Palestinian Refugees in Syria See Little Hope — Even After Assad

In Yarmouk to get from one house to another you walk through bombed-out holes in demolished cement walls Mountains of rubble and mounds of trash dot the landscape which locals climb over to get from one street to the next To walk through this ghost town is to be haunted by spirits of the dead as well as by packs of hungry and sometimes rabid dogs There is no longer as much fighting in the streets in this refugee camp outside Damascus but it doesn t feel like a new Syria here where a diaspora public of Palestinians displaced over decades struggles to survive On paper the prospects for Syria have vastly improved over the last six months The country seems poised for an economic recovery after years of war and a half-century of rule by the Assad dynasty On December Day Zero as various call it in Syria Hay at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS forces chased Bashar al-Assad out of the country ending an era of brutal dictatorship In February the European Union began easing sanctions against Syria then lifted them entirely Last month in a surprise move prior to meeting in Saudi Arabia with Syrian Interim President Ahmed al-Shara President Donald Trump disclosed his plan to lift U S sanctions that have been leveled against Syria since Jimmy Carter was president Trump praised al-Shara who fought against the United States in Iraq and was once imprisoned in Abu Ghraib as a young attractive guy and a tough guy Strong past Very strong past Fighter News of the end of Syrian sanctions have been welcomed across the aisle in Washington and from Brussels to Ankara to Damascus Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani thanked the EU for its decision Former Bernie Sanders foreign approach adviser Matt Duss announced Trump s decision was the right move which will aid desperately needed humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Syria The Economist s article about the euphoria of the news is titled One happy Damascus People in Syria are certainly hopeful A banker in Syria who spoke to Reuters described the lifting of sanctions as too good to be true and a soap factory owner in Aleppo rushed to the square as soon as she heard the news These sanctions were imposed on Assad but now that Syria has been liberated there will be a positive impact on industry it ll boost the financial market and encourage people to return she notified AFP But what are the odds that what benefits investors will benefit the average person living in Syria After all as United Nations Rise not long ago warned nine out of Syrians are living in poverty and one in four is jobless The review ominously added that to per cent of children aged six to are not attending school and million people have lost their jobs and billion was lost during the war And then there s the issue of the people among Syria s greater part marginalized residents Palestinian refugees whose families have been impoverished for decades No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk To understand what this period of enormous transition means for them The Intercept spent a week in the Yarmouk refugee camp and observed the lives of three residents who lived or hailed from there in a loose informal family Salwa a single young woman barely out of adolescence herself who is responsible for a brood of children she didn t birth Bilal a young man who wants to build houses but can only find work dealing hash inconsistently and Abu Tarek an HTS soldier positioned to thrive in post-Assad Syria All of their names have been altered to protect them from retaliation Salwa has lived in Syria her entire life Her family is originally from Haifa where she declares I will return the moment it is practicable But she s veritably never been to Palestine Home for now is a bombed-out building in Yarmouk where she is sit al beit or lady of the house It is her house she explains because she is the person supporting her family financially After her parents left their daughters Salwa located herself responsible for two younger sisters ages and She also cares for a -year-old and a -year-old whose mom dropped them off a sparse months ago when she could no longer take care of them Why did their mother leave them Maybe it is drugs trauma a man or all three Salwa says Salwa wears a hijab but only outside of her home The only male guests who come over are related to her anyways and they unfailingly ask Is everyone decent before entering This evening Salwa has sparked up a heater meant to be powered by gas But now it s fueled by burning plastic with coals burning precariously on top for shai tea She has also set up a perilous bank of power strips so everyone can charge their devices during the inadequate hours of nightly state-supplied electricity She then winds down with a nargileh hookah to her lips as visitors come over to pass the time They include her -year-old uncle Bilal more like her big brother and two friends including Heba who has Down syndrome Salwa her -year-old sister in the hat and Heba eat the meal to celebrate Salwa s cousin Abu Tarek an HTS fighter who didn t show up because he was working late Photo Afeef Nessouli The Intercept Heba at once starts asking the men in the room questions about what what they like and dislike sometimes teasing them She flirts unabashedly She enjoys listening to Shami Arabic music and tonight she plays it loudly while showing off her dance moves She says she loves to dance and makes everyone clap for her The younger children jump up and down by her legs as she twirls with a sash around her waist A woman dancing in a room of men related or not wouldn t have been appropriate during the more intense skirmishes in years past when groups of men in Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS might be too close to hear the music playing The combat is done but signs of