa is essentially a Syrian outpost on neighboring soil. Our reason for being here was to travel right up to the border, where the Orontes River divided Turkey from Syria. There's a small problem: you can't drive the distance and you certainly don't want to walk it because it's all unpaved farmland - chiefly mud. So to reach Syria from Hacipasa, you need a tractor. For that, we needed to see Abu Abdul.
Abu Abdul is a Syrian homeowner in Hacipasa, also the uncle of Mohammed, one of Mahmoud's friends who was nice enough to drive us from our starting point in Antakya, the main city in Hatay. Clad in the inevitable track suit and the not-so-inevitable Yankees ball cap, Abu Abdul greeted us groggily in his living room, having just awoken (never mind that it was close to three in the afternoon) with the aid of a few whiskey shots. He proudly exhibited the newest addition to the family, his four-month-old granddaughter, whom Mahmoud dandled on his knee as Abu Abdul's wife and daughter, the mother of the infant, laid out the customary spread for wayfarers: a minced lamb dip with rice, tomato slices and flatbread. Then Abu Abdul showed us the other main attraction: a video of his son, a rebel fighter in Idlib, who was recently injured by shrapnel. Abu Abdul called up a YouTube clip on his cell phone showing the boy, in his early twenties, lying face-down on a stretcher with an enormous red gash running vertically down his spine. He was about to be loaded into an opposition-run ambulance. The battle he'd just fought was in Jisr al-Shughour, and Abu Abdul was proud. "I send him 200 to 300 Turkish lira every two weeks," he said, as though his only male heir was away at boarding school and needed pocket money.
Things that directly affect you have a way of happening off-stage in this part of the world without your being aware of them. So it was with our red tractor, like something out of a socialist realist novel, just outside Abu Abdul's house. While we were eating and talking, our ride had arrived.
