It Could Happen Here - What's Behind the Anti-Syrian Violence in Turkey?

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

James and Shereen talk about attacks on Syrian refugees in Turkey, the response in Turkish occupied Syria, and the Turkish  ultra nationalism that took advantage of economic conditions to stoke anti-refugee sentiments.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. All right. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. A podcast where me and Shireen talk about vegetables or terrible things depending on the week it's me it's shireen and today it's a terrible thing it's not not a vegetable or a or a sea animal how are you shireen how you doing i'm good that's honestly a great premise just for a show in

general like we talk about either food or something terrible yeah like and you never know you know yeah it's just in your playlist and then is it a fucking artichoke is it genocide you don't know you have to find out yeah yeah and the only way is by listening yeah but hi i'm good thanks for having me good i'm glad to hear it shereen so um what i wanted to talk about today is what is happening in Turkey? Why are they like this? What is going on? Specifically, I want to talk about some of these attacks on Syrian refugees in Turkey that people may have seen and may not have seen. I see them in my timeline, but maybe that's because of the people I follow. I think to start off with, to understand what's happening in Turkey, you have to understand the relations between Turkey and Syria

since the civil war began in Syria, which is more than a decade ago now, 13-odd years ago. So from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti-Assad factions. So those are the rebels in Syria. This is a big change. In 2008, Assad and Erdogan's family went on holiday together. Really?

Yeah, they went into southern Turkey on a little beach holiday together. That's fucking disturbing. Yeah, what a time just to do Tarraking by the beach. But unfortunately, they're no longer holidaying together. They might be holidaying again soon,

as we'll see. Yeah, that's what it sounds like yeah they are becoming uh tight again and erdogan referenced their family holiday and in his like most recent comments on really yeah it's like our relations have been familial i don't like that at all yeah yeah i you don't want to be going on holiday with bashar al-assad just as a moral principle i think like it's just crazy to be because you're right they i feel like we're very open about supporting the anti-assad forces and so to be like suddenly why can't we have diplomatic friendliness like come on it's just like the weirdest plot twist to me yeah i mean i think a lot of it comes from anti-migrant sentiment in turkey which yeah i want to get into i think it's just like the weirdest plot twist to me yeah i mean i think a lot of it comes from

anti-migrant sentiment in turkey which yeah i want to get into i think it's uh so like we are witnessing right this global crackdown on migration on refugees we see it in europe we see it here at southern border we see it here in turkey um we're seeing it in north africa we're seeing it all over so this is hasn't always been the case like at the start of the war, Turkey threw open its borders to Syrian refugees. They built camps to house them. They were strong backers of the revolution. They spent $40 million caring for the refugees. The National Intelligence Organization, the MIT, actually trained parts of the FSA, the Free Syrian Army.

And then later they brought together the sna there will be many acronyms right like every civil war loves a three-letter acronym and the syrian one is no different but they were really open they were really public about being like we welcomed the refugees i remember that was like i don't know as As a Syrian, I was like, oh, that's nice. I remember thinking that. It was nice. It's a nice thing to do. I mean, like, at the time, no one gave a shit for the most part. So to have, like, a country out loud be like, we welcome the refugees.

Come over here. We'll help. And now they have the largest population of Syrian refugees, like, in the world. I don't know if you're gonna mention this coming up but i feel like the only thing that changed not the only thing one of the only things the main thing that changed is that no one in turkey thought it would last this long yeah no yeah absolutely not yeah yeah we'll get into that because the the nature of their legal residence there is very temporary yeah yeah okay so turkey has used the SNA, the Syrian National Army, right, which is it's more explicitly Turkish backed faction as a directly linked proxy force. They've used it in their operations against the SDF, sort of Syrian Democratic Forces, another acronym for you, the organization, which includes the YPG, the YPJ, the other elements of the military forces of the autonomous areas,

north and east Syria, sometimes called Rojava. They have also used the SNA outside of Syria, right? In Azerbaijan, Libya, and Niger, just as a private military, right? As a mercenary army, more or less. And you'll hear them referred to sometimes as mercenaries. Certainly, when they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue that they're not.

