Abu Laith flung open his arms with a camp flourish and planted a kiss on both my cheeks.
‘You get more beautiful every time I see you!’ he exclaimed. ‘Come on, I’m taking you out.’
The worst guys are often the most charming. This was the fourth time I had met Abu Laith, one of a crop of businessmen cashing in on the people-smuggling industry that was flourishing in the underbelly of Turkey’s holiday resorts in early 2015. Short and blue-eyed, dressed in chinos and a loud summer shirt, he could have passed for a tourist in Mersin, a gaudy city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. But as we drove along the seafront to the fish restaurant he kept an eye open for places where he might peddle his business in the black of night.
His choice locations were spots on the city’s northern outskirts, where fancy waterfront apartments gave way to older, less salubrious suburbs. There was a tree-shaded park between the main road and the water where he would take his customers in late afternoon, telling them to pose as families throwing a birthday party as the sun set. A few miles further on there was a small, seasonal beach town, a few hotels gathered around a stretch of sand and deserted in wintertime.
‘In the summer this place is amazing,’ Abu Laith said. ‘There are lots of people and parties. Coves all along the coastline. But in the winter all the work in this area is related to smuggling.’
Moonless skies were the best, he said – less likelihood of being spotted. In the blackness his customers abandoned their fake celebrations and climbed into eight-metre motorboats that took them out past Turkey’s sea border into international waters, where they would meet up with others and transfer into bigger vessels that could take hundreds of people at a time. Then they would set a course west for Italy, with an estimated journey time of a week. The captains of the boats – usually Syrians from the port cities of Latakia and Tartus – would also claim asylum once they hit European shores. The bigger boats were ancient eighty-metre fishing vessels bought from Egyptian traders and often destroyed by the Italian authorities once they had sailed their final voyage.
Abu Laith told me proudly of a wheeze he had cooked up in the hotter months: hire one of Mersin’s party boats, stage a wedding party, and drift just far enough out into international waters that the passengers could transfer to the main vessel. That was a luxury service, organised for people with tens of thousands of euros to spare. At the very top end of the market, would-be asylum seekers could buy fake or stolen European documents and travel by plane from Istanbul to London, Paris or Berlin.
But in Mersin Abu Laith catered to the mass market, not the big spenders. Only 300 miles from the Syrian border, it hosted a large population of refugees and was big enough to absorb the illicit industry. Passengers could buy lifejackets in the city’s numerous sailing shops before they embarked. Hotel owners could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the unusual numbers of Syrians staying in their establishments in the off-season. All of the town’s smuggling middlemen said that money was crossing the palms of Turkish officials to keep the whole thing running.
But the smugglers had got too cocky. In December 2014, a ship with no captain, stuffed with nine hundred desperate, hungry, dehydrated people, had almost crashed into the Italian shore. After the survivors revealed the details of their route, the Turkish authorities began clamping down in Mersin.
In the meantime, new opportunities were opening, Abu Laith said. The Greek islands dotted around Turkey’s Aegean coast, 600 miles west of Mersin, are often so close you feel as if you could wave to someone standing on the foreign shore. The complicated operation and long journey the smugglers had picked out from Mersin to Italy would not be necessary there – Abu Laith could send his customers over to Europe in rubber dinghies in a couple of hours. He could give one of the men on board a crash course in using the motor, insist on one small bag only per passenger to create as much space as possible, and then point them in the right direction. No need for boat deals with Egyptians, no need for sea captains from Syria. All his smuggling needs could be bought in the nearest outdoor shop.
Abu Laith was one of the Syrian war’s great opportunists. He had a handy self-exoneration for every shady deal, every new misery he brought upon his countrymen. Before the conflict he had run a money-changing business in Azaz, a Syrian town next to the Turkish border long known as a hotspot for cigarette and drug smuggling. When the war kicked off and anti-Assad rebels captured Azaz and its nearby border crossing with Turkey he restyled himself as a gunrunner, carrying weapons across the frontier.
‘I wanted the revolution against Assad to succeed!’ he said.
Next, when foreign jihadis started heaping into Syria, he set himself up as a relocation agent, smoothing their journey across the border and ensuring they were provided with living quarters and weapons. ‘I thought they were coming to help the revolution!’ he said.
And now, with his ravaged homeland haemorrhaging refugees and its neighbours roiling under the influx, he had reinvented himself again, this time as a people-smuggler’s agent touting for customers and dealing with the payments and logistics. He was relatively small fry, the bottom of the feeding chain, working for the big guys above, the mafiosi who carved up the Turkish coast between them, reaped the profits and never dirtied their hands or names with the grunt work. The Kurds controlled Mersin, he said, and the Russians Bodrum and Antalya. They were already making millions each month from their trade. Meanwhile, for each passenger who paid 6,500 euros for their journey to Italy, Abu Laith got a cut of 1,500 euros. With an average of seven or eight customers each month it was a tidy income. But he wasn’t doing it for the money, he insisted.
‘I want to help Syrians find a better life in Europe. This is a humanitarian project,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame the smugglers, blame your governments. Why are they not accepting asylum applications through their embassies? Europe is a partner of the mafia.’
Over the course of the next year I followed the mass exodus of more than a million people from the shores of Turkey into Europe, as they travelled on rickety boats in the hands of men like Abu Laith and then took long, silent night treks through the mountains and valleys of the Balkans. It turned into one of the defining stories of my career: a huge humanitarian crisis on one level, a massive and fascinating crime investigation on another, and moreover the trigger for events that would rock the European Union, and Turkey’s relationship with it, to the core. But during my first encounter with Abu Laith in the winter of 2014 he had mentioned the growing people-smuggling industry as an aside; we had actually met to speak about Isis and the war in northern Syria.
My interest was piqued when he mentioned how he was earning a living. I was also picking up snippets from Syrian friends of a slowly swelling exodus from Turkey, like a dripping tap that has finally filled a sink and is about to overflow. The Syrians I met in my first months in Antakya were mostly educated and urban young Damascenes who had skipped their military service or been sent out by their families. They had quickly found decent apartments and NGO jobs in the Turkish borderlands in 2013, but were now talking about how they would take a boat to Europe. They swapped information on the best country to get to, where they could get passports quickest and integrate the best: Sweden was favoured at that time, Germany a close second. These middle-class, law-abiding Syrians could easily reach out to the organised criminals running the industry. Men like Abu Laith set up Arabic-language WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages where they outlined prices, information and contacts. They had innocuous names: one was called ‘Syrians in Mersin’, another ‘Information for asylum in Europe’.
