Residents of the Turkey-Syria border see danger while hoping for calm
Schools in the Turkish city of Akcakale, on the border with Syria, sat empty Thursday because it was too risky for students to gather in one place.
A Syrian family that fled the eight years of war in their home country between forces for and against the government of President Bashar Assad had been renting the apartment that suffered the most damage, said Ahmet Toran, a Turkish construction contractor who owns the building.“What possible crime could that baby have committed?” Toran said. “They were just trying to build a life somewhere, and in a single moment their lives were destroyed.
At a border wall separating Akcakale from the Syrian town of Tal Abyad, a pickup truck pulled up this week beneath a guard tower manned by Turkish soldiers in battle gear. Half a dozen young Syrian men jostled for a seat, some inside the cabin, others in the bed hugging the mounted machine gun. They patted one another on the back before heading west, following the wall to a gap where they could cross into Syria.
“There is no good way to earn a living here [in Akcakale] for me,” he said. “Back home I had fields. I could work those again.”did not flinch this week at the sound of another mortar blast. He said northeast Syria is not a foreign land for him. Like much of the population in Akcakale, he has extended family on the other side.
Cotton fields flank the border road leading west from Akcakale to Suruc. Villagers pack the cotton into giant trucks to be sold in markets in nearby Sanliurfa, even as a war rages around them.Five years ago along the road, Kurds living in Turkey crossed into Kobani, a largely Kurdish city, to fight Islamic State militants, in a battle that was won with the help of U.S. air power.
“The U.S. helped the Kurds during the revolution in Kobani, but now they have abandoned them,” said Suruc co-Mayor Abdullah Polat, who is an ethnic Kurd. “People have lost trust in the U.S., because they keep changing their minds with each tweet.”
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