In other times, when they're being used outside of syria it's hard to argue that they're not um and other times like when they're being used in syria a lot of these folks were previously parts of other groups that have kind of been repackaged and bundled up together by turkey and there are still many factions within these like broadly speaking turkish supported arab rebel forces in syria there are some kurdish groups as well, but not so many. And there are some Turkic groups that are not Arab. So these proxy forces are really vital to the Turkish strategy in Syria. I wanted to get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re-recruited jihadists were from other groups. So I reach out to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros. He is a spokesperson of the kurdistan communities union's foreign relations commission if you're not familiar with the kurdistan

communities union it's the umbrella organization for the several democratic confederalist political parties north south east and west kurdistan which are inspired by the ideology of abdul so we're going to hear more from zagrosros next week. I have a number of questions about the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the Kandil Mountains, in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. But we're going to drop a little quote here where he talks about the interactions that the SDF and the YPG and the other units, right, HPG, have had with the Turkish army's Arab-Syrian elements. have had with the Turkish army's Arab-Syrian elements. When you hear Zagros here talking about Daesh, what he's talking about is the so-called Islamic State, the Islamic State of

Iraq and the Levant, right? It's just the Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you weren't aware, that's what he's talking about. The invasion of the Turkish army is that many jihadists have been incorporated into the Turkish army. They are acting as units, separate units with the Turkish army. They have been embedded with NATO's second largest army. I can say these jihadists are ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra Front members, ex-Al-Qaeda members. They are from many nationalities. According to PUK officials, Patriotic Union of Kyrgyzstan officials, they say that they

have learned the names of 300 of these Daesh members in the Turkish army ranks. So also underground, Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas themselves have observations about the inclusion of jihadist members in the ranks of the Turkish army. And many of the close-range clashes, blanket point clashes with the Turkish army, Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas here,

some of the soldiers speaking Arabic, shouting, yearning in Arabic. To understand further what's going on in turkey i think you need to understand the phenomenon of turkish ultra nationalism and social darwinism this is not just endemic in turkey but also in european countries with a large turkish diaspora the most extreme and concerning example of this is a group called the gray wolves the gray wolves are the militant street wing of the nationalist movement party in turkey and they've been involved in

political violence there since the 1960s with their primary targets being kurds greeks alavis arabs christians jews and armenians these are all minority ethnic groups i guess to understand this further you have to be able to differentiate between like race state and nation right which is getting into things that i lecture about but the idea of a race is like a so like a fictive biological link right this isn't born out necessarily but the idea of a shared biology the idea of a nation a nation is an imagined community right which can which can have many races it could have a state aligned to it or not right so the turkish nation doesn't necessarily align with the turkish state there are like other groups within the turkish state you have turkish citizenship but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically turkish for what the gray wolves believe is the superiority of a Turkish

race and they strive for a mono-ethnic Sunni Islamic Turkish nation and they're a pan-Turkic organization so they want to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind of renewed Turkish empire right after collapse of the Soviet Union they called for this revived empire that would unite turkic people they like many of these extremely right-wing violent organizations have their roots in anti-communism right uh in the cold war and specifically in something called operation gladio which was a sort of anti-communist guerrilla training uh supported by the cia and other groups they began as government condoned and a sort of deniable government force

to use against the left, right? I'm not going to be able, I can't detail everything the Gray Wolves have done and this isn't what that episode is about. I do want to explain one incident. It's maybe one of the most heinous things that they're known for and it's called the Marash Massacre.

Are you familiar with this, Shireen? No, I'm not, actually. Okay. A little history for you. So in December 1978 in Karaman Marash, Karaman Marash and Marash, you'll hear those two terms used both, right? Like Karaman, I think, means hero in Turkish.

There was a battle there in the early part of 20th century, I think it was in the First World War. And so they added like hero to the start of the town but alibi people won't don't tend to use that when they talk about the massacre because it seems a little weird to to be like a great town where this horrible massacre occurred uh so you hear both um it's m-r-a-s but s has a little diacritical mark so it's a noise the massacre starts in 1978 when an anti-Soviet movie is being shown in a movie theater in town and someone throws a bomb into the theater, right?

