One of the pictures and videos circulating on social media documenting the looting of Yarmouk by the Syrian regime forces. Source: Facebook/Yarmouk camp newsOn
16 July 1948, several units of the Israeli army, backed by the navy,
occupied al-Tira,
a Palestinian village on the western slopes of Mount Carmel in the
Haifa District. The fall of al-Tira came after more than two months
of siege and bombardment by Zionist militias met with fierce
resistance by local Palestinian fighters.
During the two months of fighting,
most of al-Tira's residents, numbering just over 6,000 at the start
of 1948, were displaced or forced to flee. Among those displaced by
Zionist militias was 15-year-old Dhahabiyeh Abu Rashed. The teenage
girl and her family fled to Syria before moving into the newly built
Yarmouk refugee camp.
Established by Syrian authorities in
1957 to accommodate the Palestinian refugees scattered across Syria,
Yarmouk quickly morphed into a microcosm of the Palestine that once
was. In that overcrowded space on the southern outskirts of Damascus,
refugees reimagined their forbidden homeland and rebuilt it from
scratch. They named the neighborhoods after their ethnically cleansed
villages and preserved their eclectic native accents. They kept alive
the struggle for Palestinian liberation and created a rich legacy of
resistance and communal solidarity.
Yarmouk
was the lifeline that connected Dhahabiyeh and tens of thousands of
Palestinian refugees to Palestine
Yarmouk was the lifeline that
connected Dhahabiyeh and tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees to
Palestine. It was the thread weaving together their memories of home
and a harbor protecting their right of return from drowning in
oblivion.
For many in the camp, Yarmouk was not
merely a makeshift sanctuary or a temporary residence to be promptly
forgotten once they go home. You could often hear Yarmouk residents
say, jokingly perhaps, that they would take a piece of Yarmouk with
them after going back to Palestine. They would plant it amongst the
almond and olive trees, a living testament to their perseverance and
to the collective identity they fostered in Syria.
Was this special emotional attachment
the reason for Dhahabiyeh Abu Rashed's insistence on staying in
Yarmouk when most of her family, friends and loved ones had already
left?
Did she cling to the camp because she
did not want to be displaced again, seventy years after her first
displacement? In Yarmouk, al-Tira feels like a heartbeat away and the
right of return does not seem like an impossibility or an abstract.
Leaving Yarmouk, however, means letting go of the certainty of return
and giving up on the last remaining tangible bond with the land.
Did the green buses, used by the
Syrian government to evict Syrians to the far away north, evoke
memories of the forcible transfer of 1948? Dhahabiyeh must have
thought that at 85, she could not cope with yet another uprooting.
Perhaps,
though, she stayed because she did not have the means or the ability
to flee. We will
never know the answer, for Dhahabiyeh was among those killed
in the Syrian-Russian shelling of the camp on 18 May 2018.
Three weeks earlier, Dhahabiyeh had
lost another fellow survivor of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing
of Palestine.
Inshirah
Shaabi was a little child when Zionist death squads murdered her
father Qassem Shaabi in Ein
az-Zeitoun near Safed. Inshirah's father was among scores of
Palestinian men and boys captured and summarily executed by the
Palmach militia on 3-4 May 1948.
Much like Dhahabiyeh, Inshirah,
affectionately known as Umm Jihad, insisted on remaining in Yarmouk,
never relinquishing the dream of returning to Safed one day.
Following the destruction of her house
by Russian air strikes on 24 April 2018, she chose to stay by her
wounded friend who suffered a broken foot due to the air strike. They
took refuge in the basement of a four-story building but there was no
escaping the constant bombardment. After surviving the Nakba, the
loss of her father, decades of self-imposed loneliness, a suffocating
five-year siege, and numerous air strikes, Inshirah was killed in an
air strike on 25 April.
Dhahabiyeh and Inshirah were among
just 3,000 civilians trapped in Yarmouk after Islamic State fighters
occupied it in April 2015, but the exodus and destruction of Yarmouk
had started long before that fateful month.
For
the first 20 months of the popular uprising that erupted in Syria in
March 2011, Yarmouk, then the capital
of the Palestinian diaspora, served as a safe haven for
internally displaced Syrians fleeing government repression.