those days of fighting are never far away On one of the sparse walls still left standing of a partly destroyed building a minimal hundred feet away graffiti reads la ilaha illAllah There is no God but God It s a foundational Islamic declaration and common Arabic phrase declared often in Syria But these words are spray-painted in black and drawn inside a black circle conveying that fighters and supporters of the Islamic State group are in the neighborhood A limited doors down is another ominous tag It belongs to another Islamist militia Jabhat al-Nusra whose roots are from Al Qaeda Over the last decade Nusra rebranded to Hay at Tahrir al-Sham the main rebel force that opposed and then pushed Assad s regime out and took over the country The graffiti doesn t faze Salwa ISIS she says was an enemy to the greater part people anywhere but she doesn t mind an Islamist regime in theory That mentioned she thinks it is going to be tough to get Syrian women to stop wearing skirts It s a welcome change from the Assad regime No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk Salwa says Life is hell Women especially were not safe under Assad She says she knows a large number of girls who were harassed raped and even murdered If a soldier demanded you even if you were married or he was married he could do whatever he required but she adds pointedly I am a girl who screams and fights Until Assad was gone she was afraid to speak of that violence and prohibited even from posting pictures of the dilapidation she lived in for fear of being disappeared Now she says it is fine to take pictures in Yarmouk I don t feel afraid like I did before adi it s OK On another night Salwa and a friend are cooking dinner in her makeshift kitchen the kind of chore they enjoy doing together like going to the domain to find deals on baby formula Salwa says she worked at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East for two months straight in recent months where she cleaned made coffee and helped with odd jobs She made the equivalent of about in total which was good money about times the average wage But she hasn t been able to get more work there and with UNRWA s future in doubt she is trying to ration the money Sometimes her parents send her and her sisters several cash but not much And sometimes their cousins or aunties help them out too But day in and day out it is Salwa who must feed at least six mouths often more On this windy night in late January when the cold air whips inside through the porous walls Salwa decides to make waraq al anab or stuffed grape leaves and invite specific family over Her aunt is visiting from Lebanon with her cousin and of syllabus her two sisters two wards and two friends from down the road are helping cook and enjoy the meal There is also supposed to be a guest of honor Salwa s cousin Abu Tarek an HTS fighter though he never evidenced up because he was working late Related In Gaza Famine Is the Weapon and So Is Aid Salwa uses a plastic UNRWA sign as a tablecloth on the floor of the living room and starts piling plates and pita bread on top of the spread Electricity and water are unstable but fresh food is usually available Her situation she acknowledges is much better than what is happening in Gaza Blockades are hell those were the worst times she explains thinking back to her childhood when food was harder to get When conversation turns to Gaza a visiting cousin says Thank God for this food Though she s happy Assad is gone Salwa noted they are still struggling to survive She s not feeling the optimism that others feel for Syria I don t definitely have hope this country will be free Salwa explains She says she lost hope in any leaders doing right by them certainly not Donald Trump and that she and the girls will allegedly remain scraping by Palestinians are dependably forgotten she announced Yarmouk was founded in about a decade after the Nakba first pushed Palestinians off their land At just kilometers Yarmouk was once home to approximately people in according to UNWRA making it the largest Palestine Refugee population in Syria and an critical commercial hub Long before it became a central site of the Syrian civil war with its refugee population held hostage as a pawn in battles between Syrian and foreign adversaries it was a thriving place sometimes referred to as a suburb of Damascus Before it was rubble the camp was teeming with buildings business and schools inhabited by Palestinian families in exile Unlike in Egypt Lebanon and occupied Palestine a Syrian law passed in that granted Palestinian refugees almost the same rights as Syrian nationals particularly in the areas of employment agreement and military institution In the Ba ath Party grabbed power in a military coup Palestinians in Yarmouk launched organisations to resist the Israeli occupation of their homeland the BBC announced Thousands of youths joined newly established groups like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Over the decades young members of these groups died fighting including when Israel invaded Lebanon in In the s Yarmouk was the home of various Palestinian movements including branches of the Yasser Arafat-led Fatah party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization Hamas s political leader Khaled Meshaal also lived in Yarmouk the BBC revealed until he refused to endorse President Bashar al-Assad s handling of the uprising against his rule From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in Yarmouk was a hotly contested battle site within and beyond Syria In July Yarmouk was cut off from United Nations aid and its population dwindled to around people The blockade The Guardian recounted in led to acute shortages of food medicines and other essentials The Free Syrian Army the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have all fought in and around Yarmouk thinning out its population