Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

Canada will begin the third leg of its effort to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February against a swirling backdrop

There's a plan to start flying Syrian refugees from the south of Turkey to Canada some time soon. All that's missing is a Health Canada-certified hospital and an airport – and a safe way to get the refugees there.

There's the war to the south, in Syria, which has driven a staggering 2.2 million refugees onto Turkish soil, and caused friction with the European Union over Turkey's unwillingness to stop those intent on travelling illegally to Greece and onwards. Moscow and Ankara are snarling at each other over last month's downing of a Russian jet. Turkish troops recently bolstered their presence in northern Iraq – near the Islamic State-controlled city of Mosul – prompting threats of attack from Iranian-backed Shia militias in the country.

Parts of Turkey increasingly resemble war zones themselves.

The army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a separatist militia better known as the PKK, resumed their three-decades-old conflict earlier this year. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says fighting the PKK is as much part of the "war on terrorism" as combatting the Islamic State.

Some cities in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast have been so badly damaged in the fighting – with almost every building bearing scars of heavyarms fire – that Turks have taken to posting photographs of them online with the bitter tagline, "Turkey, not Aleppo." Newspaper headlines refer to the "Syria-ization" of Turkey's south.

The Islamic State has made its presence felt in the country too, claiming responsibility for a trio of bombings this year, including a double suicide bombing in October outside Ankara's main train station that killed more than 100 people. The United States reduced services at its embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul for part of this week over an unspecified threat. An alleged IS militant was arrested Tuesday in connection with the Istanbul plot.

It's against this swirling backdrop that Canada will begin the third – and most complicated – leg of its effort to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February.

While the first planeloads from Lebanon and Jordan have already begun arriving in Toronto and Montreal, the first refugee flights from southern Turkey are still some way off, with security concerns pushing back political deadlines, such as a promise to bring 10,000 of the refugees to Canada by the end of December.

The deteriorating situation has complicated every phase of Canada's plan. Many of the names provided to Canada by the Turkish government for potential resettlement reside in either the predominantly Kurdish southeast, where clashes between the army and the PKK are a daily occurrence, or flush against the Syrian border, where IS, sometimes called ISIS or ISIL, is believed to have a strong presence.

Bringing the refugees in for screening interviews at a centre run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the southern city of Gaziantep – the part of the operation that's now under way – means busing them for long hours across a de facto war zone. They're later bused back across the same battlefields to wait for news of a next appointment.

"These provinces are right next to a country in civil war, so the security situation is not worse than one would expect of such provinces elsewhere around Syria," said Akin Unver, assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. "Currently, it is difficult to assess the level of threat of ISIS in those regions, and the added security problems originating from renewed violence in the predominantly Kurdish areas exacerbate this fog of war."

Unlike Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey handles refugee affairs itself, rather than delegating to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The Turkish government has given Canada two lists of about 5,000 names each that it considers suitable for resettlement. The IOM is helping Canada verify the accuracy of those lists – for instance, a family member who travelled illegally to Europe would disqualify the whole family – and arrange transportation.

On Dec. 11, Turkey declared a "special security situation" in the southern province of Gaziantep, nixing plans to possibly use the city and its airport as the hub of the Canadian refugee operation in southern Turkey.

Instead, Canada is left looking for another Turkish airport it can use, one a safe enough distance away from the chaotic SyrianTurkish border to erase worries that either Canadian officials or the refugees could become targets.

Officials from the Canadian Border Services Agency are on the ground in Turkey, conducting the security screening that is step two in the process after the IOM interviews, but safety worries are such that the Canadian embassy won't even identify which city they're in, other than to say that it isn't Gaziantep. Health tests for the refugees have not begun because officials have yet to identify a hospital in the south that meets Health Canada standards.

"Our operations have begun and we're going as fast as we can.

But security of our personnel – and the refugees and IOM personnel – is our No. 1 concern," John Holmes, Canada's ambassador to Ankara, said in an interview. "It's a challenging region and a challenging area and that affects our operations."

The spreading chaos is the result of a series of strategic reversals for Turkey over the past four years.

Initially, Mr. Erdogan's Turkey looked set to emerge as one of the big winners from the Arab Spring popular revolutions that shook the region starting in 2011.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) has informal ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party, and the two Sunni Islamist movements looked to Ankara for support after winning post-revolution elections in their countries. Suddenly, Mr. Erdogan had Ottomanesque clout across much of the Middle East.

Then it all started to unravel; first abroad, then at home.

Turkey waded into the Syrian war at its beginning in the spring of 2011, keen to topple the Alawite-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad, and to see another friendly (and Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood government rise on Turkey's southern border. At the outset of the conflict, Turkey trained and funded the Syrian army defectors who became the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Fatefully, Ankara also adopted a policy of allowing anyone opposed to the Assad regime – including the radical jihadists – to use Turkish soil as something of a rear base.

Four years on, events have spun out of Turkey's control. The Muslim Brotherhood was ousted in Egypt, replaced by a military government that severed ties with Turkey. Ennahda lost power in Tunisia. The FSA stalled and splintered in Syria. Those jihadis Turkey turned a blind eye to became the so-called Islamic State and declared a caliphate that comes right up to the Turkish border.

"In Turkish, we have a saying that if you spit into the wind, it comes back in your face," said Suat Kiniklioglu, a former AKP parliamentarian who is now a critic of Mr. Erdogan's rule. "Turkey engaged in nothing but regime-change policies, and that puts Turkey on the spot now in Syria. The rise of ISIS makes Turkey's border policy vis-à-vis ISIS much more publicly exposed."

Mr. Kiniklioglu sees the tiff with Russia in the same way. Mr. Erdogan, he believes, thought he could send a sharp message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the lengths Turkey would go to in defending its airspace – and the ethnic Turkmen militias it supports in Syria – and escape with only mild retribution.

Instead the Kremlin has continuously escalated pressure on Ankara since the incident, severing many diplomatic and economic ties. On Monday, a Russian frigate fired a warning shot toward a Turkish fishing boat it accused of sailing too close.

At home, a June election saw the AKP lose its majority after 13 years, threatening Mr. Erdogan's treasured plan to alter the constitution and give more powers to the presidency. As Turkey tottered along with a caretaker government, hostilities with the PKK exploded again, ending a decade of work Mr. Erdogan had put into mending Turkish-Kurdish relations, but creating a surge of nationalist sentiment that restored the AKP's majority in a November rerun of the election.

The price for that, however, has been at least 150 deaths in fighting between the army and the PKK since June, military curfews across much of the southeast and a crumbling sense of national identity.

"I'm very worried about my country," Mr. Kiniklioglu said.

"The government fails to see how deep the psychological break with our Kurdish citizens has become. With what's going on in Iraq and Syria next door, I'm worried about the unity of my country."

With so many moving pieces, the Canadian embassy won't even hazard a guess as to when the refugee airlift from Turkey might start.

Mr. Holmes suggested that some of those eventually flown from Turkey won't be counted among the 25,000 the government has promised to bring to Canada by the end of February, but rather as some of the additional 35,000 refugees Canada is planning to bring by the end of 2016.

For aid workers in the region, Canada's timelines matter less than the overall goal. They're anxious to see the refugee airlift succeed, hoping it will inspire other countries to adopt similar programs.

"Canada is showing how it can be," said Selin Unal, externalrelations officer for the Ankara office of UNHCR. "Money and donations [to refugees] are not enough. Solidarity, like the Canadians have shown, is something else."

Provided, of course, that everything goes well.