Though the Syrians were largely safe in Turkey, Isis’s rout of the rebels in northern Syria in 2014 had crushed their hopes of returning to their homeland any time soon. Meanwhile, Turkey’s generosity took them only so far. The middle classes who arrived earliest, when the refugee population was still in the hundreds of thousands, settled quickest and snapped up the best jobs. Others who came later found most of the NGO jobs taken and the cheap apartments occupied. For those at the other end, the very poorest who flooded into Turkey in huge waves every time there was an outbreak of raw violence in Syria, Ankara built a network of high-quality camps to house around 300,000, a tenth of the total refugee population. But life was tough for those in the middle. Some lived in farm outbuildings or shanty towns in deserted corners of the border cities. In the early mornings, huge crowds of young Syrian men lined the main roads to the countryside to wait for farmers who would pick them up for cash-in-hand day work. Others rented the cheapest apartments and packed as many families into them as they could. When my then boyfriend heard that the flat above his in Antakya had come free we decided to take a look at it. Within two seconds of opening the front door we realised that several women and their children had been living there: children’s drawings were tacked up on the cupboards, mattresses propped against the walls of every room, and, because they couldn’t afford curtains, white paper had been placed over the windows. They had kept so quiet in all the months they lived there that we never once heard them.
The rise of Isis in northern Syria also meant banishment for Aleppo’s activists, the young, educated men and women who had been working for what they called ‘the revolution’, back when there was still a revolution to speak of. These students and young professionals opposed Assad but were too urbane to join a rebel faction. Instead they set up media centres, providing much of the early footage of what was happening in their city, and then worked with foreign journalists as translators and fixers. The more secular among them sensed the danger straight away as the war in their city took a dark Islamist turn. While they tried to maintain smooth working relations with the masked men taking over Aleppo, they knew it was a matter of when, not if, the group would turn against them. Meanwhile the rebel brigades had tolerated the presence of Al-Qaeda but were warily eyeing Isis, even though they never said it publicly at first.
Some, though, placed a naïve trust in these strangers flocking to their city. ‘They’re good Islamic boys!’ one of my fixers, Soheib, told me one evening in August 2013 as we sat in the Aleppo apartment he and his friends had taken over as a base for journalists. On the floor below was the office of an FSA faction; on the floor below that a makeshift clinic. The streets outside were usually deserted – the apartment block was just a few hundred metres from the front line with Assad’s forces and most of the residents had left. The proximity gave it a strange kind of protection, since it was too close to their own side for the regime’s jets to bombard it.
But nowhere was safe from Isis and its informants. Over that sticky-hot summer, bearded men in pick-up trucks started prowling the street outside the media centre. One day, as I sat in a sleeveless top smoking cigarettes with my Syrian friends, there came a loud hammering on the front door. Mahmoud, an English student in Homs when the uprising started, was in charge of the centre and had grasped immediately how dangerous Isis was. He had fitted a huge steel security gate over the door days earlier. Now, he peered through the peephole and saw an Isis fighter, a local guy he had known before the war who had originally joined the FSA and then been lured to the extremists. He had come over for a chat – and to check up on what Mahmoud and his team were doing. My friends bundled me into a back room with an order not to smoke, and for the next hour I sat in silence trying to pick out words from the conversation across the hallway.
In the years since I have often wondered how I survived, when so many other foreign journalists were kidnapped and handed to Isis that summer. My friendship with Mahmoud and Aymann, a nuclear physics student and also an activist at the centre, was surely a large part of it – they remain the most honest and loyal people I met in Aleppo, and by concealing me that day they risked their own lives. They were also firm with me when I pushed to do stories that were, in retrospect, suicidal. I had wanted to visit a camp for foreign fighters in the countryside between Aleppo and the Turkish border in the spring of 2013, back when the reports of Europeans flocking to join the Islamist factions were nothing more than numerous but unconfirmed rumours. They stopped me. Those same foreign fighters were later revealed to have been instrumental in the kidnappings of journalists.
Being a woman also helped, since I could easily conceal myself with a headscarf and abaya. In my disguise, complete with sunglasses to conceal my eyes, I managed to drift through a Friday demonstration organised by Al-Qaeda and into the city’s Sharia court, where the extremists handed down punishments according to their interpretation of the Qur’an. Women became faceless, ghostly beings in Aleppo as Al-Qaeda and then Isis tightened their grip, floating through the streets with faces covered and heads lowered, studiously ignored by the men they encountered. For a female journalist it was a gift – even though my height and European habit of striding along with quick steps must have looked odd among the diminutive and slow-paced Syrians. But inside I boiled, desperately sorry for the Syrian women and girls I met behind closed doors, who would rip off their coverings and vent fury at the men who were forcing this on them. One day, as I walked through Aleppo’s empty, crumbling side streets with a group of young Syrian activists, a woman rounded the corner with her two young children. She had flipped up the black sheet that covered her face and was tilting her head back towards the sun with her eyes half closed. When she caught sight of us she quickly brought the sheet down over her face again, and bustled past us in silence.
My fixer Soheib’s optimism about Isis was born of his apparent obliviousness of death in all its forms. He was brave to the point of crazy, at odds with the gelled side-parting and pencil moustache that made him look like a middle-aged accountant. Because of that I was never fully comfortable going out to report with him. He would gesture towards checkpoints manned by Al-Qaeda fighters and suggest, in all seriousness, that I ask to interview them. When we went to the front lines, dead zones running through the heart of the city where rebel fighters occupied one building and the regime men another, so close we could hear them lighting their cigarettes, he would bound up ruined steps onto rooftops and stand there shouting for me to come and join him. One day we went to the crossing point at Bustan al-Qasr, the only place left in cloven Aleppo where it was possible to pass between the rebel and regime sides of the city. On the rebel side the road was blocked off a hundred metres up from the crossing by a makeshift barricade, two burnt-out buses flipped onto their sides and piled one on top of the other. It was a crude shield against government snipers, but the people of Aleppo, their reflexes weakened by a year of random violence, still flocked to the market stalls between the buses and the crossing point. A dark brown bloodstain on the pavement marked where a Canadian-Syrian medical student called Sam treated the snipers’ victims. They opened fire every day, Sam had told me, more on Fridays. Sometimes it seemed they were playing games – they would shoot only at children on one day, at pregnant women on another. As he tired of my questions, he started interrogating me.