Communist boots were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it really was them or if it was someone who wanted to start some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes sense, right? So many Alevis. Alevis are a group of kurds are you familiar shireen i was actually just trying to remind myself because i'm really not familiar with this sect because i know it's completely separate from sunni islam and shia islam is it more like sufism yes yeah yeah that's what i thought they're like a 12 uh sufist but with syncretic elements from like uh like veneration of nature

and they have this sort of idea of sainthood um right i probably used a lot of words that people aren't super familiar with so can you explain sufism and sunni and shia maybe so maybe you're familiar with the two different main sects of islam which are sunni and shia the main difference between the two if you want to really boil it down, is who they believe the successor should have been to the Prophet Muhammad. The Shias believe that his cousin and his son-in-law, Ali, should have been the successor versus the Sunnis don't believe he needed a successor at all. And it was more just like passing down his teachings. There's a lot of history behind that and there's a lot of drama and violence but that's like the most simple way to put it and it kind of grew from there the sufism sect on the other hand

is a little different it's described as a contemplative school of islam that aims to develop an individual's consciousness of god through chanting recitation of litanies music and physical movement yeah maybe you know or you've seen the sufi like whirling dervishes it's basically a form of like physical active meditation for them so it definitely differs from both sunni and shia islam it's more in a way spiritual does that is that a decent summary? Not me. Yeah, I think you've done a great job. And Sufis are like broadly Sunni, I guess. And Alawites are like,

there are 12ers and 7ers, which is like to do with the amount of people you think are the imam successors to Ali, which we don't need to go into. I didn't think a very great depth, but I guess Alawites would would fall into the Twelver camp in yeah not traditional Twelver Shia that's what the V you're saying the V Alawites yes as opposed to Alawites right another Shia group Alawites is

very different yeah yes like I feel like it's very confusing because they sound so similar but Alawites they're they're considered disbelievers by the classical like sunni and shia uh theologies their their own separate group uh it's like a religious sect that like kind of splintered off from early shiaism in the ninth century and they are the sect to which the asad family belongs. And many other military families in Baathist Syria belonged, right? Yeah. When the Baathist party, like led by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's dad, when he took power, the Alawites in the military sect were,

or the Alawite sect in the military were really supportive of that regime. And I feel like it's a big reason why he gained popularity and was able to like overthrow the government yeah but yeah okay so that's a little breakdown of islam for you i know it's good there's just so much like like little details that i know i will miss and it's just it's so much more complicated yeah, there's just many sects that stem all from the one religious book of the Quran. And then shit happens. I don't know what else to say about that. Well, maybe we'll explain it another day for people.

Because I do think like, I went to school at a very woke time in the United Kingdom's history. You could do Islam as your like religious studies. Wait, really? Yeah, yeah. It's because Tony Blair and the wokeness. That's crazy. kingdoms history where you could do uh islam as your like religious studies wait really yeah yeah uh yeah it's because tony blair and the wokeness uh that's crazy yeah no it's cool it's really good i learned a lot uh well so what did what did i miss you tell me no i i'm not i'm not i'm not here to fucking uh no i'm serious i am absolutely not here to tell you what you go right or wrong i think you did an excellent job.

Shia comes from like the party of Ali, right? That's what the word means. And I think that's the main reason why Sufism is more associated with Sunni Islam, if I'm being honest, because that's like the main tenet of being Shia, is that you believe that Ali was the successor. And so I think anything that is not that usually is more under the Sunni umbrella. Yeah, I think sometimes you'll see it like is more under the Sunni umbrella. Yeah. I think sometimes you'll see it as a third, like Sufism is its own thing. Generally, more Muslims in the world are Sunni than Shia.

Yeah. I'm not going to do the thing that people do where they go around naming the governments, which are one or another. And I don't think that's very useful. So let's go back to 1978 in Marash, right? These Alevis, for reasons that we have just explained, are perceived, A, they are Kurdish, right? So they're not Turkic. And B, they are perceived to be heretical by people with a more conventional Sunni Islam, or some people, I should say. So the day after this bomb goes off, a left-wing cafe in town is bombed and two leftist

teachers are murdered on their way home from school later at their funeral it's attacked by a mob of turkish nationalists right later that week exes start appearing on the doors of the alavi homes in this area of town, which is predominantly Alevi, right? They made announcements from the mosques saying that communists and Alevis are burning your mosques. You should attack them and kill them. And on the 23rd of December,

