HATAY, Turkey - Only in prison do cigarettes buy you as much information as they do in the Middle East. Turkish soldiers guarding their country's fragile border with Syria, and protecting the lives of some 250,000 refugees, are not supposed to talk to journalists. But at the Boynuyogun camp in Hatay, a Gauloises is a passport to volubility. So is being from a place your interlocutor wants badly to visit.
"You're American?" asked the English-speaking soldier I'll call "Ozan."
"Not quite. I'm a New Yorker."
"New York! I have never been but I want to go."
"You should come. It's a great city. What do you do when you're not in the army?"
"I studied hotel administration. I'm only doing six months of mandatory service, then I'm done."
"New York's a good place to run a hotel."
"I hope."
"Doesn't sound like you've got it so bad to me."
"Man, you don't know. A few days ago, the regime bombed Salqin from the air. I was standing right there." Ozan indicated his post just outside the main entrance to the camp. "We were all scared. Everyone heard and saw the explosion and the smoke rising from the buildings. We didn't know what would happen next."
Salqin, the gleaming white hamlet of stucco houses and 35,000 residents, was maybe 10 kilometers from where we were standing, at the nethermost lip of the Turkish-Syrian border, in Idlib province, well within eyeshot. For the last six months or so, most of the Idlib countryside had been thought of as "liberated" territory, firmly in the hands of Syrian rebels and the post-Assad governing bodies that have begun to spring up, including gendarmeries and Islamic courts. Into this province, and into others, flow the many millions of dollars in discretely purchased Western humanitarian aid; too discretely, as the credit for it seems to be going to Al-Qaeda rather than to the United States.
Idlib may indeed be liberated but it is by no means secure. The regime can still penetrate its airspace for bombing runs on both rebel and civilian targets, as it evidently had done just days before my arrival. Several YouTube videos suggest that the Syrian Air Force dropped "parachute bombs" on Salqin, something which Ozan was in no position to verify.
Added to the nicotine douceur was probably a mild twinge of guilt that impelled him to chat with me. Minutes earlier, his superior officer had politely refused me entry to a camp that I had visited almost exactly a year ago, before security had been tightened considerably. In May 2012, I was able to pass as the decidedly non-Arab-looking brother-in-law of Mahmoud Elzour, a Syrian-American rebel I befriended who also accompanied me on this trip. (Mahmoud has temporarily swapped his AK-47 for sewing machines: he is employing at his own expense a handful of women refugees as clothing and accessory makers in a workshop in Antakya, the main city in Hatay.) We tried the truth this time, hoping that my credential as a columnist for a Lebanese magazine would do the trick. No joy.
Boynuyogin, like other camps, is a canvas tent city though now interspersed with a larger number of trailer structures than I'd remembered. I'd previously sat in and taken tea while talking to newly elected member of the camp's administrative council who told me how Alawite medical staff in Hatay, a former Syrian province until 1939, had purposefully mistreated them. The camp has now got its own school to cater to the scores of Syrian children who reside here, many of whom have celebrated two birthdays in exile.
One thing that Ankara has done right, most observers agree, is to ensure that dispossession didn't impair its charges' education; many college-aged refugees are being given scholarships to attend Turkish universities. Many will likely graduate before the war is over.
To get here, you have to pass through a military checkpoint at the outskirts of the camp. If you drive in, as I did, then the underside of your car will be inspected with mirrors for bombs. Shabiha thugs and mukhabarrat agents have long been rumored to operate inside these camps, usually to gather intelligence on the inhabitants, all of whom are technically designed as "guests" of the Turkish government. Fears are also rampant that the regime might carry out clandestine operations in the camps: the most notorious example was the kidnapping of Lieutenant Colonel Hussain Harmoush, an early military defector who led the defense of the city of Jisr al-Shughour from the mukhabarrat's massacre of civilians. That event precipitated the first large wave of refugees into Turkey; it was the first time, according to eyewitnesses queried by the United Nations, that the regime used attack helicopters to fire on fleeing defectors.
