ISLAHIYE, turkey — Almost all of the toilets in a refugee camp here for Syrians who have fled the conflict at home bear messages in spray paint for President Bashar Assad. One note summarizes them all.
“The house of Bashar,” reads graffiti at the entrance to one portable bathroom, which also gave the president his local name: “Pig.”
And so it is throughout this tent encampment of 6,500 Syrians who are waiting out, or in some cases simply taking a respite from, the conflict just beyond the nearby border.
The Islahiye camp is a place of hatred and defiance, a concentration of families who say they have been chased from their homes not just by rifles and government troops but also by indiscriminate aerial and artillery barrages.
In its way, however, Islahiye is a place where anguish mixes with optimism. Syrians here, cheered by the success of rebel forces on their home ground, insist that their enemies are weakening and that they will go home.
The Islahiye camp is one of nine run by Turkey that hold, as of last weekend, almost 39,000 Syrian citizens. It is clean and well-provisioned with tents, medical attention, electricity and abundant food — all provided by Turkey. No weapons or training were visible within it. The fighters say they leave their weapons in Syria, and this is a place for families and civilian life.
Inside the refugee camp, Hassan Jubra, who before the conflict was a deputy dean at Aleppo University, offered his view on how a popular revolt that began peacefully will ultimately defeat a conventional military, no matter that military’s superior organization at the outset, or its artillery, attack helicopters and tanks.
“We have a cause,” he said. “They don’t have cause. They have interests. There is a big difference between living in a cause and living for the sake of interests.”
This camp is also a repository of sadness, of interrupted or shattered lives. Wisal Salo, 30, sat in her family’s tent on a recent sweltering day as her 3-year-old son, Hadi, napped fitfully on a cushion on the tent floor. The Salos are from the village of Surmani, near Hama.
Salo began to cry, telling of the walk to Turkey, with Hadi and another son. “We left our houses and our land, and fled to here,” she said. “I want to go home, but people warn us the shelling continues, and that we must stay away.”
