Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2021, pp. 46-47
Special Report
By Lisa Dupuy, Photos By Daniel Maissan
“I REMEMBER THE PLANES flying over. I could almost feel the engines, as if the sound trembled through the fields,” Ibrahim Yan Aslan, 50, said. “It made us feel badly for the people over there.” Aslan did not need to point very far from his farmland to indicate the Syrian border. He is a farmer in the backlands of Kilis, in southern Türkiye. As the war rages in Syria, Ibrahim said his customers moved away and his income has plummeted. Millions of refugees have fled to Kilis, and Ibrahim said he hired some as farm hands because, “you know, they lighten the work. And to support them, as well. Generally speaking, every person has good intentions, whether they’re Syrians or Turks.”
Traditionally, Kilis is the classical border town, facilitating the transport of goods and people alike. In recent years, it has seen refugees pass one way, and Turkish troops and their equipment, in large quantities, the other. The war in Syria has brought to Kilis humanitarians, victims and profiteers. The city itself has swelled with new arrivals looking for refuge at several points in the conflict’s timeline.
It is the same in other cities in southern Türkiye, like Antakya and Reyhanli. I visited these places last October, on a reporting trip with photographer Daniel Maissan. We wandered through this region which has seen an enormous influx of refugees, 3.5 million, since the civil war in Syria started in 2011.
Speaking to some refugees, I got the sense of a community that exists in the cities’ undergrowth, a collective shadow living in this border region. The refugees have their own cultural centers, economy and social structures that are self-managed by online communities. We spoke to the man who oversees a “Syrians in Kilis” Facebook page, with tens of thousands of members. It’s full of stories of furniture swaps, dental and educational referrals and charity requests. The site functions like a coping mechanism, a way for individuals to continue to exist, even for those who have endured a lot.
Let me tell you about Ibrahim. I’m not referring solely to the farmer who showed us his fields, but to several Ibrahims; men and boys of that name, a common one in Türkiye and its neighboring countries.
Daniel and I are tracing Abraham’s Path, which connects Ur in Iraq to the Sinai. The route follows the travels of the prophet Abraham, recognized by the large monotheisms, which are known as the Abrahamic religions. Abraham/Ibrahim is known in many communities as a symbol of hospitality and tolerance. Harvard researchers study the legends of his life and the long tradition of his worship as useful tools in conflict resolution. The Abraham Path Initiative, a non-profit organization, aims to install hiking trails for visitors to come and experience the Middle East. The initiative seeks to find common ground, literally, in the territory that Ibrahim inhabited. (See www.abrahampath.org)
In walking our own version of these idealistic pathways, we hope to peek behind the headlines of the news coverage and examine peace-building and reconciliation. We are gathering these stories as slow travelers and over-thinkers. While hiking, we look for Ibrahims for a portrait series that provide a cross-section of the communities we meet. We want to know how these people succeed in re-settling, and how they feel at home in places and with each other.
This is a tricky project to plan because we come in peace, but peace is far from many of the states in the region that we are aiming to cross. Our version of Abraham’s Path is almost 2.5 thousand miles long (see www.meetingabraham.com). We have divided it up in 10 separate hikes, each of which will take several weeks to finish. With our freelancer work schedules (and frankly, budget) as well as risk assessments, the logistics are a real challenge.
In the last year, of course, our planning was further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We were awarded a working grant for our trip a mere weeks before the Netherlands went into a lockdown, casting doubts over our travel plans. But in the end, the timing worked out neatly. So, in autumn we hiked through rural villages, with the road’s dust coating our legs and our hot breath caught in diligent facemasks.
We learned how the pandemic is impacting the community of Syrian refugees. In Reyhanli, we visited a rehabilitation care home for refugees who are granted temporary status in Türkiye for healthcare. The center has 285 beds, 159 of which were occupied. Due to COVID-19 fewer people have been allowed over the border for the duration of their medical treatment. “We can tell that people are very afraid of losing their place,” said head nurse Lamah, who studied medicine in Aleppo. “These people have already become refugees. Mentally they have become used to constant instability. But for their medical treatment, they are willing to wait for months, if necessary.”
Some also stay, like 7-year-old Ibrahim. The continuous strikes at his home, in the northern region of Jabal al-Zawiya, caused the boy to lose his hearing. He was a toddler at the time, just learning to speak. He is catching up, with the aid of a hearing aid. His father accompanies him to the rehabilitation center. They’ve been in Reyhanli for 10 months, while Ibrahim receives remedial lessons. “An older son died in the bombings,” his parent explains. “Due to Ibrahim’s deafness my wife and I could no longer communicate with him. That was very painful. It made us feel like we had lost a second child.”
There are many echoes to Ibrahim’s father’s story. The conversation partners we meet on our treks slip in little reminders of what they have lost, possessions and people, and wistfully shared memories. One man in Kilis told us, “In the places where we dwell in Türkiye, at least we can feel Syria as it drifts toward us from time to time, with the winds.”
The two of us can walk about 12 and a half miles at a time and on days when we are changing “headquarters” we do so with full backpacks. On our walks, Syria looms on the horizon. We catch glimpses of a newly constructed border wall, like a whitewashed, concrete snake that winds its way across a forested hillside to the very south of Antakya.
Amazingly, we have met Ibrahims at several points on these treks: an engineer who was inspecting an irrigation system just outside of Suruç; the Kurdish Ibrahim harvesting his pomegranates in the outfields; an Ibrahim taking his wife shopping in Birecik; and the Syrian refugee who writes poetry about his lost home. We even spoke to an Ibrahim on the phone, after his brother suggested we call him at his place of work on the other side of the country.
There is something powerful in taking down the details of each life, in short bullet points: family name, age, place of birth. There is a future and a past to each Ibrahim we encounter. Their communities bring us in, take hold of us. I think that among our favorite and most impressive experiences on these reporting hikes are our chance encounters. All it takes for us, really, is to have faith in the hospitality that is associated with the legendary figure. We’ve found people are curious and we entertain them. You can imagine this scene, the two of us, sweaty and strange, arriving in a random village, straining to ask people:
“Excuse me, do you know an Ibrahim?”
“You are looking for Ibrahim? Ibrahim… who? Which Ibrahim? What does he do?”
“Oh, we don’t know, just—any Ibrahim, an old man, a baby…”
Anyone with a bit of time and hospitality, in fact, will do.
Lisa Dupuy is a freelance journalist based in the Netherlands. She writes daily news and is interested in how conflict shapes people, places and culture. Daniel Maissan is a freelance photographer, also based in the Netherlands. He works for NGOs and foundations. His focus lies in capturing people and their stories. Lisa Dupuy and Daniel Maissan received a working grant from the Dutch Foundation BJP for this autonomous project.
