Santiago Montag
In 2017, as
Syrian regime forces besieged the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the
southern outskirts of Damascus and food grew scarce, six Palestinian sisters
devised a unique strategy for surviving the civil war: a small garden. Filled
with flowers and vegetables, the garden provided sustenance, as well as
camouflage for the house within the camp’s narrow alleyways. But just as
importantly, it provided a much-needed affirmation of life, and a symbol of
their connection to the land.
“Those who
visited our garden said that we made a small paradise in the middle of the
war,” Sabah Abdul-Mahmoud, one of the sisters, said with pride. “Whoever is
able to preserve their house and neighborhood is able to preserve their
country.”
After their
family was displaced from Haifa in 1948, Sabah and her sisters Hanan, Amal,
Izdihar, Miso, and Umm Rami had lived in the same home in Yarmouk nearly their
entire lives. Miso, Sabah, Amal and Izdihar managed to stay there throughout
the war to save their home, seeing control of the camp shift between the Free
Syrian Army, Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, and the government forces of Bashar
Al-Assad.
Amal, the
youngest of the six at 51, told +972 that she and her sisters “deeply love
Palestine and are proud of their heritage,” but their true sense of belonging
is in Yarmouk. Now, in the wake of Assad’s downfall, they are among those
seeking to rebuild a future in the camp — which remains devastated from the
war.
According to the
Action Group for Palestinians in Syria (AGPS), approximately 60 percent of the
camp’s buildings were damaged or destroyed in the war, during which 4,300
Palestinian refugees were killed and over 3,000 detained. Before the war,
Yarmouk was home to 160,000 Palestinians; by 2018, a mere 200 had yet to flee
the camp. Now, thousands of residents have begun to make their slow and painful
return.
Walking through
its streets, between rows and rows of bombed-out buildings, littered with holes
from years of shelling, one cannot help but be reminded of images emanating
daily from the Gaza Strip. It is even possible to find human bones amid the
rubble: Bassim Haidar, a 72-year-old man, says that he often sees children
playing with them in the streets.
In the Al-Quds
school, now half-collapsed, a blackboard shows the last English class taught
there in 2012, when the camp’s inhabitants started fleeing for fear of getting
caught in the crossfire. Most of the Yarmouk’s schools had closed their doors
by 2015, during the Assad regime’s complete siege of the camp.
And yet, life
continues amid the ruins and the trauma. In the remnants of an old shop, Huda
Alazzeh, a 50-year-old Palestinian woman whose family came from Yaffa, set up
an improvised food stall when she returned in 2023, before Assad’s overthrow.
“We’re aware that our generation will never again see Yarmouk as it used to
be,” she told +972.
Her stall is one
of several businesses to recently reopen in the camp. In many of them, owners
use bed sheets instead of doors.
“We started to
return a few years ago — the first ones came in 2020. But there is still a lot
to do,” said Tareq, a 65-year-old neighbor of Huda, lighting a cigarette. “Life
here is unbearable, but we have nowhere else to go.”
Open wounds
Founded almost a
decade after the 1948 Nakba by displaced Palestinians, Yarmouk gradually became
a bustling suburb of Damascus and the largest Palestinian refugee camp in
Syria, with 160,000 registered Palestinians and 650,000 Syrian residents in its
heyday.
In the early
days of the Arab Spring, many Palestinians in Yarmouk and across Syria resolved
to remain neutral in the conflict — aware of their politically sensitive status
within the country, and fearing the violence and bloodshed that some had
experienced firsthand during the Lebanese civil war.
The first major
test of that neutrality came in June 2011, when the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a Palestinian armed group backed by
the Syrian regime, opened fire on camp residents who were protesting the Assad
government and the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights. The following
months would see sporadic protests in Yarmouk in support of the opposition,
although many Palestinian residents — along with several of the
non-regime-aligned political factions inside the camp — refused to take part.
August 2012 saw
the first major massacre in the camp, when two mortar rounds exploded in the
busy Al-Ja’una street, killing over 20 Palestinians, including two children,
according to the AGPS. Then came December 2012, when rebels from the Free
Syrian Army and Jabhat al-Nusra gained a foothold in the camp. On Dec. 16,
Syrian jets bombed the Abdul Qader al-Husseini Mosque in the heart of Yarmouk,
where some 600 civilians had sought refuge from the fighting, thinking they
wouldn’t be attacked.
Mohammed Amairi,
a 45-year-old Palestinian construction worker, spoke to +972 about the horror
of that day near the remains of the mosque. “Men, women, and children were
killed by Syrian government aerial bombing,” he recounted. “Heads and hands
were blown off everywhere.” Dozens were killed in the strike — after which
nearly 90 percent of the population fled the camp.
By the following
July, Assad’s forces had fully besieged Yarmouk, and for the remaining 20,000
residents, merely surviving became an ordeal. “We were alone,” Izdihar
recalled. During the siege in 2014, over 150 people reportedly perished in the
camp from hunger and lack of access to medicine. “For nine months, we survived
on leftovers, making bread with lentils,” Miso said, with tears in her eyes.
“If we found sugar, we made sweets and bread for the children, who were
suffering from jaundice,” Amal added.
In the first
months of 2014, one of the brief periods in which humanitarian aid from UNRWA
successfully entered the camp, the distribution of goods was often disrupted by
heavy gunfire and shelling. On March 23, 29 people were killed when a mortar
shell exploded next to a food parcel collection point. “They wanted to starve
us to death,” said Miso. “Many of the people who went to get medicine and food
never came back.”