‘Why do you come here?’ Sam asked. ‘What is it that you’re looking for?’
Soheib and I pushed on further, right up to the sandbags that marked the final metres of rebel territory. My guts started to flip, not only from the knowledge that there were sniper rifles trained on us but also from the fear of being so close to Assad’s soldiers, just on the other side of the crossing. They would love to get their hands on a British journalist, I thought, to parade me on Syrian television as a spy and then throw me into one of their prisons. With my thoughts elsewhere I hardly noticed the growing danger we were in from the rebels manning this side of the crossing. One had caught Soheib’s arm and was demanding to see his papers. Another had spotted my camera. Soheib had assured me before we set off that it was a friendly brigade manning this checkpoint, that we would encounter no problems. But Aleppo’s war was so fluid in those months, it stank so heavily of testosterone that fiefdoms could change hands within hours. The men peering at us weren’t Islamists, I was sure, but they were scruffy and I could smell their lack of discipline.
Our saviour came from an unlikely place: at that moment, one of Assad’s snipers opened fire. The crack-crack-crack rang down the street and the crowd parted in panic. Soheib and I took our chance and melted away with them, scrambling for a market hall opposite Sam’s clinic that had lost all its windows and taken several mortar rounds to its walls. The half-minute it took me to run to the hall and clamber through its window seemed to last an hour: I wasn’t wearing my flak jacket, and I felt the softness of my flesh and spine as bullets flew past me down the street. Once inside my relief turned to sweat that poured profusely down my face, and I collapsed shaking against a wall. Soheib had other ideas. He hopped back through the ruined window onto the street as the sniper kept firing.
‘What are you doing? Come back out here!’ he shouted. ‘Come and take photos of this!’
‘Are you fucking insane?’ I shouted back, as he stood on the deserted street waving his arms.
I started to believe that Soheib was charmed, a cat with nine lives who would walk away unscathed from everything Aleppo threw at him. I was wrong, of course. It wasn’t his gung-ho nonchalance in the line of fire that did for him, but his geekiness and blind faith in the fundamental goodness of the Isis men. Soheib kept lists of everything – new rebel groupings, how many fighters they had, where their money was coming from and what areas they controlled. He saved those documents and thousands of photos and videos on his laptop, which he took with him everywhere and shared freely with the journalists he worked with. And when Isis called to tell him they had arrested his brother in Azaz, he went to their headquarters there with his laptop and lists.
We never saw him again. Both I and another British journalist who worked with him received Skype messages from him on the same day a few weeks later, before either of us knew he had disappeared. I twigged straight away that something was wrong: the message I received was a single word: ‘Hello.’ Soheib never started a conversation like that – he would always address me as ‘Miss Hannah’, and craft a polite, slightly old-fashioned introduction.
Mahmoud told me what had happened when he himself fled to Turkey weeks later, the steel door and the machine gun he kept in the footwell of his car no longer enough to protect him. Aymann was also arrested but scored a lucky escape when he was placed in the charge of an old acquaintance who had joined up with Isis, and who took pity on him. The extremists had turned on the activists, just as we all knew they would, and on the Aleppo rebels who had misguidedly tolerated the Isis presence in their midst. By January 2014, almost all of rebel-held Aleppo was under Isis control and any activists, fixers or translators who had stayed were rounded up, accused of spying for Western governments.
Two years later I met with another old Aleppo activist, a graffiti artist I had watched paint revolutionary slogans and smiley faces on the rubble in 2013. He had been held in the same Isis prison as Soheib. Finally, I got the last piece of his story: an Isis court had found Soheib guilty of sedition, and his punishment was a bullet to the head.
There were times in Aleppo when I could kid myself that I really understood the torment of the people I was writing about. I would stay in their homes and sit with them as Assad’s jets howled over, our conversation ebbing and flowing as they came and went. Sometimes, as they approached, someone would turn the lights out and everyone would stop talking, as if we could hide in the silence and darkness. As the din subsided we would unclamp our tensed muscles and smile at each other, trying to cover our fear as we anticipated the next one. At first there were patterns to where the bombs struck – hospitals, schools and crowded markets were the most dangerous places to be. But once the regime, whether for sadistic or logistical reasons, switched to using barrel bombs instead, death became horribly random. When Mahmoud and I returned to Aleppo in April 2014, after the rebels had pushed Isis back to the city’s eastern borders, we drove in silence through deserted neighbourhoods that had been turned into concrete skeletons, the remains of apartment blocks jutting like broken teeth from a ruined mouth. In the quarters that were still inhabited, everyone on the streets turned their eyes to the sky. Barrel bombing happened in evil slow motion, much more agonising than the quick whoosh-blast-death of the jets. The grace with which the barrels tumbled from the helicopters, arcing towards the ground like swooping birds and then morphing into huge mushrooms of smoke and dust, gave you the feeling that you could escape them if only you ran fast enough.
Each time I left Aleppo I felt overwhelming relief and a fierce stab of guilt as I said goodbye to the people who had to stay. No way could I ever know what this was like for them – not even close. A few days in that city was enough to make me chain smoke and fixate on my own mortality, desperate to wash the stink of the generator diesel out of my hair and the dust off my skin. So what was it doing to these people who stayed there for years, and to the kids born into a world where buildings exploded at random around them?
But my Aleppo dissonance was nothing next to the night in May 2015 when I stood on the deck of a small pleasure boat and watched a huddle of people pray as their sagging dinghy started to take in water. It was only a month since Abu Laith had talked about shifting his route north to the Aegean coast, and all the other middlemen had hit on the same idea. The long and expensive route to Italy dried up along with the local smuggling economy in Mersin, so the smugglers started organising short hops across the Aegean to Greece in rubber boats designed for children’s playtime. The retail price of a route into Europe dropped overnight from more than 6,000 euros per person to around 1,000, and the trickle of people taking the journey turned into a flood.
I was working alongside a British television news crew when we spotted the slowly sinking boat. We had decided that the best way to witness this new Aegean smuggling operation in action was to persuade a Turkish captain to take us out just beyond a bay that we knew to be a smuggling hotspot, drop anchor, and wait. We faked a party as the sun went down, blasting out cheesy music and dancing on the deck. As the last wisps of light faded, we saw pinpricks of light sparking up in a wooded hill that dropped straight down into the sea 500 metres away from us – the picturesque backdrop to a beachfront honeymoon resort. The lights were people picking their way down to the shore having been dropped off by the smugglers in the middle of a mountain road, told where to go and ordered to keep their mouths shut. By 2 a.m., in the pitch-black silence and waiting for the flotilla of small dinghies to arrive, most of us had fallen asleep.