Although
many of the Palestinian-Syrian youth opposed to the Syrian government
participated in protests outside the camp and helped organize and
document grassroots peaceful resistance activities, there was a
collective tacit agreement to maintain the neutrality
of the camp.
Few
months before the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, 495,970 registered
Palestinian refugees lived in Syria, according
to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian
Refugees, UNRWA. Law
260, passed by the Syrian parliament in 1956, regulated the legal
status of Palestinian refugees in Syria and granted them rights
nearly equal to Syrian citizens, with the exception of the right to
vote and run for office. The situation of Palestinian refugees in
Syria, who made up nearly two
per cent of the country's total population prior to 2011, was
unique: they stuck to their Palestinian identity, heritage, and sense
of community
while simultaneously integrating into the country's social tapestry.
This dual identity pushed many
youngsters from Yarmouk to join Syria's burgeoning social movement.
They shared a strong sense of belonging to Syria and longed for
building a free, more humane and just country. They were, however,
wary of dragging the camp and the refugee population into direct
confrontation with the government.
The
destruction of Nahr al-Bared laid bare the vulnerability of
Palestinian refugees
Fresh in their collective memory was
the catastrophe of Nahr al-Bared. The Palestinian camp in northern
Lebanon, home to 40,000 refugees, was destroyed by the Lebanese army
in the conflict with the Jihadist group Fatah al-Islam, which
occupied the camp between May and September of 2007. The destruction
of Nahr al-Bared laid bare the vulnerability of Palestinian refugees
during internal crises in their host countries. Thus, avoiding this
scenario in Syria became a virtual consensus.
Yet,
anti-government activists accused pro-government factions, most
notably the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command (PFLP-GC), of violating the consensus, cracking down on
peaceful dissent, and sacrificing the precarious status of
Palestinian refugees in order to safeguard the interests of the Assad
regime.
They
bring up the Naksa
(defeat) Day protests in 2011 as an example of how the PFLP-GC and
the Syrian regime showed utter disregard for the lives of Palestinian
refugees to deflect attention from the unrest in Syria. On 5 June
2011, the PFLP-GC mobilized Palestinian refugee youth to take part in
the protests at the border with the occupied Golan Heights. Many
prominent figures in Yarmouk had warned against participating in
those protests because of the likelihood of high casualties, as
evidenced by Israel's killing of unarmed protesters on 15 May.
However,
while the May 15 border marches were part of a protest movement
across Palestine and the diaspora, the June 5 protests were
orchestrated and coopted by regime-backed factions. During the
protests, at least 23 Palestinian refugees, the majority of whom from
Yarmouk, were killed by Israeli occupation forces near the border.
Syrian soldiers stood idly by, sipping mate and tea while Israeli
soldiers were callously shooting at protesters.
Convinced
that the PFLP-GC threw their children to the wolves to score
political points for the regime, Yarmouk residents turned the
funerals of those killed by Israel in the border protests into a day
of rage. Angry mourners set the PFLP-GC building ablaze and
chanted anti-Assad slogans for the first time inside the camp.
PFLP-GC gunmen responded with
live bullets, killing several protesters.
Although the polarization in the camp
continued to manifest itself in sporadic violent outbursts and
recurring tensions, the camp remained on the margins of Syria's
conflict. It was not until the end of 2012 that it fully descended
into chaos.
Yarmouk
was seen as a strategic front by both the Syrian regime and armed
rebels
Following the transition of the
overwhelmingly peaceful uprising into a full-fledged civil war in the
summer of 2012, Yarmouk was seen as a strategic front by both the
Syrian regime and armed rebels. Grassroots activists in the camp
desperately tried to distance it from the battle raging in southern
Damascus but militarization was gradually silencing their voices.
The presence of then-small armed
opposition groups on the edge of the camp was a sufficient cloak for
the Syrian regime to strike it.
On
16 December 2012, a Syrian warplane shelled
Abdel-Qadir al-Husseini mosque, which also acted as a shelter for
internally displaced people, and al-Fallujah school. It was the first
time that the Syrian army deployed its air force against Yarmouk,
killing and wounding dozens of civilians and sowing unprecedented
panic and fear.
For survivors of the Nakba, the scenes
of mass exodus triggered by the air strike were almost a repeat of
the horror they fled in 1948.
