A group affiliated with al-Qaida controls the road leading south into Syria from the key Kilis border crossing on the front line of the debacle that Turkey's Syria policy has become.
For more than a year, Turkey turned a blind eye as thousands of foreign volunteers from across the Muslim world streamed through the country en route to fight alongside Syria's rebels, perhaps calculating that the fighters would help accelerate President Bashar Assad's demise.
Now the extremists whose ranks the foreigners swelled are gaining ascendancy across northern Syria, putting al-Qaida on NATO's borders for the first time, raising fears of cross-border attacks and exposing how terribly Turkey's efforts to bring about Assad's removal have gone awry.