I woke up at 3 a.m. to an urgent whisper from the news crew’s reporter. He had spotted the first boat, drifting just a few metres away from us. We turned on a camera light and started shouting out questions – and saw for ourselves the reality of this journey, sold by the smugglers as a short and easy hop across to the Greek island of Kos.
The dinghy was four metres long, and every spare inch of it was filled. The women and children sat in the middle, and the men on the lip around the edge. It was probably meant for eight people but there were at least twenty on board, and it was starting to sag beneath the waterline. One man tried to mop up the water inside the boat with a towel, wringing it out over the side every few seconds. They were only a few hundred metres from the Turkish shore, and they were already sinking.
The reporter asked them whether we should call the coastguard as they passed us ten metres away.
‘Stay with us, please,’ shouted out one of the men, a Syrian who spoke perfect English. ‘Don’t call the coastguard, just follow us.’
‘What are you running from?’ I called out to him.
‘War,’ he replied. ‘Just war.’
‘And what are you looking for?’ I yelled as the boat pulled off towards Greek waters.
‘Freedom,’ came his response.
Turgutreis, the closest town to the smuggling point, is a tourist resort on the Bodrum peninsula, home to a gaggle of British expats and seasonal workers who throng there in summer. Signs of its burgeoning night sport were scattered everywhere by May 2015 – young Arab men with small backpacks hanging out in the main square by daytime, deflated and abandoned dinghies in the quieter coves and often, in the early mornings, the sight of the coastguard bringing in the people they had rescued or captured.
‘I come to the same sun lounger every morning,’ said Ann Davidson, a retired British nurse with pink hair who had lived in Turgutreis on and off for two decades. ‘And a few weeks ago I started to see the coastguard going out more and more.’
When Ann first noticed huge groups of bedraggled people, including children, being brought in and herded into a lock-up at the end of the pier, her nursing instincts took over. She loaded the basket of her bicycle with water and biscuits and pedalled over to hand them out. As the coastguard and gendarmerie officers got to know her they started letting her into the cell, a bare cage with no seats but shaded from the sun at least. Talking with the people locked inside as she handed out her offerings, she began to realise the scale of what was happening in her adopted home town.
‘They were all telling me how they had escaped from Syria and Iraq and were trying to get to Europe,’ Ann said. ‘And most of them had already tried several times and been caught. They said they would keep trying until they made it to Greece.’
One morning I walked down the Turgutreis pier with her to hand out refreshments and speak with the latest arrivals. The three dozen people sprawled behind the bars on the concrete looked exhausted, their fatigue turning to quiet amazement when they saw this middle-aged lady with candy-floss hair bustling in and handing out packaged cakes. A young Syrian man called Mohammed, his English polished to perfection over his career working as an interpreter in Dubai, started telling their story.
‘This is the second time we’ve been caught, we also tried yesterday,’ he said. ‘We’re not worried about what will happen. Yesterday we were held here for three hours, then they took us to the police station in Bodrum, took our fingerprints and photographs and released us. But this time we were only ten or fifteen minutes from Kos when we were caught.’
The group would try again tonight and keep trying until they reached Greece, Mohammed said. They had got to know each other, become friends – at least, the Syrians had. Half of the men in the lock-up were silent, staring men with darker complexions and rounder faces than the others. When I tried to speak with them all they would say was ‘Burma, Burma.’ One of the gendarmerie officers told me the authorities guessed they were actually Pakistani, but they had no papers to prove it either way. This nightly dance with the coastguard and the police would not and could not stop them: they would repeat their ritual until they finally passed over the invisible sea border to Greece. Each time, the smuggler would send four boats off in quick succession, and the coastguard might be able to catch one. They could not be the unlucky ones for ever. And Mohammed had nowhere to return to.
‘When things started getting complicated in Syria the UAE stopped renewing my residency,’ he said. ‘So I took my wife and three kids back to Damascus – and then the apartment I had bought there with my savings from Dubai was bombed. I came to Turkey a year ago and opened a cake shop, but I was mugged of everything by a business partner. We do appreciate Turkey very much, but it’s not easy to live here. I did my best but it didn’t work. It’s not easy to merge into the community here. The culture is similar but the Turkish people have started to feel angry about us being here. I told my wife that I’ll use our last bit of money to get to Europe, and then I can bring them after me.’
One of Mohammed’s children had stayed in Damascus with his parents. The other two were living in Mersin with his wife. He laughed in anticipation of the stories he would tell his grandchildren one day, in their future life in Europe.
‘I am forty-one years old. I have lived the war and now I am living adventures at sea,’ he said. ‘I used to look at smugglers as criminals. But if they didn’t exist we would just die in other ways.’
Mohammed and the others had each paid 950 euros for their passage, a price that bought them as many attempts as they needed, and a measure of security. By now people-smuggling had become established, organised and competitive – the agents, dependent on word of mouth and good references, had realised they needed to professionalise. I went back to Mersin armed with scraps of information I had collected from Abu Laith, Mohammed and others like them, and started deciphering how the industry worked. At every level, smuggling’s shadow economy was interwoven with Turkey’s legitimate one. The smugglers’ customers increasingly came into Turkey on official visas, stayed in tourist hotels, and paid their fees to the mob at the money exchange and transfer offices that litter every down-at-heel commercial district of every Turkish city.
Behind the grubby white Formica counter of the al-Sayeed money-changing office in Mersin, a young Syrian called Mahmoud sucked on a cigarette and told me about his business. He had started with just one office, which he set up when he fled to Turkey in 2012. As the wave of refugees increased, so did his trade: new arrivals found their way to him when they wanted to change the stacks of Syrian notes they had brought out – their life savings – for dollars or Turkish lira. He was making a decent living, nothing out of the ordinary for a small businessman – just enough to look after his family and put away some savings.
Then in 2014 Mersin’s smuggling middlemen came to him. They needed an interlocutor, they said, someone who could act as the guarantor between them and their customers. He would take the payments from people who wanted to go to Europe, and for a fee hold it in trust for them until they reached the destination they had agreed with the smugglers’ agents. On payment the customers were given two unique codes, known only to Mahmoud and themselves. They would give the first to the smuggler as they got on the boat as proof of their payment, and send the other back to him when they reached Europe. Once they texted the second one to him, he would hand the money to the smugglers and the deal was complete.
