Abstract:

Security is a multifaceted concept in today’s world. This concept involves political, economic, legal, sociological, psychological, technological, and geographical factors besides military security. For this reason, security has been interpreted based on the notions of risk and threat in recent studies, and the spiral relationship between these has often been emphasized. Over the last years, statistical and probability-based calculations have gained popularity, and risk studies have begun to be used commonly in several areas. This situation has especially paved the way for studies on security risk. This is because security risk is not a phenomenon which is procured or avoided from. In addition, it may not be possible to compensate for the damage it causes. The strategic location of Turkey has made it a target country besides gaining the status of a country of transit more every passing day. That has especially brought along an increase in the number of smuggling cases. While 13,896 operations were made about smuggling crimes in Turkey in 2010, this figure reached up to 17.776 in 2011 and to 22.466 in 2012. As a result of all these operations, 16.4 million litres of fuel oil, 241.000 mobile phones, 99.1 million boxes of cigarette, 1.378 tones of smuggled tea, and 2.438 immigrants were caught. Furthermore, the distribution of smuggling cases across Turkey has changed. In this regard, the province with the highest record of smuggling cases, which is 1771, is Hatay while Tunceli has the least number of records with 3. The other provinces exceeding one hundred are Adana with 1465 cases, Gaziantep with 1080 cases, and Mersin with 1015 cases. The most striking effect of the smuggling cases in Turkey is observed in immigration and terror incidents. Hence, due to the civil unrest experienced in neighboring countries, a sharp increase has been recorded in the number of illegal immigration incidents in Turkey located on the transportation route between source and target countries. Due to the increasing number of terror incidents since the mids of 1990 and the terror organization’s hampering the transportation serving for border trade, the population living in the border provinces and engaged in border trade began to go out of business because of security concerns. For this reason, border security and border security planning have become highly important. In the present study, it is aimed to carry out a security risk analysis on Hatay - Syria border. In this analysis, border violations and smuggling cases were taken into account. Thus, secure and insecure points were determined on the border to prevent illegal entry. Hatay’s position in the top 20 in terms of the number of the cases of smuggling through different ways in 2012 made this study necessary. This study is also very important for being carried out in a location where the neighbourhood relations between Turkey and Syria have become tense, and smuggling cases are intensively observed. The study area is in southern Turkey and covers a 10 km-area in the Hatay side of the Hatay-Syria border. This area was found to be within the second-degree land military forbidden zone defined in the Article 8 of the Law on “Military Forbidden Zones and Security Zones” dated 1981 and numbered 2565. The study area has an area of 1736 km² and is administratively located within the borders of Reyhanlı, Hassa, and Yayladağı districts. In the study area, there are 2 border gates: Cilvegözü (Reyhanlı) and Yayladağı. Furthermore, there are nearly 64 police stations on the border route. In the present study, Turkey’s 1/25.000 scaled topographic map sheets prepared by the Command of Mapping were used as the main materials. Based on these maps, the geomorphology, slope index, slope roughness, and slope position factor maps and the maps showing the distance to rivers and roads were drawn and the spatial data about the mentioned area (e.g. settlement areas, hills) were obtained. Through remote sensing tec

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