Over the course
of the civil war, the camp became a base of operations for the Free Syrian
Army, before being taken over by Jabhat al-Nusra, and by 2015, the Islamic
State. But “the majority of the population of Yarmouk did not support any of
these armed groups,” explained Mohammed.
As these groups
vied for control of the camp, the six Palestinian sisters — whose home was
located in a no man’s land, on the borders of factional control — would sit in
their doorway overlooking the street to deter looters. “We stayed to guard our
house and those of our neighbors,” Miso told +972, with a determined
expression.
Shortly before
government forces retook Yarmouk in 2018, the Islamic State’s sharia court,
which had ordered women in the camp to wear a full veil, tried to force the
sisters to evacuate their home. “We resisted with sticks and shoes,” Amal
recounted, as her sisters laughed. “ISIS thought we were men, because we were
so strong.”
But the return
of regime control in Yarmouk would not bring an end to the suffering. As he
spoke to +972, Mohammed clutched a photo of his brother Ahmed Amairi, a doctor
who would regularly assist the wounded in Yarmouk during the first year of the
war, evacuating them to the Assad University Hospital. Regime forces violently
arrested him at his home in 2012 a few days after the Abdul Qader al-Husseini
Mosque massacre; Mohammed would have to wait for any news until Dec. 10, 2024,
when his brother’s body was found in the notorious Sednaya Prison, where he had
died of starvation.
Rebuilding the
future
Sitting on a
corner of the main avenue in Yarmouk, a group of Syrian and Palestinian
bricklayers gathered before starting their daily work at one of the buildings
in the area. “The buildings are badly destroyed, but we are doing everything we
can, we have a long way to go,” Omar, one of the workers, told +972.
Omar, who
emphasized his status as a Palestinian refugee (“that’s what it says on my
ID,”) worked alongside 57-year-old Tamer. The two were both part of a
Palestinian leftist group during the civil war in Lebanon. Exiled in 1987 from
Lebanese territory for their involvement in the war, they returned to the camp
in 2019, witnessing war on both sides of the border.
Work conditions
for laborers in Yarmouk — many of whom are below the age of 18 — are appalling.
Before the fall of the regime, they earned $4 a day to reconstruct buildings
destroyed in the war, with no personal protective equipment whatsoever. “Now
our pay is no more than 50,000 Syrian Pounds a day ($2),” explained Ahmed,
another worker.
A young worker
by the name of Abdullah said that he was detained several times by the Assad
regime before he fled Syria for Turkey and then Germany. Upon his return to
Syria in 2022, he was jailed at the notorious Branch 215 and Branch 235 (also
known as “Palestine Branch”) prisons for supposedly aiding the Free Syrian
Army. He was later transferred to Adra prison, where he was held until 2 a.m.
on Dec. 8, when rebels released him alongside the other prisoners.
After his
release, Abdullah returned to Yarmouk in hope of finding work and rebuilding
his life. He was joined there by his family who returned at the end of 2022 due
to the high cost of living in Damascus. Today, he and five relatives share a
home in Yarmouk with no windows, doors, or heating in the middle of the harsh
winter.
Indeed, most of
Yarmouk’s returning residents are part of the nearly 70 percent of Syrians
facing extreme poverty — a result of high inflation, the aftermath of the
COVID-19 pandemic and the deadly earthquake of February 2023, international
sanctions against the Assad regime, and other factors. As fuel prices rise,
most families in Yarmouk are unable to afford to stay warm, and hunger is a
ticking time bomb.
At the Palestine
Red Crescent Society (PRCS) — one of the few organizations providing
psychological support, education, and vocational training workshops to the
residents of Yarmouk — Fatima Sadiqi, a 30-year-old volunteer worker, described
the hardships faced by people returning to the camp.
“There has been
no water for six days, no electricity, and no food,” she told +972 on Dec. 23.
“We are looking for funds to provide solar panels and generators, so that there
is electricity at night. The camp sinks into darkness when the sun goes down.”
To make matters
worse, since Assad’s downfall, accusations of supporting the regime have run
rampant among those who have returned to Yarmouk — now between 5 and 10 percent
of the camp’s prewar population, according to PRCS estimates.
“During the
Assad regime, the [unpopulated and peripheral] areas [of the camp] were very
insecure, because smugglers and the thieves [who] were related to the
government [operated there],” said Abu Ali, a 48-year-old resident. After the
evacuation agreement in 2018, the camp remained officially closed and,
according to several residents, the government sent members of the army to loot
what remained of the houses. “Some people who stayed during the war are being
marked as Assad supporters and they are facing threats to be expelled from
their homes,” Abu Ali added.
Now, the rapid
rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist rebel group that has
become the dominant force in the country, has brought much uncertainty to the
camp.
Recently, the
new HTS-led government ordered all Palestinian factions in the camp to hand
over their weapons, primarily those that have had links to Assad. But it is not
yet clear whether the factions will oblige, and what this process will look
like.
Nor does the new
government in Syria, which Fatima carefully described as “neutral,” have any
concrete plan to help Yarmouk’s returning residents. “[They have to] rebuild
their homes with their own hands,” she added.
The people of
Yarmouk hope for a new beginning — but they share a common apprehension about
the future under an HTS. “We experienced firsthand what the Assad regime did,”
as Fatima put it, “but we also know the crimes of the Islamic State, [Jabhat]
Al Nusra, and the other factions.”
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