Harmoush, who still occupies a stature akin to the Spanish Civil War's Andres Nin, was betrayed by a Turkish Alawite intelligence officer - allegedly in exchange for members of the Kurdish Workers' Party - and captured outside the Alt?nözü camp, slightly more inland in Hatay, and then smuggled back into Syria. He was imprisoned, forced to "confess" to an absurd confection of conspiracies on state television, and executed. That he was taken while inside supposedly protected terrain by Assad loyalists working for the Turkish government testifies to the sectarian pressure-cooker into which Hatay and, indeed, other areas of southern Turkey have been plunged. More refugees spell greater tribal tensions; another reason that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to end Bashar's reign as quickly as possible.
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.
If you want to make the people of Hacipasa laugh, seat four men on a tractor built for one and drive it through the village streets where stray cats, sheep and out-of-place luxury Mercedes compete for the right of way. I was atop the metal covering of the left back wheel on this mechanical monstrosity for the ten minutes or so it took to pass through a path of cratered and torn-up dry mud leading straight to the Orontes. Our driver, Abu Mustapha, was so lousy behind the wheel, my only thought was that if regime snipers were lurking in any of the Idlib villages we were approaching, they could save their bullets and wait for one or all of us to fall off the damned tractor and get crushed underfoot. Halfway to our destination, we spotted another Turkish solider, this one emerging from a cheap lean-to with his machine gun strung across his shoulder. I was sure we'd be told to turn back. Actually, he just wanted a lift to the river. So now we were five aboard.
The Orontes here is more a banal tributary than a river, and you can either swim across it or seat yourself in one of two giant metal tubs attached to a rope that spans both sides of the border and by which humans and goods can be hauled across in either direction. A small crowd of Syrians was waiting by the water's edge, hoping to get a glimpse of the "shabab" - Free Syrian Army soldiers patrolling the terminus of Idlib. Sure enough, three rebels appeared and, after a polite request, mugged for the camera.
Kilometers of empty agricultural land are barely protected by the odd gun-toting Turk on one side and a slightly larger contingent of Syrian rebels on the other. Ankara's heightened state of vigilance following the regime's downing of a Turkish F1 reconnaissance plane last June and its repeated cross-border mortar attacks, one of which killed five people in the border town of Akçakale in October, is purely theoretical. If Assad's forces can hit Salqin with impunity, then they can easily hit Hatay.
This fact was stated plainly recently by a Dutch military official at the Incirlik Air Base, where NATO now monitors incoming rockets from Syria that might be shot down by the Patriot missile batteries. Those batteries are only stationed in Gaziantep, Kahramanmaras, and Adana -- all to the east. "If they fall on Hatay, we won't do anything," Major Frank Dijkmans told Al-Monitor. Turkey's deterrent capability is geographically limited to where its allies in Brussels have decided to allow it one.
Indeed, likely owing to such geographical limitations, and to the consequent security risks, Erdogan's government is not as forthcoming as it might be about just how bold the Syrian regime's cross-border shelling has been.
A day after our trip to Boynuyogin and Hacipasa, Mahmoud and I took an hour-long cab ride to YayladaÄ??, at the southernmost tip of Hatay which borders Latakia. Here the Turkish authorities are slightly more stringent about keeping foreigners out. At the border-crossing, I was shouted at by a soldier in a guard tower to put my camera away. The regime is in full control on the other side, and to prove it, Mahmoud wanted to show me the acres of charred timber from where Syrian mortars had hit YayladaÄ??. You can drive 15 kilometers from the border and see piles of blackened logs stacked intermittently along the roadside. From one vantage point, we watched as bulldozers and foresters cleared the side of a once verdant mountain, now covered with dark patches of leafless trees. Fires from Syrian shelling had ravaged the landscape. "I don't know why the Turks don't do anything in response," Mahmoud said.
I didn't have the heart to tell him.