In The Earthquake's Aftermath, Border Divisions Rise Up

A once quiet Turkish town with a large Syrian population could be a model of neighbourly tolerance - or are the cracks being laid bare?

- Ruth Michaelson And Deniz Barış Narlı Kilis

When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook southern Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February, Murat Naomi rushed out of his home in his running gear. His mother, who normally covers her hair with a hijab, fled their first-floor apartment without one, fearing the building could collapse .

Mother and son went to a large central square in Kilis , a southern Turkish town that hugs the Syrian border and the nearby Bab al-Salam crossing into the north-west of a country they once called home. Over the border is Jisrash-Shugur, where Naomi’s father, sister and fiancee still live.

The pair huddled in the town square for two days, hoping for salvation. Two minarets in the centre of the little town were badly damaged and 178 buildings around the town collapsed, killing 73 people and injuring almost 700 more. “We couldn’t read the funeral rites because so many people died,” he said.

Surrounded by verdant fields of olive groves and farmland, Kilis nevertheless appeared to form a remarkable pocket of normality in the centre of a zone of physical devastation that touched every large city around it, particularly the Turkish trade hub of Gaziantep an hour’s drive north and the historical Syrian city of Aleppo just over an hour to the south.

As the town reeled from the destruction around it, many of its Syrian residents such as Naomi wondered about their futures amid declarations by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to return 4.4 million Syrians to their war-scarred country.