Mahmoud was already reaping the rewards. His single office in Mersin had grown into a chain of twelve in cities across Turkey, and he was opening others in Italy, the Republic of Cyprus and Bulgaria – all smugglers’ entry points to the EU. Each month, he was holding payments for around four thousand people. His total fee for each customer was $180, $30 of it paid by them and the remaining $150 from the smuggler. That alone was bringing him an income of $720,000 a month. On top, he was dabbling in currency and gold speculation using the money he was holding. And Mahmoud was just the middleman of the middlemen.
‘People are selling their house, gold, land, everything to get to Europe,’ he said. ‘It’s the middle classes mainly. I started doing this a year ago, just informally for friends at first. And then one person passed my contact on to another, and it grew from there.’
Of the six people working in his Mersin office, two were focused solely on the smuggling payments. The Turkish authorities, he told me, didn’t bother him.
‘The Turkish government doesn’t know about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t put any of our money in the banks, the intelligence would notice. And anyway, my business is not part of smuggling, it’s just for smuggling. I’m saving this money for them as a humanitarian act.’
I struggled with that claim, and with the notion that the Turkish government had failed to notice what was happening. Over the next months I developed a fascination with these smoky, sparsely lit, shady money offices and visited dozens of them – in Istanbul, along the western coast, and down at the Syrian border. Throughout the whole of 2015, none of them ever said no when I walked in and told them I was a journalist and wanted to know how their businesses worked. All of them sat me down with a cup of tea and a cigarette, sometimes in a back room and sometimes just out on the shop floor, and told me as many details as I wanted to know.
Every second or third shop at one end of the main street of şanlıurfa, a city close to the Syrian border, was a rough copy of Mahmoud’s place in Mersin: a bare office with a desk, and a man sitting behind it with nothing but a laptop and a collection of mobile phones. Their windows were plastered with Arabic-language signs. There was no need for any in Turkish: almost all their customers were Syrian refugees from the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, which had been overrun by Isis. The terror group’s Caliphate started just thirty-five miles down the road; Isis had captured both the Syrian frontier town of Tel Abyad and its border crossing with Turkey in January 2014. The border was still commutable: down at the Akçakale gate I stood in an abaya and headscarf and watched bearded men and burka-clad women show their passports to the Turkish guards and pass on through to the town, where the black flag was flying. There were even new clothes stores operating right on the Turkish side of the crossing, selling the Islamic garb needed to blend in over in Isis-land. Barbers who had escaped Tel Abyad when the men with the penchant for long beards had taken over had set themselves up again in Akçakale town, a few blocks back from the crossing, their customers now mostly Syrians who had had enough of living under Islamo-fascism and had come out the other way. Once in Turkey, they immediately indulged in everything they had been denied – a cigarette, a drink and a beard trim.
In those grimy şanlıurfa offices I saw how capital was flowing across the border, too. The main business of these exchange offices was hawala, an informal method of transferring money across borders – in this case, across the frontier into Isis territory. If a Syrian in Turkey wanted to send money to relatives back home in Deir Ezzor or Raqqa they would visit one of the agents on şanlıurfa’s main street. There they would hand over the cash, and send the agent photographs of their ID documents and those of the receiver. The hawala agent then passed instructions to their counterpart inside Syria, who would hand the money to the specified person once they had produced that ID. The confirmations and photos of documents were all sent via WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service the authorities could not spy on. The hawala agents on either side kept huge stacks of money and a record of the transactions they made, and evened up the discrepancies when they met a few times a year. Usually the agents were relatives, their blood ties a substitute for the legal guarantees built into formal money-transfer systems.
The hawala guys asked no questions about where the money was going. One, a brawny man called Ahmet whose arms were covered with scrappy homemade tattoos, admitted that his cousin in Raqqa was being taxed by Isis for each transaction he made – protection money, he said, to allow him to continue his business and help the people of the city to survive. With Syria’s banking system frozen there was no other way to get money in to the people struggling to make ends meet in the war zone. Aid organisations often quietly use the hawala system to get money to their workers in areas held by rebel groups, although – unsurprisingly, given its usefulness for terrorists and money launderers – Western governments are keen to clamp down.
As the conflict bit harder and the value of the Syrian pound (or lira) started plummeting, formal money changers in Turkey stopped accepting it. The refugees coming out of the country with their life savings in Syrian cash had no choice but to go to the unofficial hawala offices to change it into dollars, where the rate they were offered was derisory. The agents, left with stacks of notes useless inside Turkey, soon arranged a new system to transfer the money back into Syria, where the Syrian lira was still holding up as the street currency. They sent the money to another middleman in Kilis, who arranged for it to be smuggled across the border by ‘ants’, children and young men who would traverse the illegal routes several times a day carrying backpacks stuffed with cash. Inside Syria, they would trade it with money changers for the dollars flowing into the country in sponsorship for armed groups and aid projects.
By 2015 the hawala agents were getting in on the business of holding money for the people-smugglers, too, the last link in a circular chain of misery. Syrians were selling everything in order to reach Europe through networks that were feeding money back to the very armed groups that had caused them to flee in the first place. The poorest, as always, were left behind in Turkey’s camps, together with the women and children who were waiting in agony for their husbands and brothers to complete the dangerous journey to Europe, so that they could come safely on a family reunification visa afterwards. And by welcoming refugees at their borders but not offering any safe or legal route to get there, the governments of rich Europe provided a never-ending stream of custom for the smugglers.
On the second floor of a gritty şanlıurfa shopping arcade, barely less hidden than the hawala places, Nabil Aldush ran another smuggling auxiliary – a document forgery office. Syrian passports, some of the weakest in the world, had become hot property since Angela Merkel announced in September 2015 that her country would accept any Syrians who made it over Germany’s borders. Berlin was willingly breaking free of the Dublin Agreement, the EU rules on asylum signed in 1990 which state that refugees must make their claim in the first member state they arrive in. For those travelling the smugglers’ route from Turkey, that had meant Italy, Greece or Bulgaria – poor countries unable to cope with a humanitarian emergency and definitely not places people would choose to stay. But now, if Syrians could make it all the way 1,500 miles north of the Greek islands to the German border, they could claim asylum there no matter what other EU countries they had travelled through.
