The first car bomb in Reyhanli exploded in the early afternoon beside a government building. The second went off in a crowded market square a few minutes later. It was a Saturday; the square was full. Fifty-one people were killed and many more injured.

After the explosions, which took place last weekend, some Turks in Reyhanli, a small city in Turkey a few miles from the country’s border with Syria, reacted angrily. They smashed cars with Syrian license plates and targeted Syrians who remained on the streets. Refugees and aid workers began to hide or leave town. When I spoke to one worker—Abdul, a Syrian from Damascus who left work in Dubai to deliver aid from Reyhanli into Syria—by phone on Sunday, the day after the bombings, he and four of his colleagues were locked inside his apartment. He was cautious but calm; working inside of Syria had numbed him slightly to explosions, and he was sure that the Turks in Reyhanli, who had been welcoming until then, would settle down. “These people have always been nice to us,” he said. “Without the Turkish people we have nothing. There is nothing for us in Syria.” But he understood that it might take some time for life in Reyhanli to return to normal. “We cannot talk with the Turkish people right now,” Abdul said. “They are not ready to hear anything from us.”

In March, 2012, I visited Hatay, a region in the south of Turkey that borders Syria, to report on Syrian refugees. The conflict in Syria had been in full force for a year then, and the border remained open. Syrians poured into Hatay’s camps and cities, moving their families into tents or—if they were lucky or connected or had a little bit of money—into apartments. Work had begun on Kilis camp, where a grid of sturdy container homes replaced tents. Refugees had already built schools and set up clinics; some had gotten jobs. Even while it opened its doors, the Turkish government was wringing its hands. The refugee population had reached almost one hundred thousand. The word “crisis” was used a lot.

A year later, there are three times that number of Syrian refugees officially in Turkey, and more unregistered. It has cost Turkey seven hundred and fifty million dollars to host the refugees, with about one hundred million more coming in from outside sources. Members of Syria’s opposition—both armed and not—consider Turkey their base, and the Turkish government’s support for them has made the country an opponent of the Assad regime in more than just words. The border is being knocked down piece by piece—whether by journalists and soldiers crossing back and forth or shells falling on Turkish towns. In a report issued this April called “Blurring the Borders: Syrian Spillover Risk for Turkey,” the International Crisis Group says that that Turkey “now has an uncontrollable, fractured, radicalized no-man’s-land on its doorstep.” The two car bombs that exploded in Reyhanli last Saturday were like two deadly exclamation points at the end of that sentence.

Reyhanli, which is in the Hatay province and very close to a crowded border crossing—Bab Al-Hawa, it is known on the Syrian side; Cilvegozu on the Turkish. Until 1938, the province was Syrian territory. Like other areas in Hatay, Reyhanli has a distinct Syrian Arab influence, and there was a regular cross-border flow long before the fighting began. Trade and marriage linked the two countries, and many Hatay residents speak Arabic as well as Turkish. The food is slightly spicier than in Istanbul. Taxis offer cheap rides across the border, and clothing shops advertise in both Turkish and Arabic. Since the war began, Reyhanli’s population of sixty thousand has nearly doubled thanks to an influx of Syrian refugees, aid workers, opposition members, many of whom relocated because of Reyhanli’s majority-Sunni population.

Gaia Anderson, an Italian photographer based in Istanbul, has been documenting the town during wartime. Her work shows Syrians planting roots, however tentative. Their small businesses are functioning but stark, representing both the refugee’s desire to create a life in Turkey and their eagerness to return home at the first safe moment. “They have no interest in making it anything but a Syrian thing, with as little investment as possible,” Anderson told me. For example, “They are very proud of the fact that you can smoke in their places.” (Smoking is banned in public places in Turkey).

But no matter the number of Syrian-run chicken shops or Arabic-language primary schools in Reyhanli, Turkey’s border with Syria is a dangerous place. Bab Al-Hawa was the site of a car bombing in February that killed a dozen people, and in October Syrian shells killed five people in Akcakale, also along the border. Regardless, Syrians wait in long lines near the gate or in camps on the Syrian side in the hopes of getting into overflowing Turkish refugee camps because, car bombs or not, Turkey is safer than their own country.

The ethos of war seemed to have taken over the town. I was told that the F.S.A. presence was, in some cases, obvious almost to the point of flaunting. Sami Anjouri, another Syrian aid worker in Reyhanli, told me, “I had discussions with Syrians in collective houses about sticking logos of F.S.A. militias on the windows and doors. I asked them whether it offended Turks, and they said they had never had any critics. But to me it’s very strange to a have a Syrian car in Reyhanli with an F.S.A. logo on it.”

Observers in Turkey were shocked at the response in Reyhanli to the bombs. Huseyin Oruc, the deputy chairman of the Turkish N.G.O. I.H.H. (in English, Humanitarian Relief Foundation), which has been very active in Syria, lamented that, “After the hospitality the Reyhanli people showed, they should be attacked.” Hugh Pope, the I.C.G.’s (International Crisis Group) Turkey and Cyprus project director said, “I am surprised at the reaction of the local people. I hadn’t picked up any sense of friction between them and the refugees. There was a sense of relative harmony.” And Khaled Khouja, the representative of the Syrian National Coalition—a group attempting to unify Syrian opposition—in Turkey, also said he, “didn’t hear about any widespread tension.”

Reyhanli’s small economy was bolstered by the Syrian influx, which accounts for some of the good feelings that had existed. The town’s hotel is usually full, and shop owners find customers among the displaced. But meanwhile, the cost of living in Reyhanli has increased dramatically, and Reyhanli’s poor feel excluded. Many Syrian refugees are willing to take jobs for less pay than their Turkish counterparts, who end up unemployed. When news circulated that a Syrian refugee had burned the Turkish flag in the center of Reyhanli, a rift was exposed; most Syrians I spoke to refused to believe that it had happened. An ill-advised media blackout in the aftermath of the bombing has added to the confusion and increased anxiety.

Most Turks are anti-Assad, but they are critical of Turkey’s Syrian policy and worry about being dragged into a war. They don’t want Syrian militias operating from Turkish soil, and the Turkish government’s policy muddles the distinction between Syrian refugee and soldier. The border—no matter the barbed wire, land mines, and guard posts—means little and there is no difference between a Turk and a Syrian when a car bomb explodes in a market in a border town. The nine arrested were Turks with, the government claims, ties to the Assad regime. As Pope put it, simply: “Turkey has gotten involved in supporting the armed opposition across its border, and that has risks.”

People of Reyhanli chant slogans as riot police block them on May 18, 2013, at Reyhanli in Hatay, during the funerals of the victims of a car bomb which went off on May 11 at Reyhanli in Hatay. Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty.