Turkey's Syrian Refugees Challenge

The Syrian conflict and humanitarian crisis, entering its sixth year, has driven a large influx of refugees into Turkey. The official number has already reached almost 3 million, making the country the largest host of Syrian refugees. In political, social and economic terms, Turkey is the most affected country of the Syrian crisis.

Turkey has a long history of welcoming Arab refugees. During World War II, almost two million Arabs from the Levant and Mesopotamia settled in Turkey. There was another huge influx during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Turkey’s geographic position, its nearness to Asia and Europe and its comparatively better conditions in economic and political terms, make the country a natural route for migrants who were pushed from Middle Eastern countries, Africa, former Soviet bloc (Bulgaria, Azerbaijan) because of economic, social and political problems. Since the early 1980s, the country has found itself in a situation whereby thousands of asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa were entering the country.

The persistence of the conflict and the ever growing number of refugees is creating a set of tough challenges for Turkey. Firstly, it is becoming increasingly clear that refugees are not about to return home anytime soon. This brings up a range of very difficult policy issues for the government. They range from whether the government should start to think in terms of offering refugees the possibility to remain and integrate in Turkey to addressing urgent education, employment, health, shelter and other needs of Syrian refugees.

“As the protracted displacement of a vital number of Syrian refugees seems increasingly inevitable, earlier notions of Syrian refugees as temporary “guest” are being replaced by a focus on the difficulties of integration. A part from historical ties, the demographic characteristic of the host city or region particularly the ethnic component determine the prevailing conditions for Syrian who live in urban areas and the corresponding attitudes towards those Syrians by the host population “ Orsam(Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies)

In some cases, conflict is a distinct possibility: for instance the large Alawite (a Shia that includes Al-Assad family) in the border towns of Hatay strongly opposes the rising numbers of Sunni Syrians settling in the town. Moreover Syrian Kurds find it easiest to live in areas with significant Kurdish populations, whereas the vast majority of Turks sympathetically welcome fleeing Turkmens.

Out of the over 3 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, “approximately 54% are children and a roughly equal number of women and men (approximately 23%). The Government of Turkey has established 26 refugee camps hosting over 260,000 registered refugees”. UNHCR Turkey Syrian Refugee. The vast majority of Syrian refugees – over 90% – live outside of camps in urban or rural areas. Not all Syrian refugees living outside of camps are registered however and it is difficult to estimate their proportion.

The exact geographical repartition of registered and unregistered Syrian refugees outside of camps is hard to establish with precision, given internal movements. They are however mostly scattered across all 81 provinces with nearly two-thirds of them living in 10 provinces in the Southeast: Adana, Adiyaman, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Mardin, Osmaniye and Şanliurfa.

Moreover, a clear trend of movement toward other areas of Turkey, especially main urban centres, seems to have emerged, with over 400 000 Syrian refugees registered in Istanbul alone. The concentration of refugee populations.

The presence of growing numbers of Syrians in Turkey is deeply impacting on host communities economically, socially as well as politically. Last but not least, there is also the continued deterioration of the humanitarian and political situation inside Syria. How is Turkey addressing these challenges and what possible recommendations can be put forward to better address them?

Once it became clear that Syrians in Turkey were not just temporary ‘guests’, the need for wider adaptation to the growing refugee crisis became apparent. In response, Turkey began to develop and build institutional and infrastructural capacities to deal with ‘permanent refugees’ who want to secure their presence in the country.

Source: Data from the Turkish Ministry of Interior: Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM), Migration Statistics

Most (but not all) of Turkey’s Arab population practise Sunni Islam, the predominate religion in Turkey.  According to Luke Coffey, is a research fellow specialising in transatlantic and Eurasian security at a Washington DC based think tank:  in some cases many cultural traits are shared between ethnic Turks and the Arab minority in Turkey. This has made integration easier for Arabs than for other groups such as Armenians, for example. However, with the huge influx of Arab refugees into Turkey, this could change.

As I have pointed out that in my previous article “Unwanted Refugees in Europe” Historically, Turkey has acted as a “humanitarian sponge” by absorbing the plight of surrounding countries and providing a safe haven for countless people, regardless of their religious, ethnic or linguistic backgrounds. “Having adopted an open-door policy towards Syrian refugees in 2011,” explained President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “we now host nearly 3 million Syrian nationals from diverse ethnic, religious and sectarian backgrounds. In the past five years Turkey has allocated $10 billion to provide Syrian refugees with free healthcare, education and housing.”

However, every country may reach its ‘absorption capacity’, the maximum number of refugees it can practically accommodate, If you reach a point where your social and economic resources are not sufficient to accommodate any more people, then that surely has to be said, ‘You reached your end point.'” Therefore, long-term integration and settlement of the refugees, especially given the large scale of the crisis, calls for a comprehensive, unified, and rigorous approach. It also necessitates greater cooperation between policy makers, practitioners, and civil society organisations in different areas such as health, education, and employment. In addition, it requires robust international cooperation and support.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.