crowds stoked by and comprised of the gray wolves rampaged through Alevi neighborhoods. Children, women, and men were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown in the street. Women were raped and injured people were removed from the hospital beds and murdered. Children were burned alive in the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount of people who were murdered vary from like 111, which is the official government number, to 150, which I saw in the British Alibi Society. 550 something houses were burned and destroyed,

nearly 300 businesses were looted. Writer Aziz Tunc, my apologies, I got that wrong, I'm trying my best, who has written a book about the massacre, believes that the Alevis were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish language and culture. And he adds that Kurds are not the only victims of the attack. Progressive leftist turks who had opposed the official policies of ankara were also included the trials for this massacre actually continued until 1991 so it happened in 1978 right yeah it's a long time a total of 804 people were put on trial which kind of shows you the scale of the the mob that you have was it mostly the gray wolves yeah so it comes out of the mhp which is this turkish nationalist party right

and it's generally attributed to the gray wolves as like causality right and when you get these massive crowd violence things it's not like everyone's a card carrying member necessarily you'll hear people say that they they consider there to be like like state or organizational complicity beyond it it wasn't a spontaneous thing right and that's that's an allegation that's sometimes made 29 people were sentenced to life in prison for this by 1991 out of 804 29 were sentenced yeah and all of them were released in 1992 okay it's part of an anti-terrorism law now is a good time sh, Shereen. Do you know who will not commute your life sentence? Oh my God. They won't do it. Whatever it is. Yeah. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

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actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just

hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. All right, we're back. We're moving on from massacres, thankfully. So we're talking about the gray walls, right? That's where they come from today the party that they were sort of founded by the mhp is allied with erdogan's party and they've continued their violence and particularly they've begun to focus on kurdish people right last year groups of

them in the diaspora could be found in belgium attacking kurds who they found to be celebrating the kurdish new year right could celebrate New Year often with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's doing it, right? And they were attacked. You could see videos of this. If you scroll far enough back on my Twitter timeline, you'll see I've shared some of them. 2015, they protested and burned Chinese flags

and attacked people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and then folks who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese government's ban on Turkic Uyghurs fasting during the month of Ramadan. They also oppose Russia due to its collaboration with Assad and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some grey wolves had gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against Assad with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their most famous incident in the war was in 2015 when they shot down a Russian plane and the pirate parachuted out

and then they machine gunned him while he was parachuting down. Whoa. Yeah. So they're pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the Assad regime. I mean, they're one of the many reasons why I really get frustrated with all these different sects that are like anti-Assad.

And I am also anti-Assad. But then they make it so complicated because they're terrible people. And so it's not just the rebels and these citizens of their own country trying to stand up against their government. It becomes this larger political clusterfuck that gets hard to keep track of. And I think that's why it's gone on for this long it's not simple it's not just like government

versus people anymore it's just too many elements right like you have people fighting within the revolution and the government constantly exploiting those divisions right yeah so yeah as i said the wolves have significant support in the turkish diaspora and they represent the largest right-wing movement in germany which is pretty impressive when you consider like germany yeah like germany is not known for not having much right wing go ahead shireen you're looking i can see there's a question inside you i'm just okay because so the gray wolves believe in the superiority of the turkish race correct that's correct and you're saying that they are also big in germany i feel like germany for a time also considered themselves to be the best race this is true there are some

things that they share yeah yeah it does feel a little bit on the nose, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. If it makes a difference, in Austria, the Grey Wolf salute is banned. Oh, whoa. We're going to get into the Grey Wolf salute. Imagine making a little wolf with your hands, right? Wait, they took that?

That's like a shadow puppet. Yes, yeah. They really fucked that up. That's not fair. Yeah, no longer can you do we're gonna learn about the solution uh so for those not familiar your big finger and your little pinky finger up in the air your other two fingers are touching your thumb it's almost like the 666 rocker sign like yeah but yeah it's not it's such a shadow puppet i feel like i've done that as a kid that's

not fair they can't take a shadow puppet whatever they've done worse shireen's hard right youth is coming out so if you weren't familiar with the gray bulls before and their salute you might have become uh familiar with them this week when a turkish footballer received a two-day ban for flashing the salute after scoring when the team beat austria in euro 2024 turkish fans responded to the ban by giving the salute en masse at the quarterfinals. So that was the next game, right? Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a scene. Like, people have obviously drawn the comparison to the previous German movement,

which thought one race was better than the other races, right? But seeing a whole crowd of people doing that in the stadium is... It's disturbing. Yeah, it's concerning. They did it in a game in Germany, so the salute's not bad in germany but right right and then turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan postponed his plans to visit asbjörn and attended the game after the suspension to show his support for the team right he defended the player saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring germany was big mad about this in their defense.

