Syrian exiles sent money back to their families at home, sometimes visited them on holidays using temporary Turkish permits and organised aid distributions during the cold winter months or around Muslim holidays. Hotels sprung up in Antakya to host reporters and aid workers, Syrian restaurants and cafes opened in Gaziantep and dozens of Syrian civil society groups, media outlets and political organisations set up their bases in southern Turkey. But hundreds, then thousands, then millions of Syrians fled north into neighbouring Turkey, where they were given temporary protection status.Īs the refugee population swelled, so did their host cities. The popular uprising in Syria spiralled into a complex conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, sucked in major powers and carved up the country into rival zones of control.Īssad stayed in power. The disaster struck just over a month before Syrians marked 12 full years since protests broke out in their homeland against President Bashar al-Assad, part of the broader Arab Spring rebellions that toppled a string of autocratic leaders. "Now, there's before the earthquake, and after the earthquake." "We say, what was before the uprising and what was after the uprising," she told Reuters in her apartment in a block with cracks down the outside. For Idris, the natural disaster was no less of a turning point than the human tragedy of war and, for the first time since leaving Syria, her family is considering moving further away from their homeland, to Europe or the Gulf.
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