At the beginning of 2023, Ghiath and Haifa Abbas are still doing well. For a young family of Syrian refugees, they are doing relatively well. They live in Antakya, a cosmopolitan city in the southernmost tip of Turkey, wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the mountainous border with Syria. Ghiath occasionally works as a journalist for small Syrian and Turkish newspapers, but spends most of her time at home with their four-year-old son Aram. Haifa works for an NGO and is the breadwinner. Like many Syrian refugees, they feel at home in Antakya. The city reminds them of historic cities in Syria, the culture feels familiar, and many residents speak Arabic.
The family’s life is completely turned upside down in early February by a series of major earthquakes in the south of Turkey. Antakya is the worst hit, the ancient city has been largely destroyed. It is a miracle that the family survives the blow, their apartment building has half collapsed. They don’t know how they got outside. The stairs are littered with debris from the interior walls, in which large holes have been punched. They spend the night in a neighbor’s car. When it gets light, the extent of the damage slowly becomes apparent. They realize that they can say goodbye to Antakya.
The story of Ghiath and Haifa illustrates how the victims try to get back on solid ground after the earthquakes. The disaster leads to an exodus. Millions of people are leaving the disaster area, including many Syrians who have fled the civil war in their country. Of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, about half lived in the south. There they had built a new life with pain and effort. Now many have been uprooted again.
After a short stay with friends in the region, the Abbas family finds a small ground-floor apartment in the city of Adana, located slightly to the west, where the doorman of the apartment used to live. It’s not ideal, but they have little choice. After the earthquakes, xenophobia has increased so much that Syrians are having great difficulty finding housing.
“It was the third time we had to leave everything behind to start over elsewhere,” says Ghiath, 40, a reserved man with a congenital defect in his right arm. He is sitting in a tracksuit on the balcony of his house in Adana, overlooking the parking lot, a glass of green mate on the table and his beloved pipe in his mouth. “Migration is a bitter experience. When you are forced to migrate, for whatever reason, you do not think about what awaits you, but what you leave behind. When you arrive at your new destination, you are a stranger on your own. This inevitably means being exposed to discrimination and exploitation.”
Wanderings
Ghiath and Haifa met during the Syrian revolution in 2011. They are both active as volunteers in the capital Damascus. They host displaced people from other Syrian cities who have fled the merciless violence with which the regime is trying to put down the popular uprising. They help them look for a house, purchase things and arrange medical care. In the midst of the turmoil, they fall in love. But their political activities are becoming increasingly risky. When Haifa’s father is kidnapped and has to be freed for a lot of money, her family decides to flee to northern Iraq.
For Haifa, the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq is not a bad choice. As a Kurd, she has relatives there. And as a graduated dentist, she can start working straight away. But life in northern Iraq is very difficult for Ghiath because, as an Arab, he faces discrimination from the Kurdish authorities. It takes a very long time before he gets a residence permit, and he cannot find work anywhere. The discrimination is so pervasive that after two years, Ghiath and Haifa decide to exchange northern Iraq for southern Turkey.
“We consciously chose Antakya,” says Haifa (35), a brunette with blue-green eyes. She sits next to Ghiath on the balcony and keeps an eye on Aram, who is playing in the parking lot. “The streets in the old center resemble Syrian cities such as Damascus and Aleppo.”
Social life
They get married and Aram is born. They learn Turkish, Haifa better than Ghiath. And they build a social life. Haifa becomes friends with some colleagues from her aid organization. And in Antakya, Ghiath gets to know Turkish activists who, like him, are left-oriented and attach great importance to justice, equality and human rights.
I followed the family during their wanderings after the earthquakes. Not so much for the purpose of writing a story about them, but because they are friends. I met them through my wife, who worked for the same aid organization as Haifa. After Aram’s birth we visited them in their apartment in Antakya with a beautiful view of the city and the snowy mountains. We got along well. Haifa is a strong, independent woman who speaks five languages. -Ghiath is her opposite: a modest man who quietly smokes his pipe and perks up when the conversation turns to politics, philosophy or literature.
In the days after the earthquake, there is chaos in the south. Worried, I call Ghiath to ask if he needs help. The family is currently staying with a friend in Iskenderun, a port town near Antakya. But there is no electricity or running water there. I propose that they move to my parents-in-law’s summer house near the coastal city of Mersin. My wife and I moved there a few months earlier, although we spend a lot of time at my in-laws’ apartment in the city of Adana.
They accept the offer. The summer house is modernly furnished, fully equipped and located close to the sea. “A good place to catch your breath,” Ghiath notes upon arrival. The seaside resort of Erdemli near Mersin looks deserted in February, although it is busier than normal because many earthquake victims have sought refuge there. But many hotels and houses are empty and restaurants are closed. Because Ghiath and Haifa don’t have a car, they feel somewhat isolated. Fortunately, a friend from Antakya is staying in a hotel nearby. “We get together every evening to reminisce,” says Ghiath. “The future is so uncertain that we prefer to avoid that subject.”
