It’s surprisingly easy to do along the Turkey–Syria border — good news for refugees and jihadis alike. BuzzFeed News’ Mike Giglio saw for himself just how simple the process was.
Syrian refugees in Sanliurfa, Turkey.
Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
SANLIURFA, Turkey — Mustafa, a 23-year-old Syrian living near the border in Turkey, makes his living selling fake IDs: a murky trade that helps refugees and jihadis alike pass in and out of his country's civil war.
For $2,000, he can make a forged Syrian passport that can pass as the real deal: "100% guarantee," he claims. Lower-quality versions cost $1,000 less. Syrians who lose their IDs in the confusion of the war often use the documents to enter Turkey as refugees, and sometimes to try to travel onward to Europe. The demand has spawned a cottage industry in the border region, flooding Turkey, home to more 1.5 million Syrian refugees, with fakes.
"There's a huge number of people who are in need," said Mustafa, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his identity from Turkish authorities. He met BuzzFeed News for an interview in Sanliurfa, a southern Turkish city awash in refugees, many of whom have come to him for help.
Syrians might lose their IDs "because they left very suddenly and in the scramble didn't get them or couldn't return home," said Ariane Rummery, a spokeswoman for the U.N.'s refugee agency. Most Syrians, she noted, do have some form of a national ID. Yet the scale of the refugee crisis keeps the need for fake ones high — and it grows as real IDs expire with no chance of renewal by the Assad regime, which takes a hostile view toward those who flee. Syrians in Turkey rely on fakes like Mustafa's to help them cross the border, register with Turkish authorities, and seek help from NGOs. Good fakes can also be used to travel to Europe or the Middle East, according to Mustafa and human traffickers based in Turkey. "These are humanitarian cases," Mustafa said.
The fakes can also be used to cross the Turkish border by the war's most dangerous combatants — including the foreign fighters fueling the insurgency of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Mustafa and the human traffickers said.
The prevalence of fake IDs, and the ease with which they can be obtained, highlight a difficulty of cracking down on ISIS's war machine — and of simply determining who's who amid the war's chaos.
Among Mustafa's offerings, the cheapest fake was a credit-card-like document in the mold of Syria's national ID that costs $150. Mustafa agreed to sell one to this journalist — despite some initial concern that he might be aiding a foreign jihadi who was just pretending to be a journalist — after securing a promise that it wouldn't be used for "something bad." He received a passport-style photo by instant message, and the ID was ready in a couple of days.
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Mustafa even threw in a driver's license free of charge.
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