They summoned the Turkish ambassador to the foreign ministry to explain what the fuck was going on. And it has resulted in considerable amounts of violence across Europe. We saw in Austria, we saw in Germany, we saw in Belgium where there is a large Turkish and often a large Kurdish diaspora. Because of the tensions between these two groups, which the football has increased, then we saw street fighting between these two groups

in predominantly migrant neighborhoods, right? But I don't want this episode to just be about the football or the Turkish participation in the Syrian civil war. I want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to visit the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the start of the war. Estimates range from 3.1 to 3.5.

I've seen 4 million. Evidently, they have a land border, right? Turkey and Syria. So some of the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas others will have come in a more formal process and be documented right so whatever it's millions of refugees i think that's what matters they are largely baselessly and evidently baselessly in some cases accused of causing the economic troubles that include low wages and inflation inflation exceeded 75 in turkey in may they have also been blamed for the earthquake that

happened in february 2023 which i'm not quite sure how like who or what uh that the process exactly that they're postulating is there that's crazy yeah yeah just to clear things that people generally can't make earthquakes happen so across the political spectrum we've seen support grow for sending these refugees home in 2016 turkey began to accuse the sdf of ethnically cleansing arab areas in syria and the un refuted these accusations right but in 2018 and 2019 and 2019 with the explicit approval of president trump the turkish military and its proxies attacked the sdf and seized territory inside syria right operation peace spring and olive branch in these areas turkey has attempted to resettle arab refugees right this is why we

can't understand anti-syrian sentiment in Turkey without understanding Turkey's involvement in the Syrian civil war, right? It's trying to create what it calls a safe zone. And in this safe zone, it's trying to take the refugees that its people have decided they don't want and relocate them back into a country which is at war. Turkey's already resettled Syrian refugees in this safe zone, but obviously some of them have been in Turkey for more than a decade. Their children have gone to school in Turkey. They speak Turkish. They've learned a new language.

They've learned a new alphabet, right? They have lives there. So not all of them are just taking the chance to, yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since 2018, a cost of living crisis in turkey has been leveraged by the right to stoke anti-syrian sentiment research found that in 2020 only 23 percent of turkey citizens would accept a syrian bride or groom into their family or consider having a syrian as a business partner and only 31 would want to have their child educated in a class with a syrian in it

that is yeah that makes me so fucking mad one of the things i've come across with this doesn't by any means apply to all turkish people i've met some very cool turkish people who i like very much but people who are ultra-nationalist in turkey america has its fair share of bigots right generally they know that it's wrong they're like say it with your whole chest of the certainly the anti-syrian sentiment that i've heard expressed online from turkish people is that it's not something that like it's considered shameful they'll just they'll just fucking say it which is kind of wild no it's scary like yeah it's very scary like if you've raised your child in turkey and that's the only that's their

first language essentially or that's the only thing they know that's just one of the most unsafe places for them to be then yeah that's scary and not fair yeah and like i know i've met lots of kurdish people who like you know they come in to the united states right where i'm helping out the border and i'll greet them in kurdish and like i was talking to a guy the other day and my kurdish is by no means great but it took a little class and can say some words uh and then also a dude walked around the market with me every morning in in cambridge flow and just pointed at vegetables and shouted so i'm pretty pretty good when it comes to like the eggplant spectrum so i'll greet them in komanji and and they will they only speak turkish right like it's not like they could just drop back and i'm sure that's true for kids who would have grown up speaking

arabic in syria yeah they went to school in turkish that's the language and it's also like not necessarily something they wanted to happen i think that's something that really frustrates me it's like bashar started attacking his people and they needed somewhere to go Turkey welcomed them yeah and when you resettle and you make a home somewhere it really feels like especially now in this world like if you're a refugee it feels like you're always going to be kind of displaced in one way or another it's heartbreaking yeah at best you're like temporary yeah after the earthquake in 2023 which folks will remember we did a little fundraiser for world central kitchen syrian refugees were accused of looting a lot on social media turkish twitter had trending slogans like immigrants should be deported just straight up saying it

