Syria’s war has started to shake Turkey badly

According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, the number of Syrians that have come to Turkey since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 has reached 1.385 million. This is a figure close to 2 percent of Turkey’s population.

When the number reached 65,000 in 2012, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said that if the number reached the 100,000-person threshold, security zones could be established on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.

Now the figure is more than 13 times that critical threshold Davutoğlu mentioned and the government is after temporary solutions to establish special camps for Syrian beggars that have set up shop on the streets of Turkey’s urban areas. Syrian beggars are particularly a problem for touristic districts of Istanbul, but it’s not only beggars: The number of Syrians in the city of 14 million is estimated at 330,000 by the Interior Ministry.

In the southern province of Kahramanmaraş, where the first street fights between locals and Syrian refugees started three weeks ago (which were later repeated in some other cities near the Syrian border), the number of refugees is 49,000, more than 10 percent of the city’s population of 420,000.

Ercan Taştekin, a security expert, was quoted by the Turkish press as saying the government should consider employing Syrian police officers. He might have a point; there might be anyone from agents of President Bashar al-Assad’s Baath regime in Damascus to agents of the Sunni radical Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), or simply the Islamic State (IS) as they started calling themselves recently, among the refugees.

And the IS does not just have agents in Turkey, there are now Turkish supporters of the organization in the...