Yarmouk: Assad’s obliteration of a Palestinian refugee camp

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the fifth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our Syria After Assad section.

--------------------

As I climb out of the microbus and take my first steps in Yarmouk refugee camp, in the south of Damascus, I spot two young boys slowly digging through a pile of garbage and rubble. I ask if I can take their photo, part of documenting what Assad did to this area and its people. They look at me suspiciously, layers of filth clinging to their faces and clothes. “No, go photograph someone else”, one of them says. They look tired, defeated, possibly embarrassed. I sense their eyes on me as I walk away, wondering what my deal is. Eventually, they return to their scavenging. They’re no more than 10 years old.

According to UN records, Yarmouk was home to around 160,000 people before 2011, overwhelmingly Palestinians. My driver, Ahmad, boasts that it was once one of the most economically vibrant parts of Damascus, with shopping districts, industrial sectors and more. He takes me to visit Abu Saeed Aidi, an old man born in 1945 in the now obliterated Palestinian village of Lubya. He’s lived in the camp for decades and tells a similar story of Yarmouk once being a thriving centre of Palestinian life. His eyes shine with pride when he describes how the camp was designed by a Palestinian engineer from Jerusalem using the most modern ideas available at the time, how it had a democratic structure different from the rest of Damascus, and how generous donations from abroad meant it had the best infrastructure of any suburb.

There’s nothing left of that now.

Ahmad drives for over half an hour, winding through the narrow, desolate streets. I try to film, but it’s hopeless. The reality of such devastation can’t be captured with images alone. Row after row, block after block after block of destroyed homes. An old UN school bombed to smithereens. The shell of not one but two enormous mosques, meeting places and cultural centres for a once thriving community. A small garden, its healthy crop of string beans merely highlights the devastation surrounding it. An old playground, a rusty swing, a fading children’s painting of a happy family, one of the kids waving the regime flag.

Saeed al-Shneeni is keen to talk as soon as he gets in the car. “You need to record this”, he says confidently. He’s a long-term camp resident, and he has stories to tell about every building we pass. “That’s the checkpoint where they used to randomly kidnap people”, he says as we pass a small concrete pillbox on a narrow street. “That’s the line of demarcation, where every building was demolished to give the government a clearer shot into the camp. Then, they stole the steel from the rubble to sell on the black market. Criminals in every way, these people.”

He tells a tale of the five-year siege of Yarmouk, which the regime imposed between 2013 and 2018. Its effects were so brutal, so total, that an Amnesty International report published in 2014 found that 128 people starved to death that year alone. This was collective punishment for the crime of supporting the Syrian revolution.

Saeed says that a wealthy Palestinian exile eventually bribed the regime to allow an aid delivery. Authorities took the cash but opened fire on those who lined up for food. It became known as the Rijeh square massacre. “It was just like what the Israelis did in Gaza last year”, he says. Seven more people died in that incident, killed while lining up for bread to feed their loved ones.

Yarmouk had also been home to a vibrant Palestinian civil society. “There were more than fourteen [political] factions”, says Ahmad’s nephew, Mohammed, who joins us for lunch. “Each faction had their own organising committees and armed wings ... but that’s all finished now.”

The regime kept them on a very short leash. In fact, they had a special office within the internal security department tasked with abducting, torturing and killing Palestinian organisers who stepped out of line. Referred to as the “Palestine branch”, it attracted some of the most brutal and sadistic people within the Syrian state. They were responsible for responding to the revolutionary uprising that found a strong echo in Yarmouk and the surrounding neighbourhoods.

By the time Assad’s forces retook Yarmouk in 2018, the camp was a wreck, and only a few hundred people remained. The combination of famine and endless bombardment had made the area unliveable, forcing over 100,000 Palestinians into yet another exile. To make matters worse, ISIS and Nusra had overrun the camp a few years earlier. These reactionaries drove out the remaining rebels and spent the next three years terrorising any citizens that remained.

Undeterred by the scarcity of living beings to harass, the soldiers were ordered to abuse the dead instead. Ahmad takes me to Yarmouk cemetery, where the gravestones have been smashed. “They gave us no peace, even in death”, he says.

It’s not until we’ve sat down for lunch in Ahmad’s home that Saeed talks about how the arbitrary violence of the Syrian state forever changed his own life.

