Refugee crisis: Until there is meaningful strategic engagement in the Middle East, the exodus will continue

Nearly 2.5 million are spread across Turkey, either in camps or as guests of local communities. All of this has reportedly cost the Turks more than $6bn

Supporters of Turkey’s President Erdogan at a rally in France last week (AFP)

Visiting the Nizip refugee camps in south-east Turkey last week – home to 5,000 souls driven from the war raging across the Syrian border just 50km to the south – it came as a surprise to find not a jumble of tents, tarpaulins and makeshift shelters but a superbly well-administered mini-city; clean and orderly, with Portakabin-style dwellings, primary and secondary schools, as well as libraries and social centres.

The Turkish government, true to its traditional culture of hospitality, has – since the tidal waves of humanity fleeing the conflict in Syria started in 2011 – stepped up to the challenge of housing and caring for these people with remarkable generosity and efficiency. The numbers are staggering: 25 vast camps across Turkey house 250,000 men, women and children. A further 2.2 million are spread across the country, not in camps but as guests of local communities. All of this has reportedly cost the Turks more than $6bn.

Meeting the residents – men, women and children from Aleppo, Idlib and other parts of Syria – a palpable sense of relief was shown, that they had found sanctuary from the horrific brutality of the Assad regime and the Daesh/Islamic State (Isis) that killed many of their loved ones. Indeed, physical scars of war were commonplace. Perhaps more unsettling was the apparent psychological impact on the refugee children, communicated through heart-wrenching pictures of explosions, dead bodies, soldiers and weapons on the classroom walls. Letting children draw, a teacher told me, is an important way of helping them cope with the trauma they have suffered but cannot express in words.

The parents of these children simply want a peaceful, secure life – ideally back home, they tell me, but, if not, then here in Turkey or perhaps in Europe. Sweden is a nice place, a mother of three says confidently.

Sadly, these refugees are not the last to come out of Syria, and despite Turkish efforts to deal with the astounding exodus of people – four million have fled from Syria to neighbouring countries – its level of effort cannot be sustained much longer without a significant international financial contribution. Turkey has now closed its border with Syria and is trying to prevent the people smugglers launching boats to Europe from its extensive Aegean coastline. But, above and beyond money, without some sort of ceasefire in Syria the tides of people will keep coming.

Politically, however, the Turks seem less focused on Syria than on their own domestic battle with the PKK Kurdish separatist group. After a decade-long ceasefire ended in July, a conflict that has claimed more than 30,000 lives since the 1970s restarted.

Added to the mix is November’s parliamentary election, in which President Erdogan seeks to regain a majority for his AK party by wooing the nationalist vote with his firm stance against the PKK. Its atrocities have killed dozens of Turkish soldiers and police in the past three months. The existential threat that Kurdish separatism poses to the territorial integrity of the Turkish state has been exacerbated by the rise of the PYD in north-east Syria and the spectre of an autonomous Kurdish statelet (what the PYD, a Marxist militant group allied to the PKK, calls “Rojava”) in that area similar to the de facto autonomous Kurdistan of northern Iraq.

“Dealing with the PKK is our number-one priority”, a senior Turkish government official says, before reassuring me that “we oppose all terrorism equally, whether it is Daesh, PKK, PYD, Bashar al-Assad or Jabhat al-Nusra”.

For Turkey, the reigniting of its fight against the PKK marks the death knell of President Erdogan’s once grand vision of a neo-Ottoman renaissance of renewed Turkish influence across the Middle East. Turkey’s diplomats used to proclaim a “zero problems with neighbours” foreign policy, which even saw President and Mrs Erdogan holiday with the Assads.

But those days are long gone and Turkey, despite having a million men under arms (the second biggest army in Nato), is so consumed with its domestic struggle with the PKK that it has lost any appetite it once had for a re-enactment of its imperial power in the Levant. Government officials, when pressed on what might be done to force a ceasefire in Syria, advocate a “safety zone” across a limited area of northern Syria, but suggest other powers – perhaps from Nato or the UN – should do the heavy lifting.

But, like the Turks, the West has been mired in geo-political gridlock since the conflict started. We have no ally. Like the Turks, the West opposes Daesh, the Assad regime, Jabhat al-Nusra, Islamist groups, and, to a greater or lesser extent, the PYD Kurds in northern Syria. The Free Syria Army tragically pales into insignificance against those we oppose.

Russia, on the other hand, knows who its ally is and is backing Assad to the hilt (or at least as long as he is useful for securing their deep-water port in Tartus and shaming Nato as a paper tiger on the international stage). This certainty has allowed Russia to act with spectacularly bold and entirely cynical resolve. Of course, the Russian claim that it is, in supporting Assad, opposing Isis has been exposed as false and its air strikes in support of a regime that continues to barrel-bomb civilians will only generate more refugees.

But, whether it is bombing or not, the refugees will keep coming. And until the US and its allies regain an appetite for meaningful strategic engagement in the Middle East, backed by resolve and the potential deployment of hard power, it is civilians from benighted Syrian cities who will suffer – the families and relatives of those I met in the Nizip refugee camps.

Leo Docherty is director of the Conservative Middle East Council and a former soldier