Mixed feelings from Ghouta residents moved to Idlib camp
A new round of evacuations from Syria’s Eastern Ghouta took place yesterday, with about 900 people bused to the northern, rebel-dominated Idlib province.
Fighting has displaced nearly half a million people there since December and more than a million live in camps.
The Syrian and Russian air forces bombard the area every day, and rebel groups often battle each other over resources and territory.
But Dr Samir Mahfouz expressed relief on Saturday as he surveyed his family’s new home, which is a tent in a refugee camp designed to hold about 1,500 people.
“These are big camps,” said Dr Mahfouz, from the eastern suburbs of Damascus. “They are fit for the big numbers of the arrivals. There are good services. There are organisations that offer food and water. Things are OK.”
It is a grim measure of Syria’s civil war, now in its eighth year, that Idlib is a respite.
Dr Mahfouz was among the thousands of Syrians taken by bus in the past two days to Idlib from a group of besieged suburbs of Damascus, collectively referred to as Eastern Ghouta.
The area was under siege by government forces for four years before they launched a campaign to retake it in February, killing at least 1,600 people in the process and reducing neighbourhoods to rubble.
“For the past 45 days most people were living in basements in miserable conditions,” Dr Mahfouz said. “Food, water and means of life were all scarce.”
He left the neighbourhood of Harasta on Friday on a bus bound for Maarat Al Ikhwan, a town about 20 kilometres north of Idlib city.
About 4,500 fighters and civilians were driven from Harasta to Idlib on Friday, and the first 980 of another 7,000 people due to be moved there from other parts of Ghouta began leaving yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of people have now been transferred across Syria in the past two years, in what the UN and other organisations have called “forced displacement”.
The alternative to leaving, Dr Mahfouz and others said, was to risk being arrested by the government.
Refugees from other parts of Syria told The National that some young men they left behind were conscripted into the government’s army, and others had not been heard from since.
“Those who left from Harasta to the regime-held areas were put in detention camps,” Dr Mahfouz said. “The regime put them there to separate the young men from the rest. The youths are still detained even now, while women and children were released.”
The camp where he is staying is meant to be temporary until housing can be found.
“People are still unsure what their destiny will look like,” Dr Mahfouz said.
Abu Murad, a farmer from Harasta, left behind the land he owned and found himself in Maarat Al Ikhwan on Saturday.
“We arrived only today and we don’t know what to do,” he said. “I used to plant tomatoes, cucumber, wheat and barley.
“I am thinking of finding a job here now. I have six children. The oldest is 12 years old, the youngest is seven months. Death in Harasta would have been better than coming here.”
Mr Murad said that when he and his family boarded a bus, the only thing he knew for certain was that he was leaving Harasta.
“We were not given choices and were surprised to find ourselves in Idlib,” he said. “When we were still in Harasta, we heard that people would be taken to Jarablus,” a city farther east in Aleppo province, which is under control of Turkish-backed rebel groups.
“We were surprised that they brought us to Idlib. Now we are here in the camp. There are many organisations that did their best helping us here. May God reward them for that. But the situation is difficult.”
Dr Mahfouz and others said people were still trying to reach Turkey, despite reports that the military there has been using lethal force to stop refugees from entering, and deporting Syrians already in southern Turkey to Idlib.
Aid groups estimate Idlib city has swollen from its pre-war population of about 200,000 to nearly a million.
It is widely accepted in Idlib that as the last Syrian province largely under rebel control, it will eventually become a target in the same way as Eastern Ghouta and other places.
Complicating the problem is the widespread presence of fighters from Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, Al Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria. It has been largely left out of negotiations and ceasefires rebels have brokered with the government.
“People believe that if the presence of Hayat Tahrir in the province of Idlib continues, our destiny will be like the fate of the rest of the cities,” said Abu Hammam, a local aid worker in Idlib.