Turkish President Erdoğan's safe zone plan in Syria

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on September 24 at the UN General Assembly that Turkey intends to create a "peace corridor 480 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep" in the northern part of Syria near the Turkish border. Erdoğan also said that Turkey plans to provide housing for two million Syrians in this "safe zone."

According to the plan, settlements to accommodate one million Syrians would be constructed. The plan details the creation of 140 villages designed for a population of 5,000 people each, and 10 districts with a capacity of 30,000 each in the designated safe zone next to the Turkish border in northern Syria.

Each village in the safe zone in would have one thousand 100-square-foot homes, each on a 350-square-meter lot. There would be two mosques, two schools with 16 classrooms each, and a stable, youth center, indoor sports facility, and management center for each village as well. Every house in the village would be given 1,000 square meters of land to farm.

As for the districts planned, each is planned to consist of 6,000 apartments with 100 square meters of living space on average. There would be a central mosque and 10 neighborhood mosques, as well as a high school and eight schools with 16 classrooms each. Each district would include two indoor sports facilities, five youth centers, one small stadium, four football fields, and social facilities. A university, 10-bed hospitals in eight districts along with 200-bed hospitals in 2 districts, a small industrial zone, and other structures providing technical infrastructure for all the settlements were also part of the plan.

One village settlement would take up 590,000 square meters (146 acres), for a combined total of 82.6 million square meters (20,411 acres) for 140 villages. One district would take up one million square meters (247 acres), resulting in a total of 10 million square meters (2,470 acres) across 10 districts. Overall, the settlements would cover a land area of 92.6 million square meters (22,882 acres). In addition, 140 square meters (34,595 acres) of land would be reserved for agriculture.

In total, 200,000 housing units would be created with foreign funding. According to the announcement, the cost of construction for the settlement of 1 million people would be about 150 billion lira (26.6 billion dollars). If the population rises to two million in the future, this cost would double.