leveling the greater part of its buildings causing outbreaks of polio and at times driving people to eat animal feed Meanwhile the Assad regime and its proxy force Hezbollah also went to war against Yarmouk In a description Yarmouk under siege a horror story of war crimes starvation and death Amnesty International director of the Middle East and North Africa operation Philip Luther wrote Civilians of Yarmouk are being treated like pawns in a deadly meeting in which they have no control Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk Luther wrote with Amnesty accusing the Assad regime of withholding food and electricity as war crimes A decade later images of demolished Gaza are starting to look like Yarmouk except Yarmouk has fewer people and life left in it Even more of its structures are destroyed than in Gaza In February the number of people in Yarmouk was approximately with percent being Palestinian refugees according to UNRWA Brother I am thinking of going back to the dark side and selling hashish Bilal says out loud to his cousin Bilal is a -year-old Palestinian Syrian His teeth protrude when he smiles and he smiles a lot He is usually covered in dust and dependably wearing a baseball hat His main line of work is repairing houses Given the destruction of bulk of them in Yarmouk there should be no shortage of work Bilal a -year-old Palestinian Syrian finds works laborious to come by Photo Afeef Nessouli The Intercept Yet even when he does work on houses money is hard to come by Sometimes he works a job and doesn t get paid at all And so Bilal sometimes sells hash It doesn t pay well and it s dangerous But it s easy work and his friends had sources who could hook him up The obstacle is that selling hashish is not lucrative or risk-free now that a theocratic group runs the ruling body Bilal sleeps at his niece Salwa s house as a means of protection for the girls Just a scant months before the fall of Assad he explains he and a Syrian friend Oussama had been imprisoned It wasn t for hash They accused us of killing Assef Shawkat Bilal says At the time of his death Shakwat was the Syrian intelligence chief and deputy defense minister he also happened to be Assad s brother-in-law Shawkat was killed in July in a Damascus bomb attack allegedly organized by the Free Syrian Army coalition Incredibly Bilal points out he and Oussama were taken into custody and accused of having been -year-old assassins nearly years later Then again he notes innocent boys and men from Sunni communities were routinely accused of terrorism under Assad on absurd charges He and his friend say they were held in the notorious Mazzeh Jaweya prison a military airport with Air Force intelligence barracks in Damascus They remained in custody for several months before the revolution toppled the regime with shocking speed on December The night before Assad fled the country Bilal says he and his friend were among a group of prisoners moved to an execution room Military officers he recalls seemed panicked and were rushing to get rid of them that night for several reason At the time he didn t know why I remember they moved us around p m into the new room and we waited and waited he tells The Intercept Oussama who stands around feet tall with a heavy build explains that as they were led to the chamber he was just preparing myself to die really But by a m both men were free The Assad regime had fallen Related Searching for Justice and the Missing in the New Syria As frightening as their experiences were at Mazzeh Jaweya Bilal and Oussama say that there was a kind of incarceration which Syrians feared even more the secret prisons hidden everywhere Even by the standards of their abduction these black-site prisons made the young men feel like the regime and its army would justify a man s abduction for any reason they drummed up and no one would ever know where they had been disappeared One of those secret prisons Bilal and Oussama believe was in the basement of a house that a friend bought after the regime fell Bilal has been helping on the repairs just a scant kilometers from Yarmouk The new owner mentioned that the house s basement had been used to detain people who passed through a military checkpoint up the road He d heard stories that it was cramped and that people could be held without charge sometimes for months The Intercept accompanied Bilal and Oussama to the multi-level house then down the stairs into the basement The heavy metal door orange with rust screeches when opened At eye level a small rectangular slot with a sliding cover could allow a guard on the outside to peer in and bark orders Behind it a corridor leads to several square rooms The fetid air is thick with the smells of burned plastic trash and human waste The floors are stained from an unknown liquid but had in the last few days been cleaned In one corner a hole in the floor had served as a toilet In three of the rooms the walls are high near the ceiling ground-level windows are covered with wavy bars preventing anyone from getting in or out One dark room in the middle has no windows at all Bilal and Oussama leave the basement prison in silence and lock the door behind them Yes thank God the bastard fell Bilal exclaims clearly shaken Inside a home just a limited kilometers from Yarmouk above what is held to have been a secret prison Photo Afeef Nessouli The Intercept Still he admits he is also afraid of HTS Shortly after he and Oussama exit the house a hash dealer meets up with them to show them selected product The three boys roll up a scant joints sipped tea and talk through the afternoon about money and how they could earn a few This is harder than it used to be Bilal explains pointing to the hashish It wasn t legal to be a dealer under Assad but it is quite a different thing to be a dealer under a new Islamist regime Despite any rosy outlooks from Western economists Bilal says that