ANKARA: President Tayyip Erdogan played up his plans to repatriate a million Syrian refugees as he rode a wave of nationalism to his third decade in power, but he could struggle to make good on the promise as conflict lingers on in neighboring Syria.
Erdogan, long seen as an ally by Syrian opponents of President Bashar Assad, emphasised refugee repatriation during bitter campaigning for Sunday’s run-off against Kemal Kilicidaroglu, who took an even tougher stance on the issue.
The focus on refugee return ahead of the election caused alarm among the 3.4 million Syrians living in Turkiye, where resentment toward them is growing.
Many of the refugees came from parts of Syria that remain under Assad’s control and say they can never return to their towns and villages while he remains in power.
Under Erdogan’s plans, they would not have to. With Qatari help, he says Turkiye has been building new housing in rebel-held northwest Syria — a region where Ankara has troops on the ground whose presence has deterred Syrian government attacks.
The plans imply a redoubling of Turkiye’s commitment to the rebel-held area where it has been building influence for years, even as Assad demands a timetable for the withdrawal of Turkish troops as a condition for progress toward rebuilding ties.
With Turkish voters increasingly resentful of the refugees — Turkiye hosts more than any other country – Erdogan’s plans put the issue at the heart of his Syria policy, alongside concerns about Syrian Kurdish groups that have carved out enclaves at the border and are deemed a national security threat by Turkiye.
Erdogan has said he aims to ensure the return of one million refugees within a year to the opposition-held areas. His interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, last week attended the inauguration of a housing project meant to accommodate returning Syrians in the Syrian town of Jarablus.
“It is our duty to fulfil our citizens’expectations about this issue through ways and means that befit our country,” Erdogan said in his victory speech on Sunday, adding that nearly 600,000 Syrians had already returned voluntarily to safe areas.
But for many Syrians in Turkiye, the prospect is unappealing.
“I would like to go back to Syria but not to Jarablus ... I would like to go back home, to Latakia,” said a Syrian who gave his name as Ahmed, a 28-year-old student at Ankara University, referring to a government-held region on the Mediterranean.
“I would like to go back, but if Assad stays, I can’t due to security concerns.”
Controlled by an array of armed groups, much of the northwest also suffers from lawlessness.
“Conditions in northern Syria remain so bad and unstable that large-scale return will be difficult to arrange, despite all these reports about Turkiye and Qatar building housing and infrastructure,” said Aron Lund, a Syria expert with Century International, a think tank.
“It seems like a drop in the ocean and the overall economic situation keeps deteriorating.”
Driven partly by its goal of securing refugee returns, Turkiye has changed diplomatic course on Syria, following other regional governments by reopening channels to Assad, who Erdogan once called a “butcher”.
But the rapprochement is moving more slowly than the thaw between Assad and his former Arab foes, reflecting Turkiye’s much deeper role in a country where Russia, Iran and the United States also have forces on the ground.
Analysts think Ankara will not agree easily to Assad’s demand for a withdrawal timetable, noting that any sign of Turkish forces leaving would prompt more Syrians to try to flee for Turkiye, fearing a return of Assad’s rule to the northwest.
“Turkiye is highly unlikely to compromise on troop withdrawal, which likely means hundreds of thousands of refugees heading their way if and when they leave Idlib,” said Dareen Khalifa of International Crisis Group, a think-tank.
Many Syrians in Turkiye were relieved at Kilicidaroglu’s defeat. During his campaign, he said he would discuss plans for refugee returns with Assad after reinstating relations, and that returns would be completed in two years but would not be forced.
He sharpened his tone after trailing Erdogan in the first round, vowing to send all migrants back to their countries.
Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser, said on Monday that Turkiye wanted a safe, dignified and voluntary return.
International refugee law stipulates that all returns must be voluntary.
“We’re making plans to secure the return of one or 1.5 million Syrians in the first place,” Kalin told a local broadcaster.
Samir Alabdullah of the Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies in Istanbul, a non-profit research institution, said he did not expect much to change now the election battle is over.
“Syrians are relieved after Erdogan’s victory ... There is nothing wrong with voluntary return. We do not expect policy change on migration,” he said.
