In a blurry cell phone photo, broken tiles lay strewn across a kitchen floor caked in years of dust. The shelves are empty of dishes, pots and pans. In the next picture, bits of torn-up paper litter a living room carpet. Manal sends a third photo over Whatsapp, this one of yet another white-walled room in her childhood home, the carpet seemingly ripped up from the concrete floor. A discarded, empty window frame leans against a chipped wall.
The photos are of Manal’s family house in Syria’s rural Homs province. Her younger sister sent them to her nine months ago after she returned home for the first time since 2015, when the family fled an Islamic State invasion. Manal, whose name has been changed to protect her safety, was a teenager at the time. She remembers leaving behind almost all her possessions — there was little time to pack.
Among the things left behind was her diary. In her last entry, three days before fleeing, she had written about taking her siblings to a nearby playground, in their hometown of Qaryatayn. “We spent a lovely day there,” she remembers writing.
“When my sister returned to the house [last year], I asked her to look for it,” Manal says over a text message. But the diary had long disappeared, likely looted along with the family’s other possessions.
Tens of thousands of other people ended up fleeing Qaryatayn, Palmyra and other nearby towns and villages in 2015. They eventually found themselves in a barren patch of southeastern desert, a no-man’s-land known as the “berm” located between two earthen barriers marking the Syrian and Jordanian borders. The makeshift tents and mud homes that soon arose became the Rukban camp.
Manal got married shortly after, to an acquaintance of her older brother, and moved into a small mud home with her husband. She remembers her wedding dress, hair curlers, the makeup, the subdued ceremony. A son soon followed, then another. Yet Rukban still didn’t feel like home.
“When I saw the photos, I was upset. I just wanted to go back to the house, to repair it and live in it again,” she says.
But her childhood home has never felt further away. Between Qaryatayn and Rukban are some 160 km of desert and conflicting zones of control that all but keep Rukban’s remaining 12,000 or so residents trapped in place.
And in recent weeks, even further restrictions on movement due to the coronavirus pandemic have left Rukban more isolated than ever.
The camp is immediately surrounded by a 55 km zone in Syria’s far southeastern corner nominally controlled by a US-backed rebel force. The fighters are based at the nearby Tanf military garrison. Outside that zone are hundreds of kilometers of desert controlled by the Syrian government that is pockmarked with military checkpoints. To the immediate south, the border with Jordan has long been largely closed.
For many of Rukban’s residents, to go back into Syrian government territory, where their homes and farms now sit abandoned, is to risk military conscription or potential detainment. It would mean being processed through one of the government’s so-called “reception centers” that have been set up in former school buildings in Homs for security forces to vet returnees. Dozens have reportedly been arrested in the centers, or held for weeks on end, family members say. Despite their desire to see the home again, Manal and her husband decided long ago not to return to Homs, fearing for their safety.
But to remain behind in Rukban, in the berm, is to accept a life in limbo — and one that is increasingly deprived of any access to proper medical care.
One of the few bits of respite was a UN-run medical clinic just across the border in Jordanian territory. There, camp residents were able to seek treatment unavailable in the Rukban’s own rudimentary clinics, or to obtain passage to hospitals in Jordan for more complicated procedures, like Cesarean-section births. That’s where Manal gave birth two her two sons, now toddlers.
But the spread of the coronavirus pandemic has prompted Jordan to adopt some of the strictest lockdown measures in the region. To reach the UN clinic, and beyond to hospitals in Jordan, residents of the camp must now be able to prove to Jordanian border authorities that they have tested negative for coronavirus.
That problem is all but insurmountable. There are no doctors in Rukban, and the camp’s few makeshift clinics have only basic medical supplies, largely smuggled in across the desert from elsewhere in Syria. And though nurses there say there are not yet any cases of the virus, Rukban has no COVID-19 testing kits.
“All we have are gloves, masks, disinfectant spray, rudimentary thermometers,” one nurse at a makeshift camp clinic said in mid-April. “We have nothing, except the most basic supplies.”
The result is a Kafkaesque nightmare. On April 2, the United Nations said that the World Health Organization along with Syria’s Ministry of Health and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent were “working to advance” testing kits to the edge of the 55 km zone — where Syrian government control of the territory begins. But, according to the UN, those supplies would only be for residents hoping to permanently move from Rukban onwards towards government-held territory in Homs.
And so Rukban’s thousands of residents remain, as before, effectively trapped in the desert.
A water pump in the camp - Courtesy: Omar al-Homsi
“We feel as if every road has been shut in our faces,” Omar al-Homsi, a camp resident, texted from Rukban in April, about a month after the effective border closure fell into place. He requested the use of a pseudonym for security reasons.