syrian refugees were kicked out of uh like tent camps and left homeless they faced verbal abuse were trying to access services separate shelters were set up for syrian refugees like literally like they couldn't be together right resentment simmered amongst the groups yeah i read some ngo reports one of the things they cite is that like women who were refugees especially women who were on their own preferred not to drink water because they didn't want to go to the bathroom like they were afraid and they wanted to stay in their tents and like and well yeah that's something i've seen in other settings too but like it's obvious like that's a pretty fucked situation to be in right yeah you're in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself ngos later reported that

refugees did not receive mobile container homes until displaced turkish residents received them and that refugee women in particular experienced violence in these container camps right so that's when they're they're dropping like shipping containers for people to live in because all the houses fell down because of the earthquake many Turkish refugees have a sort of temporary protected status so that temporary protected status only allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in. And many of those provinces are obviously border provinces, right? Initially, many Syrian folks would come to Turkey hoping that they could then continue.

Turkey kind of bridges between Asia and Europe, right? So they had hoped that they could go through Turkey, right, from east to west, and then continue into the Europeanan union perhaps and live there but that didn't work right many of them found themselves stuck in turkey and are not even able to leave the province that they lived in after the earthquake turkey lifted those those restrictions on movement and you saw tons of syrian folks traveling around turkey and being like whoa like istanbul how how cool is this like having lived there for 10 years right but they couldn't leave their province before for this generation of syrians some of them like i was reading some

of their like social media like some folks i think meaningfully became felt more turkish when they were able to access those things but other folks they went back to syria to visit family they're briefly allowed to do that they weren't allowed to do that before but it also broadened their resentment against them i think it's fair to say. And in the 2023 presidential election, there wasn't really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. Erdogan was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did the Turkey-EU deals to prevent further migration westward help. So all of this just continues to turn up the temperature between january and december 2023 over 57 000 syrians were deported according to human rights

watch these deportations took place with the authorities quote pressuring the border authorities to list the majority of border crossings as returnees or voluntary. Turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to quote-unquote safe zones that are pits of danger and despair. That's a quote from Adam Kugel, who's a deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. That's bleak. Yeah, that's pretty bleak, right?

Like, oh, look, we're going to volunteer you to go back to Aleppo or Afrin. Shireen, do you know who will not force you to return to a country that is a decade-long civil war? That took me by surprise, I'm not going to lie. Yeah, that's what I strike to do, Shireen. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, I hit you with a

terrible ad pivot. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

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Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you

love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand

what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. We're back. And I want to talk about the most recent outburst of tension. There have been outbursts of tension, outbursts of violence against Syrian refugees before in Turkey. 2021 springs to mind. But recently, this all came to a head in early July when a Syrian man was accused of molesting his seven-year-old cousin in a public toilet in central Turkey, which is a pretty fucked thing to do. The guy was arrested.

The young girl was taken into protective custody, I think, along with her mother. But it didn't stop violence exploding. Then the town where this happened that night, cars were destroyed, Syrian shops were attacked, and homes were set on fire. The next night, the violence spread. In the border city of Gaziantep,

which has like a 25%rian population a man was stabbed i've seen other videos of like teenage boys like i don't know if they're dead or unconscious but they're certainly not uh capable of responding and mobs of people are stamping on them kicking them and it's pretty horrible stuff yeah the videos i've seen of the the riots and the mobs are really terrifying. Yeah, it's petrifying to think of a mob of people coming for you because of who you are, where your parents came from, with nothing you can do to defend yourself, right? Turkey's interior minister said that 474 arrests have been made, and Erdogan did condemn the

violence, but also blamed the opposition rhetoric, which linked the opposition to him yes the opposite to him yeah when he himself has said they're going to try and send a million more people back to Syria right unsurprisingly several nights of these programs have led to anti-Turkish sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey and its proxy forces right indeed? Indeed, those very proxy forces, in some cases, turned on their Turkish backers. And you could see on social media, again, I shared some of them, numerous videos last week of SNA, so that's Syrian National Army fighters,

firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and burning Turkish flags, and even mobs attacking Turkish civilians in Afrin, right, which is one of the cities that Turkey captured from the SDF. You can see it in other Turkish-occupied areas too. Demonstrators tried to storm the headquarters of Turkish-backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their frontline positions to set up roadblocks and attack Turkish bases.

