Turkey's Syrian Refugees _{Toward İntegration}

The Syrian conflict has produced the most compelling humanitarian challenge of the 21st century. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are 12.2 million people in need of humanitarian assistance with 3.9 million who fled the country and 7.6 million internally displaced persons in Syria.1 With no end to the conflict in sight, these numbers simply continue to rise and the obstacles to resolving the crisis remain out of reach. Syria's neighbors are under great pressure to host the refugees and most of them struggle to respond adequately. According to unofficial estimates, Turkey currently hosts around 2 million Syrian refugees who are, comparatively speaking, better off than refugees in other neighboring states. Turkey has done an exemplary job in hosting them and has received praise for its efforts by the international community.2 In fact, the Turkish government and civil society have demonstrated nothing short of a Herculean effort in providing for the Syrian refugees over the past four years. Nevertheless, there remain serious short-term and long-term challenges ahead in ensuring the well-being of the refugees in countries neighboring Syria. These more long-term impediments need to be addressed to contain the potential fall-out of the integration of Syrian refugees and risk to social stability in neighboring countries with the ongoing conflict in Syria.

The international community, for its part, needs to play a much more substantial role in helping Turkey and other neighbors of Syria in shouldering this enormous burden. This report is the result of a four month long research project conducted in Washington DC and in Turkey. We conducted interviews with specialists in Washington DC and undertook a two-week long research trip to Istanbul, Ankara, Mardin, Şanlıurfa, and Gaziantep. We visited several refugee camps and conducted interviews with government officials, civil society organizations, opposition activists, experts, and academics as well as refugees and Syrian NGOs.

In this report, we provide an overview of the situation of refugees in Turkey and the difficulties that Turkey is facing in handling such a major crisis alongside of its Southern border. We also assess the policy implications of this crisis for Turkey and the international community. We discuss Turkey's open-door policy, the camp and non-camp refugees, the legal framework, integration, the international community's response, and the impact on Turkish foreign policy choices. We end the report with a series of policy recommendations that we hope will help cope
with this monumental task at hand and contribute to a better coordination between Turkey and the international community.