In his mid-twenties, he has long felt hemmed in by a liminal life in the berm. Homsi had been studying to work in a medical clinic in his hometown of Maheen when the war broke out, halting his studies. Now in Rukban, he works as a citizen journalist and raises sheep with his family for extra income. A few years ago, he worked a stint in a makeshift camp pharmacy his brother set up, selling medicines smuggled in from government areas. He sold flour in another local shop at one point.
“We have a saying: ‘I’m like a dish of fine china that rings no matter where the spoon hits it.’ I take on work wherever I can,” Homsi says.
A shop belonging to Omar’s friend in the camp - Courtesy: Omar al-Homsi
Rukban was never meant to sustain a sense of permanence anyway. Bitterly cold winters turn the ground to mud, and hot summers are ripe for the spread of disease. Before the war, all that passed through the area was a section of the international highway stretching from Damascus to Baghdad.
There are no nearby villages, no hospitals, no businesses. Few people wandered through, except for the occasional shepherd, or truckers passing along the highway. One elderly camp resident, a former shepherd who once traversed Syria’s eastern desert long before the camp existed, speculates men like him named the area Rukban decades ago, after the Arabic word for “passengers.” Nobody is quite sure.
There are still some trucks that cross the desert in southeastern Syria — smugglers, bound for Rukban to sell food, cleaning products and other supplies brought in from government territory.
For more than a year, those incoming trucks have steadily dwindled, as camp residents say the government checkpoints surrounding the 55 km zone have grown stricter. Some residents have likened it to a siege. Flour sometimes runs out; whatever else makes it through comes at a high price. One man, a father, says he earns just 1,500 Syrian lira per day — less than $3 — peddling fuel in Rukban’s makeshift dirt streets, only to spend 500 of it on bread.
There have been organized aid deliveries in the past, though they are sporadic at best. The last one, a joint UN-Syrian Arab Red Cross convoy reached Rukban some seven months ago, via Damascus. In previous years, the UN has simply dropped supplies by crane into Rukban, from Jordanian territory. Jordan has since flat-out refused to facilitate more deliveries from its territory. Rukban is simply “not Jordan’s responsibility,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi tweeted on April 20, especially as the country faces the threat of coronavirus.
Manal is watching anxiously as conditions in the camp deteriorate. She and her husband depend on what little money his family members, who live in Jordan, can send them. The couple has no income of their own — there simply aren’t enough work opportunities this deep in the middle of nowhere.
Now she is facing what could soon become a crisis. Late last year, she found out she was pregnant again. It will be her third child.
But since the beginning of her pregnancy nurses have told her she likely cannot give birth inside Rukban. Her previous two children were both born via c-section, inside Jordan, and she is likely to need the procedure again this time around. c-sections, though, are “impossible” in Rukban’s ill-equipped clinics, says Shukri Shihab, a nurse inside the camp. “There’s just no way.”
The cutoff from the UN-run clinic now means Manal is trapped into making a difficult decision. It’s unclear when the restrictions might ease so that she could enter Jordan again to give birth. If not, her only option is a return to Homs, despite the safety risks of going back to government territory. She cannot count on simply remaining in Rukban, and giving birth in the desert.
Her story is just one of dozens. Camp residents with chronic illnesses and those in need of intensified care have already begun to trickle back to Homs, to receive treatment away from Rukban’s mud-brick clinics. With the Jordanian border effectively shut to them, they have little choice. And according to Hanaa Abdullah, head of a women’s’ affairs office in Rukban, hundreds of women in the camp are pregnant. Inevitably, some of them will need c-sections.
Among them was one young woman who was in touch with Mada Masr just long enough to speak of being “tired” of her pregnancy. She soon lost an internet connection and was soon after taken to Homs to give birth before she had the chance to speak, according to Abdullah, who is following her case. It is unclear if, or when, she could come back to Rukban to rejoin her family.
Manal watches from afar for now. There is little she can do. She passes the time playing cards with her husband, or watching TV dramas when there’s electricity. One of her favorites is Dayaa Dayaa (Lost Village), about a remote Syrian village cut off from society.
“None of the women who went to give birth in regime territory have returned yet,” she says, worried.
She still has about three months before she is due. “Hopefully by then the border will have been reopened, and I’ll go to Jordan.”
“I’m very excited for the baby,” she says over Whatsapp one day in April, despite her concerns. “Having a little baby in the house is something very lovely. You feel like there’s something new in your life.”
Even if the border closure does ease, Rukban will remain largely isolated in the desert.
Siraj, the father of a baby girl, is less optimistic than Manal. His daughter was born one month ago, inside the camp.
When asked of his dreams for his daughter, he replied in short texts, his internet connection too spotty for much else. “We no longer let our children dream.”