Dozens of people stayed to sit in in the Al-Hurriya Square in Afrin. Again, these are not tensions that have popped up overnight, right? This didn't just happen because mobs in Turkey attacked Syrian refugees, but this was kind of the cork popping, if you like. And one of the things that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is this sort of detente between Assad and Turkey. So in response to these protests, Turkey shut off the Internet, closed border crossings and sent more troops into the area. Masses of people were arrested and people were charged with things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey, which, again, this is not in Turkey. This is in Syria, but in the area occupied by turkey i think anytime a government or an occupying power like shuts off internet that is terrifying to me

yeah because they you know they're trying to do something they don't want you to see yeah totally like fortunately it's 2024 and like there's only so far yeah that they can go. I've seen lots of videos from those protests. But yeah, they're trying to stop people organizing. They're trying to stop them and the world seeing. It's more so the act that that power, choosing to do that, is so purposeful. And that's like a choice. Yeah, totally. Everyone knows what you're going for there.

Yeah. On the 5th of July, detainees who are arrested during protests in northern aleppo including a child were forced to film themselves with a turkey flag behind them and apologize to the turkish government and people for burning the turkish flag one of the videos obtained by the syrian observatory for human rights showed a child under pressure admitting to quote burning the turkish flag and apologizing to the Turkish people before kissing the flag. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Again, when people kiss the flags on TV, it's not a great sign. I did see videos of some of the SNA who appear to have captured some Turkish soldiers, making them kiss their flag as well, like the Syrian revolution flag. So I want to talk about these Turkish safe zones safe zones right so-called safe zones i guess um they're anything but safe right they've been seized through military incursions and they're rife with corruption and human rights abuses both by turkish back forces and and turkish forces directly and you'll be familiar with some of this stuff from what israel does in in palestine specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchards you can see it like listed on the syrian observatory for human rights if you

go to like they organize the areas by the name of the turkish mission so like operation peace spring area or euphrates shield or operation olive branch is a real fucking on the nose name and you can see like 10 olive trees were cut down and sold for firewood or like people reselling homes that were seized from civilians right wow and i've spoken to people who have left to freeing like in my time in in uh in kurdistan and syria and kurdistan and and in the united states um i've spoken to people who uh were there as part of the sdf and and fled backwards and like a lot of them have confirmed the same stuff right destruction and property theft of homes and houses and then like there's evidence of extortion there's evidence of corruption uh in these areas

today right sexual violence uh even even torture so it's pretty bad you yeah there are a ton of links that'll be on our sources page. If you want to read more, I don't want to sort of traumatize you all on your way to work here. I'll just traumatize Shireen. Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. Just another day at work.

Yeah, it's a normal day. Most of the protests seem to have died down now, but the situation doesn't really seem to have become any more stable. In Turkey, just like many other countries, politicians have run to the right, respond to an economic crisis, blame refugees for problems caused by capitalism. Reports of abuse of Syrian refugees caught crossing the border are rife. And some of their data appears to have been leaked in the last few days. I can't confirm this, but I've seen this from a few places, right,

that data from a registry of refugees has been leaked, which would obviously be very concerning. We we look at things like the mahrash massacre we look at like the totality of this sentiment and the people doing it tensions in the turkish occupied areas of syria remain high with people there strongly opposed to the turkish oppression seizure and sale of their landed homes and the potential of a detente between the two countries. Earlier this week, Erdogan said, We will extend our invitation to Assad with this invitation. We want to restore Turkey-Syria relations to the same level as in the past.

Our invitation may be extended at any time. That's a readout of an interview by Turkish media that's obviously translated. That's so vague. It's's like at what point in the past yeah yeah i mean like i i think it's the correct number of relations to have with the side is non yeah and so like any more than that is bad there are also reports that turkey is going to open crossings between the territory it is controlling and regime territory right there are protests about that i saw in aleppo syria has said that normalization can only happen after turkey agrees to pull out the troops that it has turkey is

