Syrian families return home in time for Eid al-Adha after years in notorious displacement camp
AL-QARYATAYN, Syria (AP) — Yasmine al-Saleh has two occasions to celebrate this year: the Eid al-Adha holiday and her family's return home after nine years in a notorious displacement camp in the Syrian desert.
True, the home they returned to, in the town of al-Qaryatayn in the eastern part of Syria's Homs province, was damaged during the nearly 14 years of civil war. Al-Saleh fears that even a small earthquake will bring it down on their heads. Many of the surrounding buildings have collapsed.
'When I first entered my house — what can I say? It was a happiness that cannot be described,' al-Saleh said tearfully. 'Even though our house is destroyed, and we have no money, and we are hungry, and we have debts, and my husband is old and can't work, and I have kids — still, it's a castle in my eyes.'
Last month, the last families left Rukban, a camp on the borders with Jordan and Iraq that once housed tens of thousands of families who lived under a crippling siege for years.
People started gathering in Rukban in 2015, fleeing Islamic State militants and airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition, Russia and the forces of then-Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Displacement camps became widespread in Syria during the war, but the situation in Rukban was particularly dire.
While the bulk of the camps sprung up in opposition-controlled areas in the country's northwest, Rukban was hemmed in on all sides by areas controlled by Assad's forces and by the border. Jordan sealed its border and stopped regular aid deliveries in 2016 after a cross-border IS attack that killed seven Jordanian soldiers.
For years, the U.N. and other humanitarian organizations were largely unable to bring aid in. Food, water and other essentials were only available via smuggling at exorbitant prices, and there was almost no access to medical care.
Al-Saleh recalled that when she gave birth to her two daughters, she feared that she would die in childbirth as other women in the camp had.
In recent years, some aid got in via the U.S. Army. The camp was located in a 55-km (34-mile) 'deconfliction zone' surrounding the base. Many of the camp's residents were families of fighters with the U.S.-backed Syrian Free Army.
'Conditions were horrid,' said Lt. Col. Ryan Harty, who was stationed at the nearby al-Tanf garrison as squadron commander in 2024 and assisted with the aid shipments. 'They lacked medical care, medical supplies, food, basic food supplies, water — anything you could think of that you would need to sustain life, they lacked.'
The U.S.-based NGO Syrian Emergency Task Force worked with military officials to implement a provision that allows American aid groups to send humanitarian goods on military cargo planes if the planes are not fully loaded with military supplies.
Eventually they were also able to secure seats on the planes to bring doctors to the camp. Maj. Bo Daniels, who was chief of the civil affairs team al-Tanf in 2023, was the first to realize that doctors could be classified as 'humanitarian aid.'
'I've been in the Army now for 24 years. I'm an Afghanistan and Iraq veteran,' Daniels said. He has mixed feelings about those deployments. But in Syria, he said, he felt that 'every day my missions really, truly mattered.' Working in Rukban, he said, was 'was probably the proudest thing I've ever done in my military career.'
Still, the situation remained dire. A few months before Assad's fall, Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the Syrian government's tightening siege of the camp and criticizing Jordanian authorities for continuing to 'unlawfully deport Syrians to Rukban despite the camp's unlivable conditions' and the U.S. government for making 'little visible effort to improve the desperate conditions despite its ability to do so.'
Many former residents were desperate enough to leave the camp and head to government-held territory, risking arrest and forcible conscription to the Syrian army. Before Assad's fall, about 8,000 people remained.
After Assad fell, there was an immediate exodus from the camp. But a few hundred people — including al-Saleh's family — remained, unable to scrape together the funds to make the move. Islamic Relief USA paid for trucks and buses to move some 564 people and their belongings back to their homes last month.
The Syrian Emergency Task Force said in a statement that the repatriation of those families brings 'an end to one of the worst humanitarian crises in Syria' and 'marks the end of the tragedy of Rukban.'
For some, their return was bittersweet.
Bakir al-Najim, another recent returnee to al-Qaryatayn, said, 'After 10 years of displacement, we will celebrate Eid al-Adha back in our hometown.' But, he said, 'we are poor, we have no jobs, we have no food or drinks to offer our (Eid) guests.'
Ahmed Shehata, chief executive officer of Islamic Relief USA, said the UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations that would normally provide aid to returning refugees and internally displaced people are scrambling to find the funding after the Trump administration's recent major cuts to U.S. foreign aid. He said his organization is in talks with the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR about allocating a significant amount of funding to provide aid to those returning to their homes.
Al-Saleh said however difficult her family's circumstances are now, they are nothing compared to the time they spent in Rukban.
'Rukban was a death camp,' she said. 'All I can say about it is that it was a death camp.'
——
Sewell reported from Damascus, Syria. Associated Press writer Malak Harb in Beirut contributed to this report.
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