This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

The young men carrying sticks and knives arrived around sunset on Friday last week, as the Syrian-owned restaurants of Gaziantep’s busy Inönü Street were coming to life.

Omar Jaber rushed to pull down the shutters of his small grocery shop as the gang drew closer, smashing up windows and parked cars.

The night before, Turkish soldiers had been hit by an airstrike in the Syrian province of Idlib, an incident which left at least 33 troops dead in the biggest loss of life for the Turkish military in modern history. Jaber knew the Turkish men wanted revenge.

“Eventually the police came and dispersed them,” he said. “Most shop owners here then kept our businesses closed for several days.”

The 61-year-old from Aleppo lost a son in 2012 who died fighting in the early days of the revolution against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. He decided to move his family to Turkey after that.

“There are many good Turks who defend Syrians,” Jaber said. “But generally the mood toward us is hostile.”

Similar scenes have played out across Turkey since Ankara launched a counteroffensive last month to repel an assault by Assad and his Russian allies on Turkish-backed rebel groups in the last opposition stronghold of Idlib.

After the funeral of a Turkish soldier killed in Idlib in the southeastern town of Kahramanmaraş last Saturday, a large mob attacked Syrian-owned businesses in the town centre, and two foreign teenagers were beaten in the Black Sea town of Samsun on Sunday.

According to 2018 UN data, Turkey hosts 63.5% of all the refugees in the world, including some 3.5 million Syrians. Over the years, an anti-refugee backlash has ebbed and flowed.

While Syrians who now have Turkish citizenship have been embraced by the government as potential conservative voters, in the past year refugees have also become the definitive scapegoats for Turkey’s economic woes.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, likes to portray Turkey as facing existential threats in order to whip up nationalistic sentiment. Such rhetoric is often followed by racist attacks on migrant communities. Many Syrian shops and restaurants across the country are currently shut, wary of becoming targets amid the heightened tensions.

Mohammed Hadid, a teacher from Idlib living in the southern Turkish town of Antakya, usually meets friends to play backgammon and smoke nargileh several times a week, but has avoided his favourite spot since the airstrike on the Turkish soldiers.

“I felt too embarrassed to go. I’m from a village only a few kilometres away from where they died, fighting the regime,” the 35-year-old said. “Yesterday I saw an elderly Turkish woman approach a young Syrian man and she asked him, ‘What are you doing here while our young men die in your country? Why don’t you go fight?’

The fighting in Idlib has been intense since the suspected Russian airstrike, as Turkey, a Nato member, declined to implicate Moscow and vented its fury on Assad’s forces instead.

The sustained drone and artillery attacks have left the Syrian army licking its wounds: four jets have been shot down and heavy weaponry, anti-aircraft systems, radar systems and dozens of tanks have been destroyed.

The fierce counteroffensive has been applauded by civilians in Idlib and Syrians outside the country for finally forcing Russian president Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table after weeks of indifference to Turkish appeals from the Kremlin.

Turkey’s border with Syria, however, remains shut to the hundreds of thousands of families currently camped out in miserable conditions on the border.

There is also widespread anger at how Turkey has manipulated at least 13,000 Syrian refugees and other migrants in travelling west to the country’s EU borders.

Following the strike on Turkish troops, Ankara declared it would no longer stop migrants from trying to cross into Europe – a move designed to pressure western allies to support the Turkish campaign in Idilb.

On Thursday, interior minister Süleyman Soylu said Turkey would deploy an extra 1,000 police officers to the Greek border to prevent Athens from pushing people back into Turkey, effectively trapping desperate people in the border zone.

“They say they want us to leave, but then if we do leave, they call us cowards,” Hadid said. “Every Syrian I know would love to go home. We know at this point we will never be truly welcome anywhere else.”