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.
