The 2016 agreement between the EU and Turkey led to a sharp drop in migrants leaving from the eastern Mediterranean towards Europe. One Syrian family from eastern Ghouta told ANSA how they settled in Istanbul.
Since Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan closed the doors, everything has changed. From one day to the next, the uncontrolled flux of refugees of mostly Syrian origin who for months had been flowing out of Turkey to Greek islands with the aim of reaching northern Europe stopped. Almost as if it had been a tap, turned off by a single hand.
Enormous drop in departures from Turkey
In the largest migration crisis that hit Europe since WWII, there is a before March 18, 2016, and an after. As soon as the agreement between Ankara and Brussels was in place - despite opposition from some NGOs - the daily landings in Greece fell sharply, from several thousand a day to an average of a few dozen.
As EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos noted, there was a 97 percent drop in arrivals in the EU. The second part of the 3 billion euros in aid has just been delivered.
Two years after the agreement came into place, UNHCR noted, Turkey now hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, more than any other country in the world. In Istanbul alone, there are officially 540,000, though the authorities stopped registering them a while back out of concerns that there may be repercussions from a politically uncomfortable concentration of them.
Entire areas of the metropolis on the Bosphorus have been transformed into ''appendixes'' of Aleppo and Damascus, in the historic area of Fatih as well as in the expanding suburbs of Basaksehir and Esenyurt.
One Syrian family's Odyssey to Istanbul and stability
It is in Esenyurt that ANSA met with the family of Fatma Abdulrazzaq, who arrived in Turkey three years ago from eastern Ghouta, a predominantly agricultural area besieged by government troops and allied forces and at the center of an ongoing humanitarian tragedy.
''In September 2012, my eldest son said that we should move to Damascus, since we were no longer safe in Ghouta. He had to go back with my husband to get the rest of our things but he was arrested and my husband stayed there to try to help him. Since then, he has been stuck in Ghouta and we have no idea what has happened to my son,'' the 55-year-old woman said.
Fatma now lives in Istanbul with her other two sons, aged 17 and 14, and a daughter who is a widow and mother of children aged 5 and 6. ''Then my son-in-law was arrested and died in prison,'' she said. ''After that, we got into contact with smugglers and fled to Turkey.''
EU subsistence
''First, we stayed for four months in Mersin (a southern port town, Editor's note), but there was no work and after a short time we used up the money we had brought with us. And so in 2016, we came to Istanbul,'' she said. It was here that she got a job as a cook of traditional Syrian dishes from the Builders of the Future. The NGO helped her get the necessary documents to request a debit card funded by the EU and managed by the UN' World Food Programme, the Turkish Red Crescent and other Turkish institutions. With this card, 1.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey receive a small monthly amount of money - just under 30 euros - in subsistence funds.
This help has enabled Fatma's family to achieve a bit of stability again. ''Even if things were to change in Syria,'' she said, ''we want to stay here because we feel safer and can build a future for ourselves.''
Author: Cristofo Spinella