now the economic activity is worse than it used to be and there is no work no nothing It is so frustrating It will be more dangerous to sell or even smoke hash now than it was before one of his friends agrees The new regime is very strict even though you can smoke with several of the guys who claim to be religious the other chimes in giggling It isn t forbidden in Islam just looked down upon he clarifies A night later a group of Alawites a minority group of Syrians from which the Assads hailed were raided in a neighborhood not too far away from where they d been smoking They were allegedly dealing hash Several were killed as HTS soldiers ambushed them others were allegedly arrested In Yarmouk the graffiti announcing the presence of groups like ISIS or Nusra were expressions of violent resistance to the Assad regime But it s a different piece of graffiti Syrians cite as the beginning of the revolution-turned-civil war It s known as the Dara a graffiti matter Dara a is a small largely agricultural region in southwestern Syria near the borders of Jordan and Israel In as Ahmed Masri a Syrian man now living in the United States recounted CNN graffiti appeared in the town while he was a teenager At a school in town someone had written on the wall It s your turn now Professional referring to Assad the ophthalmologist Masri commented Related A Syria for All Its People Two Books on an Unnecessary War They needed to arrest someone Masri narrated CNN So they started to gather the names written on the walls names students wrote years ago and arrested those who were under years old The boys were held beaten had fingernails removed and were tortured for weeks Although eventually distributed neighborhood backing for them increased resistance which in turn increased Assad s punishment of Dara a Eventually particular of the boys joined the Free Syrian Army which fought the Assadists The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights published last year that there were people whose death has been verified over the years since the Dara a graffiti development an event often considered to have triggered the Syrian civil war Here is where it started graffiti in Daraa Photo Afeef Nessouli The Intercept The statement was able to verify of those people since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution by name and included more than civilians who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad s regime During this same time as Assad monopolized industry and cut off aid and commerce to places like Yarmouk dissidents were purged from official employment and pushed into the informal economic system This especially affected Palestinians perceived to be at the margins of society anyway and aligned with resistance movements Assad identified threatening For people who had relied upon steady jobs in ruling body or industry the only available work was often only selling drugs making crude weapons or peddling to source black-market necessities like food Context change-fueled drought which resulted in or percent reductions in water supply in different regions of Syria led to more chaos and desperation and allowed another weapon at Assad s disposal in controlling the scarce water information available to a thirsty war-torn population By Day Zero last December the relief from the House of Assad falling was palpable across Syria after so a great number of years of torture And yet for so several who lost so much apart from the freedom from being tortured or disappeared there has been little material change When we would go out it would be with hunting rifles seizing weapons from Assad s soldiers Abu Tarek recalls between alternate sips from a cigarette and a cup of mint tea Abu Tarek is a -year-old Palestinian HTS fighter who grew up in Yarmouk He wears HTS fatigues and a HTS cap backward he has a thick beard and only one tooth He smiles often inserts the appreciation for God into nearly every sentence he speaks and is never without a cigarette He is both Bilal s and Salwa s cousin and is visiting from Idlib a city in northwestern Syria where he has been a rebel for years Now he s working with the new regime The dinner Salwa was cooking in Yarmouk was supposed to be because Abu Tarek was in town and in his honor But instead of coming over to eat with everyone he was stuck at work planning the logistics of a forthcoming military camp The operation of taking down the Assad regime he explains was planned by HTS for a long time but we were waiting for Day Zero to move Abu Tarek had finished his mandatory function in Assad s military around years ago when the civil war began Seeing what happened in Dara a particularly the torture of children led him to take up arms against the regime he says He and specific of his Palestinian-Syrian friends in Yarmouk joined rebel groups that eventually fed into the Free Syrian Army They would take the rifles and weapons they already had at home from their conscription to secretly ambush and kill Assad s men then steal their weapons to beef up their arsenal Bashar al-Assad s regime drained the country of its wealth Restoring it will not be a small task Eventually Abu Tarek explains the fighters he was working alongside with agreed that the Islamist militia called Jabhat al-Nusra seemed cleaner and more organized than the FSA It has been pivotal to Abu Tarek a devout Muslim that he fight for a Syria that would be governed by Sharia law because he believes that system would guarantee justice It is the majority key thing he says that Syria is guided by the law of God When Abu Tarek s son was just days old he took him to get vaccinated when a shell hit the clinic His baby was pulled out of rubble but remained unresponsive Abu Tarek was distraught and sure that his son had been killed In grief he ascertained a shoebox that fit his tiny body then read aloud prayers He remembered looking down when his