SURUC, Turkey – From a hilltop about half a mile from the besieged Kurdish-Syrian city of Kobani, the sounds of heavy weapons can be heard echoing from inside what was once a prosperous border town of about 250,000 people.
Most of those people are now scattered among Turkish towns just a few miles from their homes, preparing for their first winter as refugees, while a Kurdish militia and a small contingent of Syrian Arab rebels try to keep a toehold in the city, most of which is now controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Turkish armored units watch from the border but don't interfere in the bloody stalemate.
Turkey already has absorbed nearly a million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war, which has raged since 2011. But the Kobani flight was certainly among the fastest, with perhaps as many as 200,000 fleeing in a few short days in September as ISIL swept through Kobani's outlying villages in a push to take the city. The militant Islamists stalled only after the U.S. began a bombing campaign.
The battle also perhaps was the most politically fraught for Turkey because the refugees were Kurds, an ethnic group that historically has had a tense political and cultural relationship with the Turks. For the past 30 years, Kurdish militants have fought the Turkish military over Kurdish demands for greater autonomy and the right to use their own language in schools and business.
Advocates say that's colored how Turkey is viewing the new refugees, who authorities fear may be sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the insurgent group known by its Kurdish initials as the PKK. The PKK has played an active role in training and supporting the Kurdish militias fighting inside Kobani.
Barazani Haman, a spokesman for a Kurdish aid group called the Support Coordination Operations Room for Kobani, said Turkish authorities have placed tight controls on aid flowing to the refugees and are limiting access to the new refugee camps being established near the border.
"Because of their fear of the PKK, Turkey has special programs for the Kurdish refugees that bypass the normal procedures," Haman said in an interview in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city about 30 miles from the border. "All refugee groups wishing to deliver aid and help must coordinate through the Turkish Red Crescent and not the United Nations."
"The Syrian [Arab] refugees have more freedom to organize and maintain their affairs and rent apartments anywhere in Turkey," said Hasan, a refugee who said he was an auto mechanic before he fled his village just outside of Kobani in mid-September. "They think we are PKK and will cause trouble in Turkey, but all the PKK fighters are fighting [inside Syria]. We're just normal people."
Part of the issue, according to all of the Kurds interviewed, was the education system, where Turkish authorities are deeply suspicious of the use and teaching of the Kurdish language within Turkey — which by some accounts is 20 percent ethnic Kurdish. Officials fear the teaching and use of Kurdish will become a step toward the broadly popular idea among Kurds of an independent homeland.
That same concern has been a point of contention in Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurdish zone in Turkey, where Turkish officials are fuming over plans by local officials to build a Kurdish-language school for ethnic Yazidi refugees from Iraq who settled there after ISIL overran their homes near the Sinjar Mountains during the summer.
The tensions will no doubt continue. One 9-year-old refugee playing with other boys outside a camp on the outskirts of Suruc said he'd been attending school in the camp for four or five hours a day. The refugee, who identified himself as Ahmed, said proudly that among the topic he was studying was "the Arabic alphabet." Then he laughed and added, "And Kurdish, of course."