By Peter Müller, Maximilian Popp and Christoph Schult

Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Turkey to help reduce the number of refugees coming to Europe. But instead of closing its Aegean coast to migrant smugglers, Ankara shut its border with Syria, making it difficult for those threatened by the war to leave.

Suddenly, the connection breaks off. Nadim Shami* presses the telephone against his ear and cries: “Maryam! Can you hear me?” He calls the number of the smugglers, but nobody answers. Nadim Shami is sitting in a teahouse in the town of Antakya, on the Turkish-Syrian border, and taps his fingers on the table. He’s waiting for a sign that his wife is still alive. Four hours earlier, Maryam Shami had set off from a refugee camp in northwestern Syria together with her two sons Yasin and Mohammed and her daughter Samira.* A migrant smuggler brought the family to the Turkish border, where Maryam Shami and her children hid in the bushes until darkness fell. The last words Nadim Shami heard from his wife on the telephone were: “We’re heading out.”

Nadim Shami, 28, used to work as a mechanic in the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib, but last summer, he fled the violence to Turkey hoping to find work and an apartment in Antakya before bringing his wife and children over to join him. He hadn’t thought that Turkey would close off its border with Syria.

That too, though, has become a side effect of Angela Merkel’s refugee policies. For months, the chancellor has faced rising pressure to reduce the number of people coming to Germany on the search for security and a bit of prosperity. Recently, in fact, speculation has been mounting in Berlin that Merkel may soon be forced out of office. Large numbers of conservative politicians — both with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union — have demanded that the chancellor close the German border to refugees. Merkel, though, has thus far refused, hoping instead for help from her European partners and, in particular, from Turkey.

The chancellor has one main goal she would like to achieve by the beginning of March: The number of refugees coming from Turkey to Greece should drop significantly. If that happens, Merkel is prepared to take in set quotas of refugees from Turkey — even if not all EU member states agree to help.

Turkey has begun making efforts to combat the refugee crisis, but differently than Merkel had hoped. Rather that increasing patrols on the coast, where many refugees jump on boats heading for the nearby Greek islands, Ankara has closed the border to Syria.

Source: spiegel.de