son miraculously took a breath Abu Tarek bowed his head and right away recited scriptures from the Quran to give thanks to the almighty who to him had just saved his baby s life He lives with his wife and three children in a small apartment in Idlib in Killi a refugee camp built from the donations of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza The buildings in his neighborhood sit atop a hill overlooking the city center and are a striking turquoise as colorful as Yarmouk is gray Back when he lived in Yarmouk the camp had been nearly destroyed by skirmishes between various rebel groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra as well by huge battles against the Assad regime By an agreement was reached between rebels and Assad s regime to evacuate fighters like him from Yarmouk to the rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest of Syria We had to surrender and take buses up to the north he recalls At the time HTS controlled Idlib with around fighters He was drawn to the group because HTS never treated Syrian-Palestinians differently HTS controlled boundary crossings with Turkey along with swaths of land rich in petroleum providing the group with major income Since Abu Tarek and his family have stayed in Idlib which is ruled as an Islamic caliphate The roads are barely paved and there are HTS soldiers everywhere He has been lucky to rise the ranks he says because it has lifted him out of extremely dire conditions Areas within the Idlib province are still being developed Abu Tarek explains and unlike under the Assad regime it s happening under a Sharia society A new mall he frequents in Al-Dana has separate entrances for women and men and restaurants with private areas where women in niqabs can eat without covering their face After Assad fled to Russia Abu Tarek and other internally displaced people suddenly had new freedom to move about the country He had been restricted to an area of about kilometers during the latter part of the civil war and it had been eight years since he had seen his parents Related Israel Exploits Assad s Fall to Expand Into Syria Abu Tarek believes even as a Palestinian Syrian that the majority of vital thing right now to deal with is Syria One day God will open a path to liberate Palestine just like he did for us in Syria he noted Even as Israel illegally occupies large parts of Syria Abu Tarek believes the new Syrian army could not engage Israel in a fresh war after coming out of a -year revolution It would be pure foolishness Al-Shara the interim Syrian president who was also the leader of HTS has previously commented that he does not want conflict with Israel Now Abu Tarek says the biggest focus is building a country from scratch Bashar al-Assad s regime drained the country of its wealth Restoring it will not be a small task Having taken up arms on the winning side might work out well financially for Abu Tarek so far it has certainly worked out better for him than for Salwa or Bilal Lately he and his family have moved to an apartment in Damascus subsidized by the new governing body He is being paid around a month for directing logistics at a military training camp in the capital about times the average wage The hope is for one united Syria he says governed by Islamic law no more no less whatever Islam prescribes should apply to all of us on the same level As for the business activity he explains I know that our new leaders God bless them are working hard to solve the problems everyday people have right now Is post-Assad Syria ascendant Even as war spreads in the region with Israeli and Iranian missiles spanning its skies the consensus amongst western leaders seems to be that Syria s future is prosperous and bright But what about for its million residents Things are certainly not very bright right now for the million Alawites the religious minority from which the Assads hailed An ongoing series of mass killings of Alawites has occurred in Syria since December at the hands of the new executive s fighters More than people were killed in a spate of massacres in March alone Numerous Alawites have fled to neighboring Lebanon One Alawite man communicated The Intercept that al-Shara and his terrorists want us dead and they have now absolutely destroyed access to the commercial sector for Alawites He presumed there was no work for his people and was sheltering in a mosque on the Lebanese territory line town of Massoudiyeh Alawites need help so badly he noted We would take it from Israel even For the more than thousand Palestinians in Syria the forecast is mixed For those who joined HTS to take up arms against Assad like Abu Tarek they may stand a chance of enjoying the spoils of war and key roles in forging the nation s new leadership For those like Bilal and Oussama who have scant work prospects except for dealing hash and day laboring their odds seem dim For countless of the Palestinians of Yarmouk now scattered across Syria who depended on UNRWA as an economic engine prospects seem precarious at best especially as U S funding for UNRWA has been frozen since the Biden administration In Yarmouk life goes on much as it has People pass between bombed-out walls to share what little they have Salwa cooks for her ragtag brood Reporter Afeef Nessouli shares a meal honoring Abu Tarek with Salwa s family Photo Afeef Nessouli The Intercept Lifting the sanctions on Syria is a very good thing of program Salwa says in a voice memo But for Syria to raise Trump s voice and so on I do not like this at all she adds because Trump had imposed sanctions on us during his term he is the one who imposed the wars on us and to raise his picture in Arab countries as if this didn t happen I do not like this at all Even if they rebuild all of Syria she says Yarmouk will remain destroyed The post Palestinian Refugees in Syria See Little Hope Even After Assad appeared first on The Intercept