Like every morning, Hafis A. was on his way to the restaurant where he used to work. The young Syrian man had no idea his life as a refugee in Turkey's capital Istanbul was about to change.

When Turkish security authorities pulled him over and demanded his papers which had expired two days earlier, he was taken straight to a deportation center.

A few days later he found himself together with other Syrians at the Bab al Hawa border crossing between Turkey and Syria. "They dropped me off at the border, and suddenly I was back on Syrian soil," he told DW in the province of Idlib in northwestern Syria.

Hafis A. was born in Syria's capital Damascus. In 2020, the then 22-year-old decided to leave Syria to avoid being conscripted into the Syrian army. "I didn't want to fight, I wanted to live," he remembers.

Turkey has taken in more refugees from Syria than any other country. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 3.6 million Syrians have been living in Turkey under temporary protection since the Syrian war broke out in 2011.

The high number of refugees is in part also due to the European Union's controversial deal with Turkey in 2016, which was intended to stem the flow of refugees and migration to Europe via the Aegean Sea.

Hafis A. found a new home in Istanbul, he obtained the........

© Deutsche Welle