When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook southern Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February, Murat Naomi rushed out of his home in his running gear. His mother, who normally covers her hair with a hijab, fled their first-floor apartment without one, fearing the building could collapse.
Mother and son went to a large central square in Kilis, a southern Turkish town that hugs the Syrian border and the nearby Bab al-Salam crossing into the north-west of a country they once called home. Over the border is Jisr ash-Shugur, where Naomi’s father, sister and fiancee still live.
Mother and son huddled in the town square for two days, hoping for salvation. Two minarets in the centre of the little town were badly damaged and 178 buildings around the town collapsed, killing 73 people and injuring almost 700 more. “We couldn’t read the funeral rites because so many people died,” he says.
Surrounded by verdant fields of olive groves and farmland, Kilis nevertheless appeared to form a remarkable pocket of normality in the centre of a zone of physical devastation that touched every major city around it, particularly the Turkish trade hub of Gaziantep an hour north and the historical Syrian city of Aleppo just over an hour to the south. As the town reeled from the destruction around it, many of its Syrian residents like Naomi wondered about their futures amid promises by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to return 4.4 million Syrians to their war-scarred country.
Kilis has welcomed an exodus of Syrians fleeing war over the past decade, blossoming from a desolate and quiet network of dusty streets to a bustling town where data from the UN refugee agency show that, as of two years ago, roughly 80% of the town’s population originate from Syria. A leading Turkish business association, Türkonfed, estimated that the earthquake could cause losses of $84bn (£69bn) to the Turkish economy, and despite a lack of major infrastructure damage in the town, Kilis’ reliance on trade routes that crisscross southern Turkey and northern Syria could reshape the town once more due to the damage sustained by Gaziantep and other nearby trade hubs.
The town’s transformation over the past decade, from a one-horse town into a vibrant miniature city, was in large part due to its proximity to the Bab al-Salam border crossing, which had been forced to close for two years until last week, when the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, agreed to allow the UN access for vital cross-border aid. The reopening of the crossing – as well as the Turkish government’s proclamations that 10,000 Syrians chose to return to Syria after the earthquake – marked potential new flashpoints for a place that was long considered a haven of coexistence, even if its Turkish residents kept their grievances to themselves.
Naomi, who runs a shop renting wedding dresses in Kilis, primped the delicate tulle skirts of the deep navy and bright red sparkling outfits in his shop, where he had moved them after the earthquake damaged his nearby showroom.
The dressmaker, who arrived in Kilis as a child and watched it transform into a tiny metropolis as he grew up, speaks Turkish and says he is in the process of applying for citizenship in a country that he is proud to call home. “This town was like a village 10 years ago. Now it’s better, it’s almost like a city.”
If he succeeds in his application, Naomi hopes to change his surname to Yildirim, to sound more Turkish. Naturalisation means he will evade Erdoğan’s promises to return home the millions of Syrians who have lived in Turkey for a decade, including to areas badly damaged by the tremors. The Turkish government insists that the returns are voluntary, despite testimony from Human Rights Watch prior to the earthquakes stating that some refugees were deported against their will or forced to cross the border at gunpoint.
“Only God knows what will happen, who will go back to Syria. I mean personally, I like Erdoğan, but it’s kismet,” said Naomi. “Anyway, if all the Syrians left Kilis, the town would die.”
But across Kilis’ network of winding streets and small stone squares where slim pale stone minarets crumbled from the force of the earthquakes, Turks and Syrians seemed to view the same sets of events in the town through entirely different eyes, a glimpse into either an uneasy coexistence or a febrile peace that risks being upended by the quake’s aftermath.
“Turks couldn’t get any of the tents or aid after the earthquake,” said local construction manager Çağrı Sahin bitterly, standing in the shadow of the damaged minaret as members of Turkey’s disaster relief agency took down tents that had previously distributed hot food in the quake’s aftermath. “The Syrians got most of it. We’ve really become a minority here.”
In the shadow of the Bab al-Salam crossing, taxi driver Mehmet Yilmaz waited outside a taxi rank, eyeing a line of brightly coloured trucks piled high with bags of cement next to the border crossing. Yilmaz’s taxis have maintained a trickle of trade between Syrian tradespeople with Turkish identity cards, ferrying them to the southern Turkish trade hub of Gaziantep, where the powerful earthquakes have cut power and hot water and forced many to flee.
“Most of the traders are from Idlib and Azaz,” he said. “Now Idlib is in ruins and the roads are closed. At the moment, the majority of the people we pick up are going to Gaziantep to check on their families, not trade.”
In Kilis, many of the town’s Turkish residents were cautious about the idea of integration with their neighbours, preferring quiet coexistence. “We are sticking together as Turks and Syrians. We’re neighbours, and this is a good thing,” said barbershop owner Abdülkadir Çalıkuşu, who also works as a mukhtar or neighbourhood official, a job that often requires him to resolve local disputes.
“So many Syrian shops and restaurants opened in this town, so it would affect us if they left. But it’s OK. It doesn’t matter if they stay or go, this town won’t change,” he said, as he cut a customer’s hair. His young Syrian employees, working nearby, understood his every word.
Across the street, grocery owner Ahmet Seyretoğlu sat outside his shop to welcome local residents hoping to stock up on eggs or plump fat olives.
“We were a very closeknit community before. But just because this is a border town, you see people from all walks of life compared with 10 or 15 years ago,” he said. He joked: “Even Angelina Jolie came here once! But for the Syrians, not for us.”
