Residents and displaced people of Idleb, northwest Syria, believe that the areas, in which Turkey intends to resettle about one million Syrian refugees, are unsafe and subject to attack by various parties to the conflict in Syria.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week that Turkey is building homes and public facilities in parts of Syria held by Turkish-backed forces to support the new plan of encouraging the voluntary returns of 1 million Syrian refugees in Turkey to the “safe areas” in northern Syria; namely Sere Kaniye, Tel Abyad, Jarablus and al-Bab.
These projects will be funded by international relief organizations, and they will be for Syrian refugees who have been granted temporary residence in Turkey.
Muhammad al-Agha, 39, a displaced person from the northern countryside of Hama in the city of Idleb, believes that the talk about returning Syrians fleeing the war to Turkish territory for the so-called “safe zone” is nothing more than a media bubble.
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He points out that the goal of this project is “to calm the Turkish street and the Turkish opposition, which constantly demands the deportation of Syrians, in particular before the Turkish elections.”
The displaced person, who hails from the town of Qamhana, north of Hama, adds that “these areas cannot be called safe, as everyone sees that they are constantly being targeted.”
Deportation is not a solution
Turkey has not yet determined the mechanism for selecting the refugees it wants to return, especially since Turkish official statistics indicate that there are about four million Syrian refugees in Turkey, while it is talking about the deportation of only about one million Syrians.
Hussein al-Swed, 42, who is displaced from the city of Kafr Nabl, south of Idleb, in the city of Sarmada, north of Idleb, sees that what Turkey is doing is an attempt to satisfy the Turkish people, whose racism has recently increased against the Syrian refugees.
“Turkey has also been seeking for years to build a human barrier through what it calls today a safe zone to separate it from the areas controlled by the Syrian regime and the areas controlled by the SDF in northeast Syria,” according to Swed.
” This way, Turkey will be able to secure what it calls its national security, which is an excuse to enter the Syrian war in order to have a political pressure card to use in several foreign files that do not concern the Syrian people,” he added.
This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
