‘We Don't Stay in Camps’ is an ethnographic documentary profiling the 2013-2014 arrival of Syrian street beggars in Istanbul, Turkey. Fallout from the ongoing Syrian civil war has displaced upwards of three million refugees into Turkey alone. Though international organisations, in concert with the Turkish government, have established refugee camps on the Syrian-Turkish border, overcrowding has pushed Syrians further west, across all of Anatolia.

By the winter of early 2014, large numbers of families suddenly appeared on the streets of central Istanbul, over a thousand kilometres from the Syrian border. In order to understand the developing situation, Aleppo native Yahya Al-Abdullah and I set out to speak to the newly arrived refugees, initially to gather interviews to raise awareness through collaborative research.
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Over three months, we sat and spoke with dozens of men, women and children. With Yahya having lived in Aleppo for most of his life, he immediately recognised the identity of the majority of Istanbul’s beggars as native Syrian Domari.

A distinct ethnicity and nomadic Kurdish/Turkic community, Syria's Domari (or Kurbaht) are amongst the country's poorest people. Traditionally following the harvest season, the Domari travel in large families, passing from village to village, playing music and providing entertainment at weddings in exchange for food and supplies for the winter - a social and economic pattern that has existed for centuries. In dense urban environments like Aleppo and Damascus, they are known to sell basic wares and benefit from zakat (alms giving) around mosques and other holy places.
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Like millions of others, the Domari were forced to leave Syria as the country spiralled out of control, in a war that has killed over half a million people and displaced over 12 million. After we commenced filming, it became clear that almost all the Syrians we spoke with were newly arrived in Istanbul on false pretences or against their will - having been ‘told’ to make the arduous journey overland, with promises of comfort, safety and job security.

What awaited them, however, was forced street begging in central Istanbul, and communal living in rundown slums that were described as ‘hotels’ run at exorbitant daily rates by apparent human traffickers. Yahya was shocked to realise that almost everyone we spoke to hinted at, or specifically testified to being forced to beg in a city they had never imagined they would ever visit.
After a summer of filming, what emerged was contrary to the simplistic narrative of Istanbul's new arrivals. Not the product of a failing humanitarian response, Istanbul's Syrian beggars are the result of an extremely vulnerable community disoriented by war, forced to flee from their homes and seemingly exploited by an unseen minority for financial gain.

'We Don't Stay in Camps' preceded the wider Syrian refugee crisis which would hit Europe the following summer of 2015. The film attempts to show both the extreme complexity of the crisis and its demographics, whilst trying to humanise a largely faceless catastrophe of unimaginable proportion.

​Yahya Al-Abdullah is a Paris based Syrian activist and PhD candidate at The School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS). Max Harwood is an ethnographic filmmaker and PhD in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. They met in Syria in 2010.
Copyright Savage Mind Films 2014. Remastered April 2018.