“We have already been through everything: the Nakba [éxodo] from 1948; the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973… More than 13 years of conflict in Syria. What else can happen to us?”, shakes his head Ahmed Shaabi, 86, at the devastated landscape of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, south of Damascus, where he has spent almost his entire existence. He arrived in Syria when he was barely 10 years old, expelled from the north of Galilee by the advance of the troops of the newly created State of Israel. “We are used to losing,” admits this retired carpenter with a look of resignation, as he warms himself in the late afternoon sun next to a wall with his neighbor Amir Abduljair, 84, also originally from the north of pre-war Palestine. partition approved by the UN in 1947. They are some of the 6,000 inhabitants who still resist, in the midst of ruin and abandonment, in the peripheral enclave, which once welcomed more than 150,000 Palestinians.
“Actually, no one knows what is going to happen with the new Syrian government,” confesses Abduljair, who still offers himself as an electrician to his few neighbors, when the sunset freezes the afternoon among the broken buildings among the rubble of Yarmouk. Beside him, the youngest of the trio, former accountant Mohamed Said Naas, 75, smokes incessantly in silence, a cap pulled over his head with the legend in English: “I am here.”
“The Palestinian factions handed over their weapons and disappeared when the militias from northern Syria entered the camp,” Shaabi reveals. Hamas Islamists were already allies of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), but many left for the Gaza Strip; The nationalists of Fatah, at odds with the Assad family for half a century, have long since abandoned Syria, and the leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who cooperated closely with the regime, appear to have been swallowed by the earth.
Yarmouk was first besieged in 2013, two years after the start of the conflict, when most Palestinians had already moved to other areas of the capital or left the country because of the war. The insurgent forces immediately took over the refugee camp. Then the Islamic State became strong in its streets and evicted the Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate from which the HTS commanders come, by force of arms. Between 2015 and 2018, government aviation and artillery turned Yarmouk into a war zone by dropping barrel bombs and firing howitzers. Famine, disease and misery decimated the few who remained.
About half a million Palestinians lived in Syria before the conflict, within the diaspora of more than five million formally registered by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. Faced with the restrictions they suffer in other countries, such as Lebanon, the heirs of the Nakba (literally catastrophe, in Arabic) have almost the same rights in Syria, except for nationality and voting, as holders of citizenship.
Yarmouk was one of the largest refugee camps in the Middle East. It went from a provisional tent camp in 1950 to a residential and commercial district in the south of the capital 20 years later. Until the war between opposition forces and the troops of the Assad regime forced the exodus of more than five million civilians from Syria, many of whom were grouped in huge reception centers in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon near the border of your country.
After more than a decade of destruction, oblivion has taken over the Palestinian enclave. “Even the cemeteries have been razed, we have nowhere to lie dead,” laments Shaabi. Dozens of Palestinians who fled the Syrian war are returning to Damascus, for the first time in the last 12 years, after the flight of Assad to recover the graves of their ancestors and reoccupy their homes, if they are still standing and have means to rehabilitate them.
In a lot strewn with rubble that serves as a central square, some minibuses (collective taxis) transport residents from the center who return at dusk. They come loaded with bags. In Yarmouk there are hardly any shops or public services. It is difficult to see any Palestinian flag, but those of the new Syria are not many either. All you can see is a ghost town.
“The war had already emptied Yarmouk,” explains municipal official Saaded Abdulai, 59, also originally from a family of refugees from the north of the former Palestine, who while riding his bicycle home at dusk stopped to greet the three elders. “Many Palestinians will try to rebuild their homes if the new Government grants permits. With the Assad regime it was an impossible task, except for those who could pay high bribes to the authorities,” he details. Now no one represents the State in the old camp.
Abdulai says that it is not only the Palestinians who are trying to return to Yarmouk. There are also refugees and displaced Syrians who return to Damascus after long years of estrangement. “Most of the houses are deteriorated or uninhabitable, but they prefer to pay for repairs rather than the high rents in other areas,” he points out. Mostly Syrian districts with more than a million inhabitants emerged around Yarmouk.
The destruction of the Palestinian enclave is reminiscent, by a great distance, of that of the Gaza Strip. Battle after battle, Yarmouk has been depopulated until it has become an urban setting without people and in ruins. Palestinians returning, even briefly, from Gulf countries or with relatives in Europe, have been some of the first to undertake the rehabilitation of their old homes, say residents like Abdulai, in a sign of the camp’s rebirth.
Today it is a ghost district, abandoned to its fate in the last years of the regime, which is trying to revive after a long agony. At the checkpoints located at the entrances to the Yarmouk camp there is no longer visible surveillance, as well as at those that mark the rest of the city. But while the Islamist militias, the new dominant force in Syria, patrol armed, in uniform or plainclothes, through the center of the capital, the small Palestine of Damascus has been left unguarded and still remains adrift.