“At the time, we were still living in our flat on the fourth storey of a building near here”, he says. “But the bombing was so constant that my wife and I had decided to sleep in separate rooms, so that if one of us died, the other could keep looking after the kids.”

They were eventually forced to move to their parents’ house after a bomb landed on their next-door neighbour’s apartment. A few weeks later, their 16-year-old son, Mahmoud, went missing. “It was strange at the time—nobody was staying outside after dark due to all the fighting. I was up all night worried, and when he didn’t return, I spent the next week looking for him. I looked everywhere, asking anyone if they had seen him.”

After trying everything else, Saeed went to the morgue. “The worker there showed me body after body ... At one point, I thought I had found him, but it turned out to be someone else’s child. I was relieved, but still very stressed.” The mortician told him to try the internal security office, where a database was kept of dead bodies “found” locally.

Saeed’s eyes glaze over; retelling the story has sent him back in time. “When I got to the relevant room in the security building, [there was] a man sitting behind a computer, with an officer on either side. They were showing him pictures of dead faces, sixteen to a page.” Saeed stood behind them and watched them scrolling through endless pictures. He describes feeling torn between wanting to find his son and yet wanting to cling to the hope that he was alive. Soon, his face showed up. “I yelled, ‘That’s my son!’ They hadn’t even noticed I was there until then.” Saeed was then shown eight pictures of Mahmoud’s body. He’d been shot in the head at close range. That’s all Saeed ever learned about the loss of his precious child.

But this story isn’t finished.

In 2014, two years after Mahmoud’s execution, Saeed’s son Ousama was a month away from graduating high school, having specialised in administration and law. Saeed’s family had moved to yet another apartment—“more space for the kids”, he explains. One day, a government employee came to their house and asked them to go to the mayor’s office to register their new addresses with the local administration. On arrival, both Saeed and Ousama were arrested and thrown into a van. After a few minutes, Saeed was let out and dropped off on the street without charge or explanation. He was never to see his son again.

For years later, members of the internal security came to his house, promising to get information about his son in exchange for money. “I must have paid out over $5,000”, he says. This was a common practice, Ahmad interjects—a way of extorting cash from desperate people. “I knew they were manipulating me, but I would have done anything to hear something about my boy”, Saeed says. He never got anything in return for these transactions but doesn’t regret trying.

Two weeks ago, he received a message from his daughter. Her friends had sent her a photo of an official document from 2015. It was a photo of a list of names of dead bodies found in the region surrounding Yarmouk. It included his son, described only as “Palestinian” and listed as number sixteen.

Because Ousama was never officially declared dead, Saeed’s last surviving son Abdullah was almost forced to serve in the same Syrian army that had killed his brothers. The prospect nearly drove Saeed insane. It took another round of bribery—worth another couple of thousand that he didn’t have—to convince the local bureaucracy to sign off on his status as an only child. Today, he’s in Germany, building a new life for himself.

In tears, I find myself apologising to Saeed for his suffering, on behalf of an indifferent world. He shrugs, tells me not to worry. He leaves shortly after with the look of a man who has completed a difficult but necessary task. It seems that sharing this traumatic incident with the world, even just some nobody from Australia, is for Saeed an act of resistance and love.

Ahmad subsequently tells me that Saeed suffered enormously during the intervening years, the stress and sadness leading to a range of health issues. “The regime took his sons, but they also took the best years of his life.”

By the end, the Assad regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its supposed support for the resistance to Israel. Of course, those with the most basic knowledge of Syria’s history know about the regime’s treason during Black September, its defence of the far-right, pro-Israeli forces in Lebanon’s civil war, its role in driving Yasser Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon not once but twice, and how it defended Israel’s borders better than any other Arab state in the region.

But regardless of this history, what the regime did to the Yarmouk refugee camp, to people like Saeed, should stand on its own as an unforgivable crime. Indeed, Assad’s thugs killed more Palestinians in Yarmouk than Israel did in any one of its wars prior to 7 October.

As we’re digesting our dinner, Ahmad gets a call from his son in Germany. He announces that it looks like the government might be about to revoke the asylum status of many of the nearly 1 million Syrian refugees in the country.

Mohammed grimaces. Just minutes earlier, he had explained that he planned to seek asylum in Germany alongside his wife and 10-month-old baby. This news must have broken his heart, but he hides it behind a bitter smile: “The Arab world doesn’t want us, and the West doesn’t want us. They should just send me to Gaza so I can die fighting for my country”, he says.