The Istanbul governorship launched a plan to determine the addresses of Syrian residents in the province to increase the efficiency of public services targeting the refugee community.
Conducted between the dates of Nov. 15 and Nov. 27, the governorship checked 8,309 addresses of the 27,625 Syrian population under temporary protection in 17 districts during the first phase of the process. The second phase of the checks started on Dec. 9 in 22 districts.
According to the statement released by the governorship, the update and address checks are crucial for the efficiency of public services in all sectors, including public security, public health, education and employment, as well as infrastructure. They are also crucial for facilitating efficiency in the works of governmental institutions. The statement also reiterated that the law requires updated addresses for the refugees on the Directorate General of Migration Management's (DGMM) Migration-net (GÖÇNET) and its Central Population Management System (MERNİS) databases.
The statement also added that the plan to update the addresses will continue.
Turkey is home to some 4.5 million Syrian migrants who fled the civil war, which has been ongoing since 2011 when Bashar Assad's regime brutally repressed peaceful calls for democracy.
The Istanbul governorate announced in July that Syrian refugees without registration with authorities or registered elsewhere in Turkey would be sent back to the Turkish provinces they arrived from as the refugee population in Turkey's most populated city swells. In a statement in July, the governorate announced that there were 1,069,860 registered foreigners in Istanbul, made up of 522,381 foreigners with residence permits and 547,479 Syrians under temporary protection status.
This constitutes one-fifteenth of the population of Istanbul's economic and cultural population as of December 2018, according to Turkish Statistical Institute (Turkstat) figures, putting the megacity's population at 15,029,231.
