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On Syria’s Border With Turkey, Unrest Divides Communities - NYT : nyti.ms/s2D2Du #Turkey #Erdogan #SyrianNC #SyriaNC #Syria
Ed Ou for The New York Times
Between the village of Gorentas, Turkey, and the hilltops in the distance lies the border with Syira, a boundary that was once permeable to families and commerce.
By LIAM STACK
Published: November 11, 2011
GORENTAS, Turkey — Rostom, a Syrian refugee, stood near the peak of this hilltop village, peering through binoculars in hopes of catching a glimpse of troop movements across the Syrian border, which lay at the bottom of the valley floor below.
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Ed Ou for The New York Times
A group of Syrian activists who have taken refuge in Gorentas watched a video of men being beaten in a Syrian prison.
Sometimes there are tanks on the distant hilltops, he said, and other times armored personnel carriers grind across the valley’s narrow roads. Villages up and down the border are alive with rumors of Syrian sniper nests in the hillside watchtowers, and last month villagers here watched as two cars — a Jeep and a Nissan taxi — burned near the border fence.
“That is all Syria,” said Rostom, 43, who gave only one name for fear of Syrian government retribution, gesturing across the valley, “and it is all army now.”
The new harshness of the border comes as a shock to most here. Borderland residents say that the division marked by the thin asphalt road between Turkey and Syria never reflected life in the valley: most family trees have both roots and branches that crisscross the border, and the winding mountain footpaths between the two states are well worn by a traditional black market trade in everything from sheep to cigarettes. Most towns have two names, one in Turkish and one in Arabic, and many adults can function in either tongue.
But the unrest in Syria has torn or tangled the ties that have long bound communities on each side of the border, say residents, thanks in part to the flight of large numbers of villagers on the Syrian side as well as the now-overpowering presence of Syrian security forces, who traditionally left the frontier lightly watched.
The flood of black market goods has slowed to a trickle; extended families have been thrown into disarray. Some residents fled to cities deeper inside Syria, while others came to Turkey, where relatives have sometimes found themselves divided among more than a half dozen camps run by the Turkish Red Crescent.
“There is nothing here at all now, and everyone is tired,” Rostom said. “Smuggling has totally stopped. People used to smuggle goats and cows and sheep in, but how are you supposed to bring cows over the border with all the security forces present?”
Rostom and his family fled their home in the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shoughour in June, escaping an advancing government crackdown on the increasingly violent uprising against four decades of rule by the family of President Bashar al-Assad. Turkish officials say that 7,660 people are housed in the camps, but Syrian activists estimate that more than 10,000 currently live in Turkey as refugees.
With his wife and five children, Rostom has lived for the last five months in a three-room house owned by a Turkish cousin living in the nearby provincial capital. His parents and sister live in a house farther up the hill. Each day, he peers through his binoculars at army movements in his country down below, and gathers with friends to share news over coffee and cigarettes.
They trade rumors about the activities of military defectors, who are said to be fighting security forces inside Syria, and about friends and loved ones who have died in the uprising across the border. They complain about the anemic smuggling trade and worry that their children have no school to attend.
“We rely on each other,” Rostom said. “Life is hard for everyone on the border now.”
On a recent day he watched a violent video passed to him on a digital flash drive by another refugee, with Nouri Abdel Sofaan, 36, a friend from Khirbet al-Jouz, a Syrian village abutting the border. In the video, a group of bloody, half-naked men are savagely beaten by men in black uniforms, brandishing heavy clubs and bullwhips. It was a scene from a prison in the Syrian coastal town of Latakia, they were told, purportedly shot by a guard who either turned against the Syrian government or was persuaded to sell the video to opposition activists.
Mr. Sofaan sat quietly. In September, his 23-year-old nephew, Alaa, was shot dead in the fields below, he said. When government forces arrived in the north in June, his nephew was visiting relatives in Khirbet al-Jouz, far from his mother’s house in Latakia. He fled with Mr. Sofaan’s family but soon grew tired of life in a Turkish refugee camp. He crossed the border into Khirbet al-Jouz with a plan to return home.
He was only 50 yards inside Syria when he was shot by a sniper, said Mr. Sofaan, and his body lay in the grass for weeks.
“I told him not to go,” said Mr. Sofaan softly, his hands slowly turning in his lap. “I knew it was a dangerous idea.”
Down the hill from Gorentas, and closer to Syria, is the village of Guvecci. It sits in the shadow of an imposing Turkish military complex on a hilltop. The slopes around the town are a cascade of olive groves, and the houses wear thick necklaces of long red peppers, strung together and left out on lines to dry in the sun.
The towns’ links with nearby Syrian villages have been cut, said Ammar Abu Abdu, 36, because there simply was no one left there to be linked to.
“There is no one living in the valley anymore,” he said, standing on a rooftop and pointing out abandoned houses. “Everyone who was there came to Turkey. My relatives in Syria all left.”
As he spoke, the punchy staccato of far-away chanting filled the air. He and others on the roof turned to look up the hill, where a throng of Turkish soldiers chanted army cadences as they did laps in their fenced-in base.
“There have been more Turkish soldiers here since the problems began,” he said. “The Turks are in control here. That hasn’t changed.”