opposed to this because it doesn't want the sdf which it believes to be an extension of the pkk which it considers to be a terrorist group to have territory along its border right and and the sdf still does already have territory on this border right like kamishlo where i was you can go on top of a tall building and look across the border but that does seem to be kind of a red line for turkey so i don't know where that leaves us but yeah that does seem something that they would never want to do so bashar really called their bluff there yeah yeah yeah he's which is which is kind of funny given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate no but maybe turkey has given up on the revolution in syria and it just wants to join with assad and and as long as they can both say fuck the kurds and you know that's enough for both of them right but like if they can both get together on a state level and be like fuck

these kurds and therefore i guess the cost of that would be sending these refugees home for turkey which is i guess not considered to be a cost by some of them and that's millions of people right millions of people who like something in some cases people are worried about having a citizenship removed yeah like they went there to be safe and of course it's a violation of international law and of course that doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns but it leaves millions of people in limbo right erdogan said he's promised to send another million refugees back but that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime really i guess he could just pump them all into like a freeing or whatever but he's pumping people into a situation where

people are already actively opposed to the turkish occupation there right if he pulls out his troops he's going to have to accept that there will be kurdish forces on his border which he hates so it's a question of like what value does he assign to the safety of these three million refugees and it doesn't seem to be very high and like every time when we talk about migration that people are leaving terrible things right that's why people tend to end up as refugees but there's never been a i don't think a more pronounced global crackdown than i've seen right now it's not like these syrian refugees they can't leave their province, right? I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey in the last six months, a year.

It's very hard. It's very expensive. And lots of the people who have fled from Turkey only went there for a few months, right? And then kept moving. Every country has made it harder than it ever was to immigrate like even you know that we talk about the syrian refugee crisis in 2014 2016 that's that's three unleashing three million people right there they they need a safe place to go and if you try and force them back to syria it's either going to be an absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more refugees entering the

refugee system at a time when governments all around the world are indifferent at best to the survival of refugees right including the fucking biden government in this country yeah yeah it's uh it's pretty bleak yeah that uh that fucking sucks j James. It does fucking suck, Shireen. I will be back in two weeks to talk to you about what Turkey is doing in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq, where they are bombing Kurdistan freedom guerrillas. They're setting up roadblocks and, again, making massive incursions into another country.

So that'll be great. You can all look forward to that over the weekend, I guess. I guarantee that there are refugees, probably refugees from Turkey or Syria, in the town where you live or in the nearest big town to where you live. And you can do something nice for them this weekend if you want to. Especially if you live somewhere where it's hot as shit. You can, I don't't know help out and drop off water somewhere or something yeah like like uh i know i've just been talking to kurdish refugees

who are in like the northeast you know i spoke to some uh they're not kurdish or turkish but talked about to some refugees who are in scranton oh famous for joe biden always talking about it but yeah there are folks everywhere who need your help you can make a difference i guess the government isn't going to joe biden isn't going to kamala harris isn't going to either uh and neither is fucking hillary clinton i'm damn sure of that so it is only you and that doesn't need to make you desperate you can do something i spoke to so many podcast like another of our podcast listeners was uh at the border on Monday and I met them and they were lovely and we drove around and help people and like

you just need to take that yourself and then like you can do something but the first step is you know logging off Twitter and and uh getting out there and like I promise you you will feel less hopeless if you if you start helping even if's only one person, it makes a difference. Yeah, that is something that James did tell me that I think about. Because I get really overwhelmed with the idea of how many people need help in this world. And I'm just like this big softie and it really just overwhelms me. Like, what can I, what can me, little me do to help anything? But James is right right if you change

even one person's life that's one person's whole life that's a big deal and so i think it has to start there and if there are many more of you doing the same thing then that's how actual change happens because yeah our government is useless but yeah listen to james james is wise and british please don't listen to me. James is wise and British. Please don't listen to me because I'm British because that will lead you down some dark paths in terms of gender ideology. I mean, maybe I meant that you sound wise because you're British.

Yeah, that's all I've got going for me. But just be nice to people. Buy someone fucking lunch this weekend. If not, make them lunch. Make some rice. It's cheap. And yeah, you can make a difference. No one fucking else will. If you want to talk about being a leftist, that's great.

But I have so much more respect for people who want to do stuff. So do stuff. And the rest will sort itself out. You don't have to argue with people about the minutia of ideology. It doesn't matter. Helping people matters. Making the world better matters. So do that.

It's Friday. Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice for someone. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Thank you. Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura.

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