Fears from her past returned for Syrian woman Alia Baraka at about 12.30pm on a recent Friday.
The woman, from Ashrafiyeh in Aleppo, was in the top-floor kitchen of her Kilis home, having fled the war-torn Syrian city four months ago.
Her son, Hamoud (10), was playing on a bicycle down on the street, but within eye sight. A nearby mosque was packed with worshippers.
Little did she know that, having survived the war in Syria, the war was coming to her.
“I was doing the dishes when the rocket hit the roof. The force threw me against the wall; I’ve got some pain in my back but, thank god, I’m fine,” she said the next morning, while taking a break from sweeping shattered glass from the kitchen floor.
The family’s fridge was destroyed, pieces of chicken and minced beef lay strewn among smashed glass and rubble. A ceiling light hung precariously from its electrical cables.
The reinforcing steel inside the roof’s cement stopped the rocket from breaking through the ceiling and killing her.
Over the past two weeks Islamic State militants in northern Syria have upped their campaign of rocket attacks on Kilis and its surrounding areas. In broad daylight, the jihadists, who control swaths of territory on the Syrian side of the border, drive close to Turkey on motorbikes before launching the rockets. Almost two dozen Syrians and Turks have died since the beginning of this year.
“There was a wedding at the mosque and it was the time of Friday prayers,” says Baraka, pointing to the site of where another rocket struck a derelict space, closer to the mosque and about 200m away. “They call themselves Muslims but they send these rockets at prayer time to hurt as many people as possible.”
Losing goodwill
A secondary, troublesome result of the rockets is that the tens of thousands of Syrians in Kilis are, after more than three years here, beginning to lose the goodwill of locals.
Hussein (21) and Ahmad (19) Ibrahim from Aleppo have sweat dripping from their faces at a building site on the outskirts of town. They unload cement from a truck on to a tractor trailer at a rate of more than four tonnes every 10 minutes. The brothers have been in Kilis for three years and have worked on and off with their current employer for the past two.
“Two weeks ago some people came to a Syrian restaurant and got very angry,” said Ahmad. “They knocked over people’s dinner plates, kicked things around. After that we were afraid to go out, our families didn’t move for days,” he said.
“Daish [an alternative name for Islamic State] is hitting us from one side and the Turks are against us from the other.”
He says he thinks about 100 Syrian families have now fled Kilis for other cities in Turkey because of the rockets.
“We want the situation to go back to the way it was – even under Bashar [al-Assad, the Syrian president],” said Hussein.
Ahmad says over the past eight months work has slackened off to around two days a week, but the situation in Aleppo is too bad to contemplate going back. “One of our uncles was beheaded by Daish, another was killed in an air strike,” he said.
About three million UN-registered and unregistered Syrians now live in Turkey, making it home to the largest displaced population in the world. While hundreds of thousands have been assisted by Turkish government-built camps, millions more have been forced to fend for themselves.
Expecting a child
For Ibrahim al-Ahmad, who is tending to a herd of dairy cows off the highway halfway between Kilis and the city of
Gaziantep
, an hour’s drive to the north, the locals have for the most part been good to him.
He is a labourer on a Turkish family’s farm. He and his wife are expecting their first child soon but what should be a time of joy is shrouded by uncertainty. Home for him is a short distance beyond the border in Aleppo province. But it may as well be on the other side of the world. “There’s a huge difference between having a child here or in Syria, but we do what we can,” he said.
He says his salary is enough to live on and physical work is something he has had to do for years. But in a country where 400,000 Syrian children do not go to school, the prospects for his child, and countless others born in exile since 2011, are poor.
“If the war ended we would be back home by tomorrow morning,” he said. “That’s all we want, to be left alone.”
