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Sunday, July 22, 2012 11:34:28 PM
Syrians Hold On to Optimism at a Tent City in Turkey
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
There are 6,500 Syrians at the Islahiye camp. More Photos »
By C. J. CHIVERS
July 21, 2012
ISLAHIYE, Turkey — Almost all of the toilets in a refugee camp here for Syrians who have fled the conflict at home bear messages in spray paint for President Bashar al-Assad. But one note summarizes them all.
“The house of Bashar,” reads graffiti painted at the entrance to one portable bathroom, which also gave the president his local name: “Pig.”
And so it is throughout this tent encampment of 6,500 Syrians who are waiting out, or in some cases simply taking a respite from, the conflict just beyond the nearby border. The Islahiye camp is a place of hatred and defiance, a concentration of families who say they have been chased from their homes not just by rifles and government troops but also by indiscriminate aerial and artillery barrages.
In its way, however, Islahiye is a place where anguish mixes with optimism. Syrians here, cheered by the success of rebel forces on their home ground, calmly insist that their enemies are weakening and that they will be going home.
In Syria, a short distance away, the anti-Assad forces have made tactical progress in parts of the northern countryside, carving out areas largely under opposition control. In their most potent strike, a bomb attack killed four of Mr. Assad’s top security officials last week. In many places, the opposition says, government units are confined to garrisons, from which they fire with artillery, mortars and machine guns, but rarely venture out.
Some of these government-occupied outposts and bases, the opposition says, are now resupplied almost entirely by helicopter. Government patrols are said to be rare, leaving opposition fighters free to roam, and coordinate attacks, as anti-Assad activists said have been occurring in neighborhoods in the capital, Damascus, much of last week.
Inside the refugee camp, Hassan Jubra, who before the conflict was a deputy dean at Aleppo University, offered his view on how a popular revolt that began peacefully will ultimately defeat a conventional military, no matter that military’s superior organization at the outset, or its artillery, attack helicopters and tanks.
“We have a cause,” he said. “They don’t have cause. They have interests. There is a big difference between living in a cause and living for the sake of interests.”
For this reason, he said, he spoke of Mr. Assad, even as his army fights on, in the past tense. “He is gone,” he said. “He is finished.”
Whether this certitude and optimism are well placed is an open question; the pace and course of this conflict, many fighters and refugees said, is impossible to predict, even to those with unshakable confidence in its eventual outcome.
And this camp is also a repository of sadness, of interrupted or shattered lives. Wisal Salo, 30, sat in her family’s tent on a recent sweltering day as her 3-year-old son, Hadi, napped fitfully on a cushion on the tent floor. The Salos are from the tiny village of Surmani, near Hama.
Ms. Salo said that as part of the collective and indiscriminate punishment of Sunni citizens suspected of supporting the opposition, government soldiers had raided her home and smashed the furniture. And then they left, and the random shelling of Surmani and the area nearby had begun. In places, she said, Syrian troops set fire to the forests, apparently to deny guerrilla fighters concealment.
She began to cry, telling of the walk to Turkey, with Hadi and another son. “We left our houses and our land, and fled to here,” she said. “I want to go home, but people warn us the shelling continues, and that we must stay away.”
Her husband, she said, remained in Syria to fight. Now her brothers-in-law and other male relatives cycle back and forth between this camp and the northern Syrian countryside — fighting there, resting here.
One of her relatives, Rimsan Salo, 32, was in the camp; he said he had left the rebels temporarily because they had too few guns. “I joined them, but there are no weapons,” he said. “If there are weapons, I will go back.”
Another relative stepped into the tent and said he would go back sooner. He needed only to pick up some more communications equipment.
The Islahiye camp is one of nine run by Turkey that hold, as of last weekend, almost 39,000 Syrian citizens. It is clean and well provisioned with tents, medical attention, electricity and food — all provided by Turkey. No weapons or training were visible within it; the fighters say they leave their weapons in Syria, and this is a place for families, and civilian life.
On the day of this visit, the meal included hearty portions of rice and beans, bowls of canned fish in oil and trays of cut watermelon, all with the ever-present tea. The residents said it was a typical meal.
Complaints about the camp’s conditions appear relatively few.
But one group of men, including Ziad Najjar, 45, a policeman from Azaz who said he had defected, bitterly complained to a passing journalist that he and a few friends had not been given a tent and were sleeping on mattresses under the trees.
An official managing the camp said that in fact Mr. Najjar and his friends had been offered spots in a tent, but that they wanted another one just for themselves. “With patience everything will be resolved,” the official said. “It is a protest. They have one tent, and they want two.”
(He asked that his name not be published in keeping with what he said was government policy.)
Even as Mr. Najjar fumed, Mr. Jubra, who worked at Aleppo University, gently tried to calm him. “We have to be honest, and we have to thank Turkey,” he said, a position that seemed widely shared, even among the weary.
The frustration among the residents was at other nations, including the United States, for not helping Syria’s opposition more. Mr. Jubra spoke again of the perils of measuring interests, as opposed to having a cause.
“America should not let its interests kill its humanity,” he said.
Walking out, toward the gate, another tent of Salo family members, shouted in the afternoon heat, returning to the subject of Syria’s president, whose home, according to the graffiti, was either the camp’s toilets or its garbage cans. Daad Salo had another suggestion. Her voice rose above the rest. “Please God,” he shouted, “take him to hell!”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/middleeast/syrians-find-optimism-at-a-tent-city-in-turkey.html
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
There are 6,500 Syrians at the Islahiye camp. More Photos »
By C. J. CHIVERS
July 21, 2012
ISLAHIYE, Turkey — Almost all of the toilets in a refugee camp here for Syrians who have fled the conflict at home bear messages in spray paint for President Bashar al-Assad. But one note summarizes them all.
“The house of Bashar,” reads graffiti painted at the entrance to one portable bathroom, which also gave the president his local name: “Pig.”
And so it is throughout this tent encampment of 6,500 Syrians who are waiting out, or in some cases simply taking a respite from, the conflict just beyond the nearby border. The Islahiye camp is a place of hatred and defiance, a concentration of families who say they have been chased from their homes not just by rifles and government troops but also by indiscriminate aerial and artillery barrages.
In its way, however, Islahiye is a place where anguish mixes with optimism. Syrians here, cheered by the success of rebel forces on their home ground, calmly insist that their enemies are weakening and that they will be going home.
In Syria, a short distance away, the anti-Assad forces have made tactical progress in parts of the northern countryside, carving out areas largely under opposition control. In their most potent strike, a bomb attack killed four of Mr. Assad’s top security officials last week. In many places, the opposition says, government units are confined to garrisons, from which they fire with artillery, mortars and machine guns, but rarely venture out.
Some of these government-occupied outposts and bases, the opposition says, are now resupplied almost entirely by helicopter. Government patrols are said to be rare, leaving opposition fighters free to roam, and coordinate attacks, as anti-Assad activists said have been occurring in neighborhoods in the capital, Damascus, much of last week.
Inside the refugee camp, Hassan Jubra, who before the conflict was a deputy dean at Aleppo University, offered his view on how a popular revolt that began peacefully will ultimately defeat a conventional military, no matter that military’s superior organization at the outset, or its artillery, attack helicopters and tanks.
“We have a cause,” he said. “They don’t have cause. They have interests. There is a big difference between living in a cause and living for the sake of interests.”
For this reason, he said, he spoke of Mr. Assad, even as his army fights on, in the past tense. “He is gone,” he said. “He is finished.”
Whether this certitude and optimism are well placed is an open question; the pace and course of this conflict, many fighters and refugees said, is impossible to predict, even to those with unshakable confidence in its eventual outcome.
And this camp is also a repository of sadness, of interrupted or shattered lives. Wisal Salo, 30, sat in her family’s tent on a recent sweltering day as her 3-year-old son, Hadi, napped fitfully on a cushion on the tent floor. The Salos are from the tiny village of Surmani, near Hama.
Ms. Salo said that as part of the collective and indiscriminate punishment of Sunni citizens suspected of supporting the opposition, government soldiers had raided her home and smashed the furniture. And then they left, and the random shelling of Surmani and the area nearby had begun. In places, she said, Syrian troops set fire to the forests, apparently to deny guerrilla fighters concealment.
She began to cry, telling of the walk to Turkey, with Hadi and another son. “We left our houses and our land, and fled to here,” she said. “I want to go home, but people warn us the shelling continues, and that we must stay away.”
Her husband, she said, remained in Syria to fight. Now her brothers-in-law and other male relatives cycle back and forth between this camp and the northern Syrian countryside — fighting there, resting here.
One of her relatives, Rimsan Salo, 32, was in the camp; he said he had left the rebels temporarily because they had too few guns. “I joined them, but there are no weapons,” he said. “If there are weapons, I will go back.”
Another relative stepped into the tent and said he would go back sooner. He needed only to pick up some more communications equipment.
The Islahiye camp is one of nine run by Turkey that hold, as of last weekend, almost 39,000 Syrian citizens. It is clean and well provisioned with tents, medical attention, electricity and food — all provided by Turkey. No weapons or training were visible within it; the fighters say they leave their weapons in Syria, and this is a place for families, and civilian life.
On the day of this visit, the meal included hearty portions of rice and beans, bowls of canned fish in oil and trays of cut watermelon, all with the ever-present tea. The residents said it was a typical meal.
Complaints about the camp’s conditions appear relatively few.
But one group of men, including Ziad Najjar, 45, a policeman from Azaz who said he had defected, bitterly complained to a passing journalist that he and a few friends had not been given a tent and were sleeping on mattresses under the trees.
An official managing the camp said that in fact Mr. Najjar and his friends had been offered spots in a tent, but that they wanted another one just for themselves. “With patience everything will be resolved,” the official said. “It is a protest. They have one tent, and they want two.”
(He asked that his name not be published in keeping with what he said was government policy.)
Even as Mr. Najjar fumed, Mr. Jubra, who worked at Aleppo University, gently tried to calm him. “We have to be honest, and we have to thank Turkey,” he said, a position that seemed widely shared, even among the weary.
The frustration among the residents was at other nations, including the United States, for not helping Syria’s opposition more. Mr. Jubra spoke again of the perils of measuring interests, as opposed to having a cause.
“America should not let its interests kill its humanity,” he said.
Walking out, toward the gate, another tent of Salo family members, shouted in the afternoon heat, returning to the subject of Syria’s president, whose home, according to the graffiti, was either the camp’s toilets or its garbage cans. Daad Salo had another suggestion. Her voice rose above the rest. “Please God,” he shouted, “take him to hell!”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/middleeast/syrians-find-optimism-at-a-tent-city-in-turkey.html
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