Why Do Syrian Refugees Choose to Stay in Turkey?

Since 2011 the world has witnessed one of the greatest humanitarian crises in recent history. This crisis has affected not only the future of Syrian generations but also that of a wide region including Syria, Turkey and many European countries. In the years that followed, as the fighting intensified, millions of Syrians were forced to leave their homes. The abnormal life of a refugee, which many initially hoped would be temporary and exceptional, has now become normal for millions of Syrians.

According to reports by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), some 6.7 million Syrians have left their country today. Yet 80 per cent of Syrians who have left their country are trying to live in neighbouring countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt), and about 60 per cent of Syrian migrants forced to leave their country are sheltering in Turkey. Both Syrian refugees and the countries hosting them are coming under growing pressure because of rising poverty and economic crises.

Turkey hosts the most Syrians. According to UN records, more than 3.7 million officially registered Syrian refugees live in Turkey. The neighbouring countries Jordan and Lebanon also host large numbers of Syrians. In UN records Turkey appears as the country with the world’s largest refugee population, including more than 3.7 million Syrians.

Why do most Syrian refugees in Turkey not want to, or not manage to, go to Europe?

First of all, in 2016 Europe and Turkey signed an agreement that forced millions of Syrian refugees to stay in Turkey. Under this agreement, people crossing irregularly from Turkey to the Greek islands from 20 March 2016 onwards who did not apply for asylum, or whose applications were rejected after individual assessment, could be returned to Turkey. Turkey would take all necessary measures to prevent new sea or land routes for illegal migration from Turkey to the EU and would cooperate with neighbouring states as well as the EU to this end. The EU would speed up the disbursement of the 3 billion euros allocated to Turkey and fund migrant projects to be identified on the basis of Turkey’s notifications.

Political scientist Lea Müller-Funk spoke with 360 Syrian refugees in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and İzmir about their decisions to flee, their present lives and their wishes for the future. The research findings say a great deal about Syrian refugees’ wishes and plans to stay in Turkey.

Having to stay in Turkey despite the wish to return to Syria

Müller-Funk’s research shows that many Syrian refugees dream of going to Europe, but choose to stay in Turkey, the nearest place, because they hope to return to their country. Syrian refugees in Turkey want to return to Syria if the conflict and the regime come to an end. From this research we can say that Syrian refugees have not lost hope of returning to their country, but because of the lack of security, the risk of arrest by the political regime, the continuing destruction and the lack of infrastructure, many refugees see little chance of returning to Syria. They see no opportunity to live the life they want in their country. At the same time, Turkey is seen as a place culturally similar to Syria and safer than their own country.

A hard decision to leave and the hope of return

The stories of the hundreds of other refugees Müller-Funk spoke with shed light on the factors involved in the decision to flee Syria, to migrate further or to stay in Turkey. Müller-Funk also interviewed Aisha, a 28-year-old Syrian living in Istanbul’s Küçükçekmece district with her husband Muhammad and their four children. After the fighting began, the family tried to stay in Syria as long as possible. The growing violence and the killing of Muhammad’s brothers and Aisha’s relatives finally drove the family to the hard decision to leave.

Muhammad first went to Istanbul alone to work in construction and save money, but after 16 months he managed to bring Aisha and the children to Turkey through a smuggler. Aisha’s parents and Muhammad’s mother stayed in Syria. Although Muhammad worked long, exhausting days after arriving in Turkey to support his family and his mother, and although they had a chance of being among the Syrian refugee families who could resettle in Canada, Aisha resisted and did not want to enter the Canadian refugee admission process.

Aisha does not want to be far from Syria because she fears a long distance would make returning harder. Being close to Syria also means she can visit her parents during Ramadan. Moreover, Aisha finds it very hard to live in a country where everything is very different, and for this reason she does not want to seek asylum in Canada or European countries.

Although the story of Aisha deciding with her husband to leave Syria and live in Turkey may at first seem personal, it represents the story of many Syrian refugees. Syrian refugees who want to return to their country are considering settling permanently in Turkey out of necessity if the existing problems, such as insecurity, the risk of arrest by the political regime if they return and the continuing destruction, cannot be solved.

Negative perceptions of Europe and a shared material and spiritual past and values with Turkey support staying in Turkey.

Most of the Syrian refugees Müller-Funk spoke with said they did not want to migrate to Europe even if they were given the necessary papers. Because of shared cultural values, Syrian refugees want to stay in Turkey, and because of cultural incompatibilities with Europe they do not want to move on from Turkey to other countries. Cultural differences and different social norms influence many refugees’ thinking about not moving to Europe. The Syrian refugees who left Turkey, on the other hand, chose to do so because they had lost hope of returning to Syria, because of financial hardship in Turkey and because of broader prospects for the future in Europe.

So why is Turkey the country most preferred by Syrian refugees? First, Turkey played an important role in Syria’s international trade in the past. In 2011 Turkey was Syria’s seventh-largest export market and third-largest source of imports. Northern Syria and south-eastern Turkey in particular were linked before 2011 by multiple business networks and social ties. Since the start of the conflict, Syrian businesspeople and almost all sectors, including industry, trade and services, have invested in Turkey. For example, it is estimated that by 2016, 20 per cent of the 40,000 factories operating in Aleppo province alone had moved to Turkey and the Syrian coast.

If Syrian refugees want to return to their country, why don’t they return now?

Although Syrian refugees in Turkey have a strong desire to return to Syria, only a small share of respondents in Müller-Funk’s research said they were really ready to return in the near future. Of the 360 people surveyed, 30.6 per cent said they would return only if the war ended, and 33.1 per cent made their return conditional on the outcome of the war, including adequate security, the availability of basic services and regime change, in addition to the end of the war. Moreover, refusing to return to Syria if the Assad regime stays in power is a recurring theme among the interviewees. (Update: the Assad regime fell on 8 December 2024; returns from Turkey to Syria have accelerated since then.)

In conclusion, in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees show that the interviewees do not believe the war in Syria is over and that Syria is not yet safe for the citizens who left the country. Almost all interviewees express serious security concerns when considering return. This explains why actual returns from Turkey to Syria in 2018 (22,410 people, UNHCR 2018) were so few compared with the high number of refugees in the country.

The legal dimension of the rhetoric on sending Syrian refugees back

In Turkey, the AKP government’s hitherto moderate migration policy, owed above all to the 6-billion-euro support package from the European Union, has recently been changing, and we now hear rhetoric about sending Syrian refugees back from the government side too. For example, in a statement on 3 May 2022, Erdoğan said they were preparing for 1 million Syrians to be sent back “voluntarily”. The opposition parties, for their part, take the view that if they come to power they can establish sound relations with the Damascus administration and return asylum seekers safely to their country, yet we see that political parties ignore the individual motivations of Syrian refugees regarding this return process.

If we ask why individual motivation matters, the statements of lawyer Barış Birol, deputy head of the Istanbul Bar Association’s Centre for Refugee and Migrant Rights, stress the importance of the “principle of voluntariness” under international law. He also stresses that, as long as the conditions that caused people to leave their countries have not changed, it will not be legally possible to impose their return. According to Birol: “The point to stress is investigating whether returns are truly voluntary and whether people are being subjected to forced return under the name of voluntary return.”

There is also a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on this subject. Turkey’s forcible return in 2018 of Fawzi Akkad, a Syrian national with a residence permit, was found to be a rights violation, and the court ruled that he had been subjected to degrading treatment as a result of his return. In its judgment the ECtHR also ordered Turkey to pay Akkad 12,250 euros in compensation.