Kill the Syrians': Turkish mobs search out civil war refugees after devastating car bomb
The Telegraph's Richard Spencer witnesses fear and suspicion in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli where 46 people died in a double bombing.
8:23PM BST 12 May 2013
The mob shouted "Kill the Syrians" as they marched on the Hawam family drinks stall in Reyhanli.
Refugees from Aleppo, the family served mainly fellow Syrians, and were natural targets after Saturday's double bombing of the Turkish border town.
"There were 60, maybe 100 of them," said Ridar Hawam, 18, the older boy.
"They were shouting, 'You are Syrian, you are bombing us.' They said they should shoot all Syrians, even the children."
Three Syrians were among the 46 killed when the two car bombs struck the town centre on Saturday afternoon. But that did not lessen the anger vented against both the refugees and the man many locals blame for bringing them to Reyhanli, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Reyhanli is close to the Bab al-Hawa crossing, the busiest between the two countries and a funnel through which arms and men are flowing into the country to bolster rebel forces.
Three Syrians were among the 46 killed (David Rose)
Upwards of 300,000 Syrians have also flooded into Turkey, by no means all confined to a string of refugee camps along the border.
Mr Erdogan and his ministers blamed President Bashar al-Assad's secret police, the mukhabarat, for the explosions, which would make this is the worst "blowback" the country has yet suffered for its backing of the Syrian opposition.
It was a classic terror attack. The first, smaller bomb detonated outside the town hall. As people came out to see what had happened, a second, much larger car bomb exploded at the busier end of the main street, crowded with shoppers on a Saturday afternoon, outside the telephone exchange and post office building.
It sent jets of flame into the air and shattered glass frontages for up to a kilometre around.
Hakkan Calem, 37, was having lunch with his wife at her mother's near the post office when the first bomb went off. "He ran out and got into his car to see what had happened," his brother-in-law, Mehmet Gezer, said at his wake yesterday. "Then the second bomb happened. He died instantly."
Yilmaz Gelik said he saw a hand fly past him. "The back of my shirt was caked in blood," he said. He showed graphic images on his mobile phone of the bleeding and charred corpses in the burned out cars and smashed shops along the street, taken moments afterwards.
Next to the wreckage of a motorcycle belonging to his cousin Mehmet, who is missing presumed dead, Salih Tas began leading a chant of "Erdogan out, Erdogan out", as an angry crowd gathered at the scene yesterday/Sunday morning.
"We are angry with the refugees and with Assad," he said. "We are angry with Erdogan because they are allowed to come here driving around, going anywhere."
Mr Erdogan's policy of "zero problems with the neighbours", pursued actively during the first years of his premiership, has had spectacular consequences.
Many of the leading Syrian rebels are small businessmen who took advantage of easier trade links to travel to Turkey, seeing its new-found prosperity and democracy at first hand, and making the money with which they funded their initial arms purchases.
After Mr Assad snubbed Mr Erdogan's earlier pleas to step down, Turkey began backing the rebels wholeheartedly, and is now calling for western intervention.
The authorities said they had arrested nine Turkish citizens from a Marxist group with links to the Syrian mukhabarat. Ahmet Davutoglu said the same faction had carried out the bombing as was responsible for the massacres of Sunni civilians in two villages near the northern Syrian town of Baniyas ten days ago.
In Damascus, the Syrian information minister Omran Zubi denied any involvement, calling the Turkish statements "unfounded accusations".
In the wake of the bombing, gangs of teenagers roamed through Reyhanli overturning and smashing cars with Syrian number plates. The violence did not, eventually, turn personal. "They broke the windows of our father's car but left us alone," Ridar Hawam said.
Turkish residents attack a Syrian registered car in anger at the bombing (David Rose)
Many Syrians fled. The Alice Hotel, a haunt of rebels passing through for meetings was empty yesterday afternoon. "They all left last night," the manager, Mustafa Ocak said.
Opposition MPs claimed Mr Erdogan had bitten off more than he could chew with his Syria policy.
"Everyone should ask why this disaster happened," Aytug Atici, an opposition MP for the neighbouring town of Mersin, said at the site.
He said he was worried for the safety of Turkey's ethnic Arab population, many of whom live in the towns around Reyhanli and many of whom belong to the Alawite sect of Mr Assad's family.
Anti-Erdogan groups staged a protest in the provincial capital, Antakya, last night.
"The Alawites are afraid that Alawites and Sunnis will be pitted against each other," he said. "Erdogan has made a big mistake. Syria was a neighbour with a fire – we should have taken water to put it out, not gas to make it flare up."
Mr Davutoglu blamed the international community for its failure to intervene to end the war. "The latest attack shows how a spark transforms into a fire when the international community remains silent and the UN Security Council fails to act," he said while visiting Berlin.
"It's unacceptable for the Syrian and Turkish people to pay the price for this."
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