Instantly, Germany rather than Sweden became the number one destination for the people trying to reach Europe. And for the scores of non-Syrians who had joined the exodus to Europe via Turkey – mainly Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis – a Syrian passport was a must-have. The smugglers told them they would be granted automatic refugee status in Germany if they could pass as Syrians – even though the authorities in Europe quickly wised up. Nabil had opened his office in late 2014, initially providing other kinds of forged documents to Syrians who had lost everything in the war: marriage contracts, driving licences and university certificates were some of his best sellers. A year on, passports had become his most lucrative trade. He had worked for the government back in Syria, and through a contact with the regime in Damascus he was buying genuine blank passports which he would print with the details and photographs of his customers. He charged $2,000 per passport.
‘Six months ago the first Iraqis started coming,’ Nabil said. ‘They’re frank – they say they want to go to Europe as Syrians. A lot of people ask me how they can get to Greece, but I tell them I just deal with documents, not with smuggling.’
Nabil took a certain pride in his work – he even kept an ultra-violet scanner in his office to prove that the holograms on his passports were genuine before he handed them over to his happy customers. He turned his nose up at what he called the ‘Istanbul passports’, the obvious fakes; ten thousand of them had made their way onto the market, he said, but he had never dealt in them. So legitimate was his business, he claimed, that he was licensed by the Turkish government to do it – at least for his Syrian customers.
‘They trust us, they know we just want to help Syrians,’ he said. ‘When the refugees go to the municipality and say they’ve come here without any documents, they send them to us.’
As the trafficking business professionalised, its warp weaving in with the weft of Turkey’s legitimate economy, an even meaner subset of criminals started operating in its shadows. The Syrians dreaming of Europe made easy pickings for the conmen who now flocked to the seediest districts of Istanbul, where they set up informal offices in the tea houses.
‘The smuggler told me to meet him by the tram stop,’ a Syrian called Rami told me, a few days after he had been relieved of his life savings and left in huge debt to friends and relatives. ‘When I got there, I waited for thirty minutes and called him three times. I guess he was observing me. When he came, he had an Aleppo accent and told me not to trust anyone. I asked about using the money offices for the payment and he told me no, they’re thieves.’
The smuggler took Rami to a grungy hotel where his accomplice showed him pictures of the European passports they could provide him with. Rami had decided not to risk the sea route, instead plumping for the high-end option of documents and a flight ticket straight into the EU. The men told Rami they would provide him with the passport of a European who resembled him, and that they had contacts in Istanbul’s airports who would ensure that no one would look too closely. He would fly to the Emirates, and from there to the UK. To ease his doubts they brought in another customer who told him that his cousin had used their services days earlier and was now in England. Convinced, Rami shook on the deal.
‘I went around everyone I knew and collected money,’ he said. ‘They wanted $4,500 as a deposit, and the whole thing would cost $15,000. I would send them the rest when I got to Europe. I paid them, and they said my flight would be booked for the next day. But when I went back to the hotel to meet them they were gone. Everything was gone.’
The key to cutting off the smugglers lay not at sea, but on land. That was what the Turkish coastguard wanted to show me when he sneaked me aboard his patrol on a balmy September night. He was the skipper we had found off the Turgutreis bay four months earlier after the Syrian in the sinking dinghy had asked us to follow them to Greece. After a few panicked minutes of moral tussling we decided that we had to report what we had seen, and set off back to the port. The coastguard found us first, speeding up to us with sirens sounding in the gentle dawn sunlight. By law the owner of the boat needed a licence and a radar system to stay out in the bay all night, and he had neither. As the only journalist on board with a Turkish press card and some command of the language, I did the talking as he pulled alongside us.
‘And what do you think of how the Turkish coastguard is handling this crisis?’ he asked me after I had explained what we were doing.
‘I think you’re doing a good job in a very difficult situation,’ I replied.
His demeanour changed, the stiff outer shell of officialdom dropping away as a smile crept across his face.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you back to the port.’
Once we had docked he ticked us off for staying out on the water all night and took my details and telephone number. A few months later, he sent me a message asking if I would like to see what the trafficking trade looked like from his eyes.
A few hundred metres out from the coast he turned off the ship’s lights, opened a packet of chocolate biscuits and handed me some night-vision goggles.
‘Look out over there,’ he told me, gesturing back towards the shore. At first there was just blackness, but within minutes I saw the first boats, picked out in sharp green lines. Soon I could see five of them scattered across the bay.
‘Now this is my dilemma,’ the coastguard said. ‘If I go to stop one of them, what if another one sinks in the meantime? If I intercept one boat that is not sinking it will take me at least two hours to take all the people back to land and hand them over to the police. And if another boat sinks as I’m doing that, there is no one here to rescue the people.’
Once the boats were in the water it was too late, he said. The only way to stop the smugglers was for the gendarmerie to set up checkpoints along the coastal roads and catch them and their customers as they travelled to the launch points. He was sick of the blame being directed at him and his colleagues for the huge criminal and humanitarian crisis happening on his watch. Only days earlier, a photo from a nearby beach had torn across front pages around the world: a Turkish gendarmerie officer carrying the limp body of a three-year-old boy who had washed up on the shore. It sparked the first real wave of global rage about what was happening at the edge of Europe, even though it had all been going on for months. Volunteers of every stripe, from professional lawyers and medics to idealist leftists, flocked to the Greek islands to pitch in. Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Abu Laith was talking about how he was planning to send his twelve-year-old son on the boats to Greece and on to Sweden, to claim asylum quickly as a lone child and bring him on the parental visa afterwards. Such paternal cynicism happened. But there were scores of older teenagers I met along the route, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in parks in Belgrade or harbour fronts on Greek islands who simply knew that it was their responsibility as the eldest son to do something to save their families back in Syria. The brute truth was that it was hard, even at the height of the exodus, for anyone other than the young and fit to complete the trek from Turkey’s shore to Germany’s borders, via sinking boats, stuffed trains and military lines. Older family members would never make it like that. Many on the route were young people who saw what was going on in their homelands through clear eyes, and wanted no part in it. Ahmed, a seventeen-year-old Shia from Baghdad, had lost his whole immediate family in a car bombing four years earlier. Raised since then by an aunt, all he could think of was his chance to leave for a place where people didn’t kill each other in the name of a God he didn’t believe in.
‘Will they accept me in Europe if they know I’m an atheist?’ he asked me with scared eyes as we stood looking back over the sea to Turkey.
