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A Turkish Border Town on the Brink of Change

I visited the city of Mardin, where Turkish, Syrian, and Kurdish people live together. What I found was a culture of pluralism under siege.

My childhood summers in Turkey were marked by adult chatter about the Syrian refugees that had supposedly overrun the country. This sort of talk—about how immigrants survived on freebies, skyrocketed inflation, and even became, could you believe, comfortable enough to put up storefronts with Arabic signage—would only become more and more familiar as I got older.

At its peak in 2022, Turkey hosted over 3 million displaced Syrians, nearly two-thirds of the Syrian refugee community worldwide. Around the same time the Syrian civil war sent its citizens looking for new homes, Turkey’s economy plummeted. From 2011—when Turkey first began admitting Syrians—to 2019, unemployment in Turkey increased from about 10 to 14 percent, while inflation similarly escalated.

Syrians received a disproportionate amount of blame for the country’s unfortunate fate, and consequently became victim to political attacks, online vitriol, and violent hate crimes. After the fall of Bashar el-Assad in 2024, it seemed like people in Turkey had conclusively decided that their hospitality had come to an end. The mayor of Şehitkamil, a town in Gaziantep province where many Syrians relocated, aptly described the situation at the time: “I have come where I am even willing to get in my own car and take [Syrians] away if necessary.” While at least half a million Syrians have returned to their home country, a large portion of Syrians will remain in Turkey, a place where those under temporary protection status have received free healthcare, started businesses, and grown their families. Meanwhile, people in Turkey are forced to reckon with the fact their once seemingly temporary neighbors might be there to stay—and reactions range from disdain to warm embrace.

When I arrived in Turkey this past summer, months after Assad had been replaced, I was curious to see what relations were like with Syrian neighbors. I set out for Mardin, a city just 20 miles away from the Syrian border: a place where marginalized ethnic and religious groups indigenous to the area—like Kurds, Yezidis, Assyrians, and Arabs—have lived together for decades, and in the past decade or so, have welcomed thousands of refugees from Syria.

I wondered if, with enough pressure, even the diverse and ever-hospitable people of southeastern Turkey would have been convinced to turn their back on their neighbors by now.

Within days of arriving in Mardin, I was invited into the home of a Syrian family led by a matriarch named Maryam. Originally from Al-Hasakah—the site of one of the firsts acts of protest against the Assad regime in 2011, and a home of battle between the rebels, old regime, Islamic State, and Kurdish militias thereafter—Maryam’s daughter was sent to Mardin first in 2017, followed by Maryam and her husband two years later. This period of separation was not easy to live through, but neither was the war.

Maryam described the Syrian Civil War as an earthquake with many aftershocks. While one neighborhood was recovering from attacks, violence quickly sparked elsewhere. In a heavily sectarian war, there were Christian neighborhoods that remained untouched, while Sunni Muslims were targeted by the regime. Months had passed since Assad’s regime had been toppled when I visited Maryam’s home, but her loved ones were telling her not to come back; that the chaos, death, shortage of food and water persisted. We don’t even know who is responsible for the violence anymore, Maryam said in Arabic, we just see the devastation.

The people of Mardin were generally empathetic and helpful to Syrians when they first arrived. But life in Mardin is getting harder for everyone, Maryam told me, not just for refugees, but locals too. Things are getting more expensive as the city experiences a tourism boom. And Turkey just........

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