It’s far from what the Turks had in mind. In late 2009, at the height of its detente with Syria, the Ankara government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan lifted visa requirements for Syrian nationals and floated plans for future energy cooperation, investments, as well a free trade zone. Less then four years later, with its southern neighbor gripped by war, and with Turkey openly calling for the US to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad‘s regime, the border has become a flashpoint. The area — expected to be a crossroads for traders, business people and tourists — now teems with refugees, smugglers and insurgents. According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank, 75 people have died in violence along the border since June 2012, when Syrian air defenses shot down a Turkish fighter jet over the Mediterranean. The threat of further bloodshed may be around the corner. On Monday, a pair of Turkish F-16s downed a Syrian helicopter that had crossed into Turkish airspace. “Nobody will dare to violate Turkey’s borders again,” the country’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced. “The necessary measures have been taken.” Earlier this year, a car bombing that Erdogan’s government believes to have been the work of Syrian intelligence agents claimed 53 lives in Reyhanli, a border town in Turkey’s southern Hatay province. Having contained the fallout from the attack — in days that followed the attack, groups of young men harassed and attacked Syrian refugees, whom they blamed for the bloodshed — local authorities have since had to confront an entirely different menace. In Reyhanli, smuggling has always been part of the local economy. Over the past few months, however, it has turned into a plague. The Turkish General Staff has described a number of incidents in which its troops have had to fire tear gas and warning shots to push back waves of as many as 3,000 Syrian smugglers, who often storm the border by car or on horseback. In Kusakli, a hilltop village less than ten minutes by car from Reyhanli, a![]()