Though young men were over-represented on the smugglers’ boats, there were plenty of girls and young women making the trek to Europe too. Many of the young Syrian women I met on the refugee route were Kurds, camping out in tents at the Macedonian border or crowding around a phone they were charging in a Greek café. A group of young Damascenes I met on Kos reminded me in every way of my group of Syrian friends in Antakya – same urbanity, same funny accent, same way of bursting into song and verbally jousting with each other non-stop. Among ten of them, only one was a woman, Leila, a 21-year-old student in a tight white hijab. They had all hung on to the Damascus life that my Antakya friends had left behind: Assad’s Syria, relatively safe but scarily oppressive. They pushed me for my accounts of the unknown terror, rebel-held Syria, which they had heard so much about but never seen. One of the guys, a cheerful soul sipping a Mythos beer on this balmy evening, said that he supported Nusra, the Al-Qaeda-linked rebel faction in Syria, even after I had told him of all the bullshit they had peddled in Aleppo.
Leila clicked her teeth at her friend and slapped his leg.
‘You need to listen to her, you fool,’ she said, pointing at me. ‘She’s seen them.’
It would be comforting to think that it was the rising tide of death in the Aegean that finally forced Turkey and Europe to act against the people traffickers, and that the measures they took made it easier and safer for those legitimately seeking asylum to do so. By the end of 2015 more than a hundred people were known to have drowned in the sea and thousands more plucked out by the coastguard or volunteers on the Greek islands. The solution the leaders in Brussels finally hit on, a multi-billion-euro deal with Turkey to stamp out the smuggling industry and improve life for the Syrians Ankara was hosting, succeeded only in the sense that it staunched the flow of boats across the Aegean. But it also handed Erdoğan a major trump card.
The deal was signed in March 2016, and promised to hand six billion euros to Turkey in two tranches to provide better services for the three million Syrians living there. It also dangled the prospect of visa-free travel in the Schengen zone for Turkish citizens. In return, any person who travelled to Greece from Turkey’s shores via the smugglers’ boats would be sent back to Turkey. For each Syrian returned, one already living in Turkey would be resettled in Europe. On the sunny morning that the deal came into force I stood in the Turkish seaside town of Dikili with a scrum of other journalists, waiting for the first boat bringing in forcibly returned people – the final breakdown of an asylum policy Europe had operated for two decades. The boat was due to dock around lunchtime. But as around a hundred of us, television cameras, photojournalists and newspaper hacks, waited on the rocks next to the wire fence surrounding the port, workers came and hung up huge plastic sheets blocking the television cameras from capturing the big moment. In the end we caught a glimpse of a downcast huddle of men being ushered from the boat into a police bus, filed our stories, and then headed to the beach with beers.
The money the EU has handed to Turkey has been distributed among the camps, the Turkish health service, schools and other refugee aid projects. It has also funded detention centres where non-Syrians – mostly Afghans and Pakistanis – returned from Greece are held before being deported back to their countries. The flood of people travelling to the Greek islands has slowed to a trickle. But the measures Ankara has taken to cauterise trafficking have not much improved life for the Syrians who remain in Turkey. Most must now get a permission paper from the local government before they are allowed to travel out of the Turkish province where they are registered. Their residency documents must be renewed each year in a lengthy bout of paperwork, and in order to get them they must present a valid Syrian passport – a huge hurdle for those who left the country without documents, or who skipped military service and whose passports have expired. For a time, they too went to the passport forgers for their renewals, but the regime back in Damascus has now started issuing documents to defectors for huge fees in a bid to bring more cash into its coffers. The Syrian consulate in Istanbul, which has stayed open throughout the war despite Turkey cutting its diplomatic ties with Assad back in 2011, is constantly crowded with Syrians desperate to get their papers renewed, queuing from four in the morning down the gleaming pavements of the exclusive consular district. The process often takes six months and by the time the Syrians have their new passports they have already nearly expired again – men who have not done their military service get only two years’ extension each time. Stuck in a never-ending loop between Ankara’s bureaucracy and nonchalant contempt in Damascus, they are often never fully legal in Turkey, always in fear of being stopped by an unfriendly policeman.
Those caught without the right papers in Turkey have, on occasion, been forced back across the border into Syria – a breach of the UN convention on refugees. Meanwhile, from the middle of 2015, the Turkish security forces started sealing the frontier, building a huge wall along its length and militarising the area around it. There have been countless reports, some of them accompanied by horrifying mobile phone footage, of Turkish soldiers shooting at Syrians as they try to cross the border. Hundreds have been killed. Ankara flatly denies it, but a former Turkish commando who had served at one of the busiest border areas told me the instructions from their commanders had shifted over the course of 2015 and 2016. At first they were told to turn a blind eye, then they were told to keep the refugees back and to fire warning shots into the air if necessary. After that, they were ordered to shoot at their legs if they kept on coming. Finally, they were commanded to shoot to kill if they felt they were being threatened. There is no evidence of European collusion in Turkey’s changing border policy, but it happened in sync with the bloc handing over billions to Ankara to stop migration to Europe. The EU has never criticised or even commented on the reports of the shootings.
Back in Ankara, Erdoğan has repeatedly used the deal as a way to lash out at Brussels. He has claimed that the bloc has not handed over the promised money, even though it is flowing to Turkey as scheduled. He has accused Europe of insincerity in its promise to grant visa-free travel to Turks – a part of the deal that has never been enacted due to Ankara’s worsening human rights record since it was signed. He has even threatened to call the deal off and open his borders should Europe not give him what he wants, be it more money or more leeway to rule without reproach.
For most Syrians still in Turkey the biggest problem is insecurity – not knowing how long they will be allowed to stay and if they will ever be granted citizenship. Ankara has so far given passports to a select few Syrians, around 300,000 who are mostly educated professionals. But as opinion polls show that Turks are increasingly fed up with hosting millions of Syrians, so Erdoğan’s rhetoric has turned. He now says the Syrians will eventually have to return to their homeland, that they cannot stay in Turkey for ever.
Unpicking the story of Syria’s revolution is like trying to untangle a knot of hair. In early 2011 no one wanted to tell a foreign journalist that they were involved in the uprising. By early 2013, everyone did. Two years on again, and everyone was just sick of telling the same old story to a world that had long grown bored of it.
So it wasn’t until our conversation randomly tilted towards Damascus and the first protests of the revolution that I realised that Ahmed – a smiling, warm-hearted fixer from Aleppo who was taking me to meet Abu Laith, the smuggler – had been a member of the security forces that I had feared so deeply when I travelled into Assad’s Syria on a tourist visa in 2011.
