Twenty-one-year-old Syrian refugee Ibrahim Abdullah (L) waits on the Turkish side of the Oncupinar border post with Syria, preparing to return to Aleppo after eight years in exile. — AFP
After eight years away, Ibrahim Abdullah is finally heading home, carrying his belongings in the same basic sports bag he used when he fled Syria eight years ago. At just 13, Abdullah crossed the barbed wire along Syria's northern border to find safety in Turkey. With the fall of Bashar Al Assad, Abdullah is one of thousands of Syrians returning home. Armed with his bag, he plans to locate his childhood home in Aleppo, days after an Islamist-led rebel offensive captured the city and forced Assad to retreat.
"There's nothing valuable in it, just a few clothes," he told AFP, pointing to his bag while waiting at the Oncupinar border crossing near Gaziantep. Dressed in a blue-and-white checked shirt and a black hoodie, he arrived via an overnight bus from Istanbul, which hosts around 500,000 of the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey. "It took 18 hours, then 10 minutes by taxi to get here," he explained, standing among two other refugee families also returning to Syria. Once across the border, the young man with floppy black hair and shaved temples will need at least another hour to reach Aleppo to the south.
"My family has a home there. It's destroyed, but I'm going to try and rebuild it," he said calmly, holding a mobile phone. His mother and four younger siblings remain in Istanbul, living in Esenyurt, a district with a large Syrian community. "They will follow me in two or three months, but I'm not coming back," he said in flawless Turkish. Between watching TikTok videos, he made calls to arrange for a car to meet him on the Syrian side of the border.
In the distance, a plume of black smoke rose into the air. Though the cause of the smoke was unknown, Abdullah seemed unconcerned, confident that the fighting had ceased. He barely remembered crossing the border eight years ago, during the peak of the Syrian migration crisis when millions fled the intense bombardment of Aleppo by government forces and their Russian allies. "But I know we left on foot and I was carrying this bag," he said. Since then, he has worked in a shoe factory in Istanbul and has not attended school. His memories of Istanbul are of working-class neighborhoods, never mentioning tourist attractions like the Hagia Sophia, the Bosphorus, or the Galata Tower.
In front of him, a metal gate leading to the final checkpoint before entering Syria briefly opened and then closed again. Almost there, but not quite. Sitting on his bag, he played with his Turkish residency card, which had a white sticker with the number 157. He received the number upon arrival at the border and it will be recorded in the interior ministry's database. Will he keep the card as a memento of his time in Turkey? "No, I'll have to give it back," he said. "After that, it's over."
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