Turkiye’s Erdogan faces struggle to meet Syrian refugee promise
https://arab.news/9ecse
Turkiye’s Erdogan faces struggle to meet Syrian refugee promise
- Turkiye hosts 3.4 million Syrian refugees
- Erdogan wants to send a million back as resentment grows
Israeli airstrikes kill 20 in Gaza, Palestinian officials say
- In Deir Al-Balah, a town in central Gaza about 14 km (8.6 miles) south of Gaza City, the sounds of explosions mixed with thunder, and rain added to the miseries of displaced families in tent camps
CAIRO: Twenty Palestinians were killed in the early hours of Tuesday in Israeli air strikes on Rafah and central parts of the Gaza Strip, Gaza health officials said.
In the southern Gaza city of Rafah near the Egyptian border, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought shelter, 14 people were killed and dozens others wounded in strikes that hit several houses and apartments, Gaza medical officials said.
Six more people died in another air strike on a house in Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, they added.
In Deir Al-Balah, a town in central Gaza about 14 km (8.6 miles) south of Gaza City, the sounds of explosions mixed with thunder, and rain added to the miseries of displaced families in tent camps.
“We are no longer able to distinguish between the sounds of thunder and bombings,” Shaban Abdel-Raouf, a father of five in Deir Al-Balah, said via a chat application.
“We used to await the rain and pray to God if it was late. Today we pray it doesn’t rain. The displaced people have enough miseries,” he added.
The conflict, now in its sixth month, began when Hamas fighters stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing 253 hostages according to Israeli tallies. Since then, Israel’s assault has killed more than 31,000 Gazans, according to Palestinian health officials.
Negotiations for a ceasefire in the war were due to resume on Monday with an Israeli delegation heading to Qatar.
“We are looking forward to the good news from Qatar. Will it happen this time? Will they seal a deal? Over 2 million people in Gaza are praying they do,” said Abdel-Raouf.
Israeli airstrikes target Damascus countryside, Syria says
- Iran has been a major backer of President Bashar Assad during Syria’s nearly 12-year-old conflict
AMMAN: Israel early on Tuesday launched missiles at several military targets outside the Syrian capital Damascus resulting in some “material damage,” Syria’s defense ministry said.
Syrian air defenses intercepted Israeli “missiles and shot down some of them,” the ministry added in a statement.
Iran has been a major backer of President Bashar Assad during Syria’s nearly 12-year-old conflict. Its support for Damascus and the Lebanese group Hezbollah has drawn regular Israeli air strikes meant to curb Tehran’s extraterritorial military power.
Those strikes have ramped up in line with flaring regional tensions since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with more than half a dozen Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers killed in suspected Israeli strikes on Syria since December.
As a result, the Guards have scaled back deployment of their senior officers in Syria and have planned to rely more on allied Shiite militia to preserve their sway there, Reuters reported in February.
Doubts over Israel plan to move Gaza civilians out of Rafah
- HRW’s Hardman was categorical: Moving “1.5 million people in an area that is already devastated” is “absolutely impossible,” she said
JERUSALEM: Israel has vowed to let Palestinians crammed into southern Gaza leave before its planned invasion of Rafah, but experts have warned it was practically impossible to get those civilians out of harm’s way.
The roughly 1.5 million Gazans in the territory’s southernmost tip have the Mediterranean Sea to their west and sealed borders to the south and east, while Israeli forces are poised to push in from the north.
“Where will we go if they enter Rafah, and where will we get a tent, mattress and blankets?” said Sabah Al-Astal, 50, already displaced inside Gaza by the Israel-Hamas war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on sending troops into Rafah to root out Hamas in the area that borders Egypt and Israel.
But Netanyahu has also pledged to enable Gazans to leave, saying Sunday that his troops would not move in “while keeping the population locked in place.”
Israel, though, remains vague regarding how or when this massive evacuation would take place, a challenge that aid experts consider impossible in the devastated territory.
“People don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere safe in Gaza,” said Nadia Hardman, an expert on refugees at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7 that resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 who are presumed dead.
