But as soon as they crossed the border, they were shocked.
Imagine snakes, scorpions and stupefying heat. And miles and miles of white tents spread across a gravel parking lot. This is what life is like in one of Turkey’s newest refugee camps, where the Haleets arrived on Sunday morning.
The Ceylanpinar camp, home to more than 12,000 Syrians who fled their country’s civil war, is in the Turkish equivalent of Siberia, a barren, dusty, rocky plain in southeastern Turkey, hours away from the nearest metropolitan area.
By 9 a.m., it is 100 degrees out here. By noon, maybe 115. There is so much dust in the air that the sky is white.
Every morning, buses unload as many as 400 new arrivals. Many have grit in their teeth, bloodshot eyes and greasy hair, signs of rapid flight from Syria’s inferno, where rebel fighters and government soldiers are steadily leveling the country’s biggest cities. To get out of Aleppo, where the fighting is especially vicious, Mr. Haleet said he used a number of cars, constantly switching, before he emerged into rebel territory and was safe. He never planned to go all the way to Turkey.
“I was just trying to get to Dana,” he said, mentioning a Syrian border town. But when he arrived, Dana was deserted and charred, so he pushed on.
Though the Turkish government, because of its asylum policies, prefers to call the 44,000 Syrians who have sought refuge in this country “guests,” the Ceylanpinar camp is surrounded by razor wire and is patrolled by armored personnel carriers.
Mr. Haleet, 30, a tailor, traditionally a very respectable profession in Syria, played down the ills and tried to cheer up his wife, 23, whose face appeared waxen.
“The Turks have been wonderful,” he said as they waited in line to be photographed.
He then flashed a tight smile and wiped his face. Sweat is not shy here. It pours.
Mr. Haleet tried to stay cheery through the fingerprinting process in the camp’s registration tent, which might have been reasonably cool except for three unusually large men standing in front of the air-conditioner, absorbing the cool, delicious air and blocking it from reaching others.
But when a minibus pulled up and it was finally time for the Haleets to be assigned to their temporary home, an 11-foot-by-13-foot tent, Ms. Haleet began to cry. It seemed that all the stress and sadness of fleeing — leaving behind her apartment, her parents, the only world she knew — had finally hit her.
“It doesn’t feel like there’s any meaning to life anymore,” she mumbled.
On their way to the tent, the sun glinting off the windows of the minibus, they passed row after row of white tents, an emerging city rising from the gravel floor. Countless lives were neatly warehoused. Children sat in the shade and played languidly with rocks. Laundry hung from ropes, going from sopping wet to bone dry within minutes.
The Haleets’ arrival at Tent No. 2, Ninth Neighborhood, immediately set off an argument. The man next door, who kept filling a plastic bucket with water and sloshing it over his head, had wanted that tent as an annex for his 10-member family.
“Asharra! Asharra!” he kept yelling, holding up his grubby hands. “Ten! Ten!” But nobody seemed to listen.
A small crowd gathered to greet the newcomers, who were far better dressed than anyone else in the Ninth Neighborhood.
“What do I do all day?” said Mehmed Aziz, a stocky factory worker and the father of three, who recently fled the Aleppo area. “I pick up one kid, run over to the air-conditioned lounge, freeze him for a few minutes, run him back, then grab another kid, run to the air-conditioned lounge. ...”
Then the conversation turned to snakes. Ms. Haleet grimaced. One man whipped out a cellphone to show a picture of a three-foot-long creature that had slithered into his tent a few nights ago. He said he promptly beat it to death with a stick.
But things could definitely have been worse. In many parts of the world, refugees fleeing war zones are lucky to get a plastic sheet. Here, there was good security, occasional electricity, three meals a day and a nursery school tent with Mickey Mouse painted on the walls.
The main problem, really, was the location, said Carol Batchelor, head of the United Nations refugee office in Turkey.
“And I don’t know why they chose it; you’ll have to ask them,” she said.
Turkish officials said they had chosen Ceylanpinar because it was flat government-owned land with some water nearby. The half-dozen or so other guest camps are now full.
But during the summer, Ceylanpinar is barely inhabitable. When Ms. Haleet parted the canvas flaps and peered inside her new home, her cheeks were stung by a saunalike heat. Tears were streaming down her face, and she slid behind her husband, almost as if she were hiding from something.
Mr. Haleet then mused out loud about going home, prompting several camp dwellers to speak up, and in a crowd like this, everyone was a poet.
“The heat here that burns is better than the fire of the tanks,” Mr. Aziz said.
Someone translated: “Don’t go back.”
But some people were going back. According to the Turkish government, nearly 28,000 Syrian guests have returned since last year. While the urban areas remain hotly contested, the rebel Free Syrian Army has seized large chunks of the countryside, providing some openings.
By midafternoon, the Haleets had made up their minds. The man next door would get his tent.
“We’re going back,” Mr. Haleet announced, a bit tentatively. “We’re just not used to this.”
They walked arm in arm to the camp manager’s office.
“I need a ride back to the border,” Mr. Haleet said, a little more confidence in his voice. “I’ll figure it out from there.”