Will Syria’s Revolt Disrupt the Turkish Borderlands?

"...What is Ankara so nervous about? There are of course many reasons for Turkish qualms about the refugee situation—not least Turkey’s careful cultivation of the Assad government in recent years, which has already put it in an awkward position in relation to the Syrian revolt (though it did host a Syrian opposition conference in early June). Largely overlooked, however, is the history of Hatay itself—a region that, until 1939, belonged to Syria and to this day appears as part of Syria on Syrian maps. Geography, moreover, seems to be on Syria’s side...

Indeed, Syria has never officially recognized Turkish sovereignty over Hatay, and as recently as the late 1990s, Syria’s support for separatist Kurds in the disputed region pushed the two countries to the brink of war. Moreover, Hatay’s population has large non-Turkic minorities. There are Christians and Sunnis of Arab descent as well as Kurds; there are also Arab Alevis, a minority religious community that in this part of Turkey follows the same syncretic faith as the Alawites in Syria who dominate the Syrian government and mukhabarat. With this history and population, it becomes clearer why the Turkish government might worry that the arrival of tens of thousands of Syrian Sunnis could cause sectarian tensions to spill into Turkish territory...... there has already been at least one protest in the Turkish border town of Samandag by Turkish Alevis who are against allowing in (mostly Sunni) Syrian refugees to Turkey. With hundreds of Syrians crossing each day–and growing reports of Alawite-Sunni violence in Syria’s northwest—such opposition in Hatay’s border villages, several of which have concentrations of Alevis, could gain strength. (One apparent reason Syrians are crossing into Hatay and not into other Turkish provinces further east along Syria’s long northern border with Turkey is that other parts of northern Syria include areas dominated by Syrian Kurds, who have reportedly been far less affected by the crackdown and hence have not been compelled to flee the country.) ..."