The fear is still there, especially for Aram. This is noticeable during the many aftershocks that hit the region around Mersin. While most are relatively mild, Aram becomes completely upset. When the family still lived in Antakya, they regularly experienced minor earthquakes. But they were quite laconic about this. “After February 6, we also take minor tremors very seriously,” says Ghiath. “We leave the building immediately, regardless of the weather conditions. We even take into account that we will have to move to another city. Because some aftershocks are accompanied by official warnings of a tsunami and we live near the sea.”
Although their lives regain some peace and regularity in Erdemli, Aram has great difficulty with the forced move. He has suddenly been torn from his small, familiar world with his toys, his friends and his school. During the first few weeks, he wakes up almost every day in a different place, with different people around him. He is tense and gets angry easily. He often expresses his surprise at the many destroyed buildings. “This house is broken,” he says. Ghiath and Haifa initially think that he does not fully understand the situation. But later he learns the English word ‘earthquake‘ from an educational children’s film. He immediately starts building houses from cubes, shakes them violently and says: “Earthquake.”
Their stay in Erdemli is short-lived, because Haifa has to get back to work. The aid organization she works for needs people in the earthquake area. Haifa chooses to work in Antakya. “I feel like I have to be there to help people,” she says. But traveling back and forth between Erdemli and Antakya is practically impossible. It is easier to do from Adana.
But my in-laws, who live in Adana and are helping with the housing search, cannot find landlords who want Syrian tenants. They even have great difficulty convincing the other apartment residents to rent the small caretaker’s house to Ghiath and Haifa. The flat has now been inspected by an expert and declared safe.
But it takes a while before Ghiath and Haifa feel at home. Some secular residents are not happy with their arrival because they think all Syrians are conservative Muslims. They come together when my mother-in-law organizes an iftar during Ramadan to which she invites the entire apartment, including Haifa and Ghiath. They first see the ground floor apartment as a temporary solution. But my parents-in-law changed their minds. “They are so incredibly helpful,” says Haifa. “They come for coffee every weekend and bring food. They are always ready. That reassures me. If anything happens to Aram and Ghiath while I am in Antakya, they will be in good hands.”
Surrogate grandmother
Aram is doing better since they live in Adana. The tension and anger have subsided. “He has calmed down since he started school,” says Haifa. What helps is that my mother-in-law has set herself up as a surrogate grandmother, in the absence of a grandchild. Aram is also having a great time at school and has made many new friends. “His Turkish is improving by leaps and bounds,” Haifa notes with satisfaction. “Adana is a good place for him. There are many parks and playgrounds where children can play. I had to cut off his long blonde hair because the neighborhood kids called him ‘princess’.” She laughs.
For the first few months, Haifa will commute by bus between Adana and Antakya a few days a week. But that takes too much time. Moreover, her aid organization wants her to live in Antakya. At first she is against this, because then she would only see Aram on weekends. And she also doesn’t want her family to move with her to Antakya, because the city is not at all suitable for raising a child at the moment. “There are problems with transport, education and healthcare,” says Haifa. “And it is not a healthy environment for a child. Buildings are still being demolished everywhere. When I return to Adana at the weekend, I feel my lungs hurt.”
First, Haifa lives with colleagues in a container home in Antakya. But with winter approaching, she rented an apartment with a colleague, even though she now pays rent twice. It is located on the edge of the city, near the university. “The only part of the city still standing.” Haifa finds it difficult to have to leave Aram in another city for the whole week. “It breaks my heart when he refuses to talk to me on the phone,” she says. “Then he gets angry and tells me that my work is already done. Ghiath has also been very shaken since the earthquake, so I’d rather not leave him alone all week. But unfortunately there is no other option.”
The neighborhood where Haifa stays is far from the center of Antakya, where she lived before the earthquakes. Her work recently required her to be downtown a few times. “The last time I didn’t even recognize where I was,” says Haifa emotionally. “I had to ask the driver to identify the spot. I found it very difficult to no longer recognize the city where I had enjoyed living for years and of which I have so many wonderful memories. I have asked my manager not to send me to the center anymore.”
Despite everything, Ghiath and Haifa hope that they will eventually return to Antakya. They have lost their hearts to the city. “In some cities you just live, but Antakya is the kind of city that lives in you,” says Ghiath. “I have always been able to find a place in the cultural community. All the cities I lived and loved are now destroyed. If the city you love is destroyed, you cannot even desire it anymore, because the object of your desire no longer exists.” This reminds him, he says, of a quote from Dostoyevsky Crime and punishment: ‘Do you understand that, sir, do you understand what it means when you have nowhere to go? For everyone, there must be a place somewhere on earth where he is not rejected.’