Despite holding all required legal documents, our writer was detained at an Istanbul checkpoint and jailed for two weeks alongside dozens of other foreign nationals, all locked up for trivial paperwork issues, many suffering violent beatings and other indignities.
Over 400 Syrians have been killed trying to cross the border into Turkey in recent years. A writer with personal experience traversing the border charts its transformation from an open door to a deadly sealed fortress.
A single building in the Gaziantep, Turkey brings together families from different parts of Syria, where a few exiled individuals build their own tiny Syria, rendering their homesickness more tolerable.
It's unjust, and reductive of the lives of Syrians in Gaziantep, to describe the city merely as being an “activist town,” as it accommodates many other everyday tales of people as well.
Macabre thoughts haunt Syrian writer Rustom Mahmoud as he finds himself in cold Paris. But if he leaves to feel alive again, what city would have him?
A pharmacist from Aleppo journeys through the Syrian-Turkish borders area in an attempt to reach Gaziantep, and as he does, he is haunted by memories of revolution and war.
