Syrian Refugees Are Conflicted About Returning Home
Any en-masse return of Syrian refugees to their native land would represent a conundrum for Turkey, too.
Illustration: Maggie Cowles for Bloomberg
Sitting on a floor mat in a living room warmed by a wood-fired stove in a shanty town in Ankara’s Onder district, Samir Ataki remembers the precise moment he decided to move to Turkey. It was the fall of 2012, and he had just recovered the bodies of his loved ones, including that of his wife, from the rubble of their home in Aleppo, which had been destroyed in an air strike by the forces of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“My wife, my brother and his wife were all dead,” says Ataki, a bearded, joyful man whose voice trembles when he speaks about the past. “I had no time to waste and took my sons and their sons across the border to the safety in Turkey.”