In
the immediate aftermath of the MiG strike, nearly 80
percent of the camp's 160,000 residents fled as Syrian government
forces and their Palestinian allies imposed a partial siege on the
camp. Rebel and Islamist groups, particularly Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, a
Palestinian Islamic militia affiliated with Hamas, grew in size and
influence and so did their repressive practices and authoritarian
grip.
In
July 2013, the Syrian government and its allies tightened the siege,
denying access to food and medical supplies and holding close to
20,000 civilians in an open-air
prison. The siege of Yarmouk was part of a "surrender
or starve" strategy, systematically employed by the Syrian
government against civilians in rebel-held areas as a form of
collective punishment. A report
by Amnesty International documented the deaths of 128 Yarmouk
inhabitants due to starvation.
Caught between regime bombardment and
siege, and extreme repression by Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis and Jabhat
al-Nusra, Yarmouk residents were left reeling.
"Yarmouk
as we know is gone forever," Palestinian photographer and
refugee Niraz
Saied said back in 2014. "It is either heading towards
complete decimation or becoming an Islamic emirate."
His prognosis turned out to be
painfully accurate.
In
April 2015, the Islamic State seized
Yarmouk after defeating Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, leading to yet another
exodus. Thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to the neighboring
town of Yelda, leaving behind 3,000 civilians and a camp in tatters.
For those who stayed in Yarmouk, enduring three years of IS control
and five years of regime siege was akin to slow death amid constantly
deteriorating conditions and a state of sheer desperation.
Routing
Islamic State terrorists and insurgent groups was the official
justification for the Russian-backed regime offensive
launched against the southern Damascus enclave, including Yarmouk, on
19 April 2018.
Justifying all-out annihilation
under the guise of waging war on terror is immensely popular
After all, justifying all-out
annihilation under the guise of waging war on terror is immensely
popular. It dismisses the lives of trapped civilians as collateral
damage at best, insignificant and disposable at worst. It normalizes
collective punishment and dehumanizes the victims, portraying them as
terrorist sympathizers and generalizing their towns or neighborhoods
as terrorist strongholds.
In the case of Yarmouk, this
justification overlooked the alleged complicity of the Syrian regime
in facilitating the surprising IS invasion of the camp: in April
2015, Yarmouk was under complete regime siege and regime forces
tightly controlled all entry and exit routes into the camp. Yet this
did not seem to hinder IS fighters from entering the camp through the
neighborhood of al-Hajar al-Aswad, also under regime siege.
After
an intensive military campaign that lasted for just over a month, the
Syrian army "liberated"
Yarmouk after having besieged, destroyed, and emptied it of its
people. Syrian soldiers celebrated the liberation of Yarmouk by
looting
all that could be stolen – and sold later – from homes and shops.
The looting was so massive and widespread that many refugees from
Yarmouk expressed their relief that their houses had been destroyed
by then. "You have to look at the silver lining," one
displaced refugee from Yarmouk said with a wry smile. "There was
nothing left for them to steal from my home because it was completely
destroyed by an air strike."
The
looting carried out under the approving gaze of senior Syrian army
officers included
furniture, wooden doors, wires, heaters, and sanitary installations.
For the past forty years, the Syrian
regime has been "looting" and exploiting the Palestinian
cause to bankroll its quest for legitimacy or to condone and
sugarcoat the oppression of Syrians. All that is left to steal, load
and sell is one refrigerator here and a mattress there. In the
meantime, supporters of the Syrian regime continue to blame the
destruction of the camp on armed groups, absolving the regime of any
responsibility.
Palestinian
thinker Salameh
Kaileh claims that expelling insurgent groups was merely a
pretext
for the systematic destruction of camps, citing the plight of Khan
Eshieh. Located approximately 15 miles southwest of Damascus,
Khan Eshieh refugee camp was subjected to heavy shelling and siege by
government forces despite the absence of any armed groups.
Kaileh argues that the concerted
campaign targeting Syria's Palestinian camps, especially Yarmouk, is
aimed at erasing the Palestinian presence in Syria and getting rid of
the refugee "problem," the heart of the Palestinian cause.
Yarmouk embodied the inalienability of the right of return and
represented the bond between refugees and Palestine. Destroying it,
driving out Palestinian refugees, and blocking those who did stay in
Syria from returning to the camp, constitute an attempt at breaking
this bond.