Israel has carried out a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive that Gaza’s health ministry says has killed at least 31,726 people, most of them women and children.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz remained evasive Monday, telling Kan public radio that “before any massive operation, we will evacuate citizens.”
“Not to the north, but to the west. There are Arab countries that can help by setting up tents, or something else” in the tiny area between Rafah and the Mediterranean, he added.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military spokesman, told the press last week about the establishment of “humanitarian islands.”
Such tent cities on Gaza’s territory would be spared the fighting and created with the international community, Hagari said.
But UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Jamie McGoldrick, said: “I honestly don’t know where they are supposedly being established.”
“How will they move people from wherever they are now? Will they be pushed, forced, encouraged?” he asked.
“That’s not something the UN will participate in because we’re not a part of any forced displacement.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on a visit to Israel on Sunday, voiced concern over the planned Israeli offensive.
“The military logic is one consideration, but there is a humanitarian logic as well,” he said.
“How should more than 1.5 million people be protected? Where should they go?“
Netanyahu has agreed to US President Joe Biden’s request to send a delegation of senior Israeli officials to Washington to discuss Israel’s Rafah plans and a possible “alternative approach,” the White House said Monday.
HRW’s Hardman was categorical: Moving “1.5 million people in an area that is already devastated” is “absolutely impossible,” she said.
Israel has declared certain areas protected humanitarian spaces, notably in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area in the south of the territory between south Gaza’s main city of Khan Yunis and Rafah.
But hundreds of thousands of people are already sheltering in tents there, and the area has been bombed several times since the war began more than five months ago.
Netanyahu has doubled down on plans for a Rafah offensive, announced more than a month ago, despite growing international pressure.
However, according to David Khalfa, Middle East specialist at the Jean-Jaures Foundation, the threat also involves psychological warfare.
“The Israelis maintain a strategic vagueness around their plans because they do not want to devalue their cards in order to keep Hamas in uncertainty,” he said.
Khalfa called the threat of a major offensive in Rafah “a card in a game of liar’s poker” with Hamas, a means to force the militants to soften their positions in ongoing truce negotiations.
Israel ‘deliberately’ blocking aid to Gaza: Oxfam
LONDON: Anti-poverty charity Oxfam on Monday accused Israel of intentionally preventing the delivery of aid into Gaza during its war with Hamas, in violation of international humanitarian law.
The nongovernmental organization said in a report that Israel continued to “systematically and deliberately block and undermine any meaningful international humanitarian response” in the Palestinian territory.
It alleged that Israel was defying an order by the International Court of Justice in January to boost aid in Gaza, and was failing its legal responsibility to protect people in land it occupies.
“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” said Oxfam Middle East and North Africa director Sally Abi Khalil.
“Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it. We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”
Oxfam said that “unjustifiably inefficient” inspection rules were causing aid trucks trying to get into Gaza to be stuck in queues for 20 days on average.
It said that Israeli authorities arbitrarily reject “dual-use” items — civilian goods that also have potential military use such as backup generators and torches.
“The list of rejected items is overwhelming and ever changing,” Oxfam said.
It recalled that water bags and water testing kits in an Oxfam shipment were rejected with no reason provided, before later being permitted entry.
The group also denounced “attacks on aid workers, humanitarian facilities and aid convoys” and “access restrictions” for relief staff, particularly to northern Gaza.
IAEA to help Iraq develop nuclear program
BAGHDAD: The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi met Iraq’s prime minister in Baghdad on Monday as part of a visit to help the country develop a peaceful nuclear program.
“We have discussed several projects in Iraq, including building a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes,” Iraqi Education Minister Naim Al-Aboudi told reporters following a meeting between Grossi and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani.
Grossi said that a team of Iraqi experts would visit the agency’s headquarters in Vienna in a few days to hold meetings to “set out a road map for the Iraqi peaceful nuclear program” amid growing interest in nuclear energy in the region.
Iraq in the past had three nuclear reactors in Tuwaitha, its main nuclear research site, south of Baghdad. One was destroyed by an Israeli air raid in 1981 and the two others by US warplanes in the 1991 Gulf war that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“Definitely, turning the page on this complex past is of the essence and we’re doing just that,” Grossi said.