‘Now everyone says they were there in the first protests, everyone tries to outdo each other with what they did for the revolution,’ he said, as we drove along the smooth new highway to Mersin. Then his round face cracked into an irresistible smile. ‘I was at the Day of Rage,’ he laughed. ‘Only I was on the other side.’
He had told me before how he had spent a couple of weeks fighting alongside the rebels in Aleppo before deciding that he could better use his skills by working as a fixer for the foreign journalists who were flocking to the city, but I had no idea about his narrow and lucky exit from the regime’s army. Ahmed had been called up for his compulsory military service in July 2009. At the time he was vaguely annoyed – ‘I had a good life in Aleppo,’ he said – but he accepted it as inevitable. Every young man in Syria was obliged to spend a year and nine months in the army as soon as they turned eighteen, unless they had the money or the connections to bribe their way out of it. Some leeway was given to university students, who could delay their military service until they had graduated. Many stretched out their time at university for as long as they could, changing courses or signing up for another as soon as they had finished their first one. But Ahmed was a barber from a working-class family, and he had no get-out available. So he decided to make the best of his unavoidable circumstances. He excelled in his six months’ training, and when that was finished he was selected to be one of the prime minister’s bodyguards. It was an elite position, and he jumped at it. ‘I didn’t want to be one of those people who spends their whole military service in the barracks,’ he said. ‘I would have gone crazy if I couldn’t go out every day.’
He pulled up a photo on his mobile phone, showing him back in his military service days. Dozens of other Syrian men had shown me similar photos, in which they usually looked far older, even when the shots had been taken years before. The service was so notoriously tough and brutal that it turned fresh-faced teenagers into gaunt shaven-headed young men with haunted eyes. They were forced to complete gruelling physical training every day on pitiful rations, sleeping in unheated barracks even in the freezing winter months and running for miles in boots that were often several sizes too small. The Sunnis suffered the worst; on top of the physical discomforts, they were humiliated by the Alawite officers. Praying was strictly forbidden, and anyone caught doing it would be beaten.
But in his photo Ahmed looked like a male model. He had a fashionable haircut, a designer suit and sunglasses, and he was leaning proprietorially against a gleaming Mercedes. This was the fortune of those who occupied the elite military positions – privilege, freedom, and carte blanche to behave how they liked.
‘If I had wanted to be an asshole, I could have been,’ said Ahmed. ‘You could steal, or rape, or blackmail, and nothing would happen to you.’
By early 2011, he had been seconded to the personal protection team of the head of Damascus’s political intelligence unit. In the days before the 15 March Day of Rage, preparations for the security service’s response reached warp speed. There had already been one small demonstration in Damascus a month earlier; now, the regime knew that it had to prepare for more. ‘We have twelve different intelligence forces in Syria and every single one knew what was being planned,’ said Ahmed. ‘I felt uneasy about it – I didn’t believe that these protests could bring anything good.’
The Day of Rage protest started in the Souk al-Hamidiyah, the famous covered market in the old city. Ahmed was one of the dozens of officers assigned to it, far outnumbering the handful of protesters. Every officer wore plain clothes, mingling seamlessly with the demonstrators before moving in for the kill. As the protest moved into the old city along the ancient streets around the Umayyad Mosque, the security forces moved in from all directions. Ahmed and his colleagues arrested everybody – it didn’t matter if they were taking part in the protests or not.
A few days later, his ambivalence about the slowly swelling protest movement turned to fear. President Bashar al-Assad gave a speech in which he promised that the security forces would not open fire. But the head of the political intelligence unit told his men something different.
‘He told us that at the next protests, we were to fire on the protesters,’ he said. ‘Some of us spoke up – we said that the president had said that wouldn’t happen. But he replied: “Shut up. This is what I’m telling you. And this is what you do.” And then I realised that Bashar was saying one thing, but the security forces were doing something else.’
On 2 April, Ahmed attended his final protest in Damascus. Everyone in his unit had been issued with cattle prods that discharged 330 volts of electricity – enough to kill a person. The protest, near the political intelligence headquarters, was the largest yet in the capital. News of the spiralling violence in Deraa was spreading, and people who had spent years subdued by their fear of the regime were now galvanised by anger. It was not just the students and the young people who turned out to protest – this time there were older people too. ‘I saw one old man next to me and I told him “Just run, just go”,’ said Ahmed. ‘I knew what was going to happen.’
Within half an hour the security forces had turned on the protesters. Ahmed had deliberately spilled water over his cattle prod and broken it but others were fully invested in the mission they had been sent out on. Division Four – the elite and feared security force headed up by Bashar al-Assad’s psychopathic brother, Maher – came out into the demonstration. Ahmed watched as they started laying into the protesters with crude maces – sticks of wood topped off with sharp metal. ‘They were like animals,’ he said. ‘The old man I’d told to run had ignored me. I saw him getting beaten with one of those sticks.’
On 4 April 2011 – two days after that protest – he was released from military service and returned to Aleppo, charged with new hate for the regime and fear of the future, of what the things he had witnessed might turn into. Two weeks later, the regime stopped releasing men from their military service. For those still serving against their will, being forced ever more often to fire on the people they sympathised with, the ways out were closing down.
By the time I met him in 2014, Ahmed had fled Aleppo with the other activists and was living in Kilis in the Turkish borderlands. With his fluent English and rapidly improving Turkish, he was soon earning enough money to pay the rent on a newly built apartment and look after his wife and baby son in comfort. He was also developing a growing admiration for Erdoğan.
On the night of the 2016 coup attempt, he drove around the streets of his adopted town flying a Turkish flag out of the window. Soon after that, he was regularly posting pictures of the president on social media, alongside AK Party slogans and sycophantic dedications, so similar to those that Assad’s loyalists devote to him. At first I couldn’t figure out Ahmed’s path from army defector, to revolutionary, to refugee, to Erdoğan supporter. But soon I came to see that he is not unusual – he is the norm. Many of the Syrians who loathe Assad as a dictator see Erdoğan as their protector and sole champion in an otherwise uncaring world. WhatsApp groups set up for the Syrians applying for Turkish citizenship are full of adoration for the president, and many of Turkey’s pro-Erdoğan news services have launched Arabic-language versions to peddle their version of the truth to the refugees. And those Syrians who see the growing similarities between Erdoğan and Assad are wise enough to keep quiet.
‘Syrians are frightened and the only positive signals they get are from Turkey,’ one told me. ‘When Erdoğan says there is a conspiracy, it makes sense for them.’