Crisis in Syria: ‘We had only our clothes when we came here’

To reach the scrappy, breeze-block town of Harjileh, we turn off the main highway to the conflicted southern Syrian city of Deraa, where protests against the Syrian government erupted in March 2011.

Since then, Harjileh, like many Syrian cities, towns and villages, has received hundreds of Syrians displaced by the war and settled them in temporary shelters while permanent accommodation is being built.

At the end of August, 780 men, women and children from the Damascus suburb of Daraya – retaken by the government that month after a bloody four-year siege – moved into newly built housing in Harjileh. At the same time, 700 fighters and their families went to the northern province of Idlib, held by insurgents, and another 1,600 civilians scattered to locations where they had relatives, friends or prospects.

Once a prosperous agricultural community, Daraya became a bastion of the insurgency. But it was bludgeoned into surrender by the Syrian regime because of its strategic location near Damascus’s military airport and as a passage for the movement of fighters between west and east.

At present, Daraya, strewn with mines and unexploded ordnance, is empty. Most neighbourhoods are in ruins, with habitable buildings looted. The provincial governor has promised to rebuild.

In Harjileh, half an hour's drive from their former homes, the displaced from Daraya live in tidy, pastel-painted, one-room houses built by the UN High Commission for Refugees. The landscape is barren, beige, stony desert.

In charge

The Syrian army is in charge, as there are among the civilians rebel fighters who availed of an amnesty. No one admits to being a former fighter, however.

After obligatory Turkish coffee and sweet tea, we tour the small settlement followed by curious children asking in the few English words they know: “Where are you from?” They go to the state school in Harjileh, some for the first time ever, as schooling in Daraya was intermittent.

Martial music booms from loudspeakers to mark the anniversary of the October 6th, 1973, war waged against Israel by Syria and Egypt. Tiny triangular Syrian flags are strung across the unpaved road. Syrian Arab Red Crescent (Sarc) vehicles are parked in the shade.

Yousef Kamel Awaz is a farmer who dwelt in his still-standing Daraya home before the evacuation. Here, he shares a house equipped with a bathroom and kitchenette with three other men. His wife has been living in the nearby town of Sahnaya for the past five years so that their seven children can can go to school.

Sarc distributes food parcels providing breakfast and dinner, and a hot midday meal is delivered daily to each household, he says.

Just inside the door at a second house a woman with a soft, sweet face sits in a wheelchair. As we slip off our shoes and sit on mattresses, she and her middle-aged son welcome us. His wife and six children also live elsewhere.

“Daraya had everything before the war. When we left, there was no food and no water,” he says. “We had only our clothes when we came here.”

He blames drug dealers and criminals for initiating violence in Daraya. The fighters who arrived there “did not allow anyone to express pro-government opinions”, he claims. He declines to give his family’s name because his son is a soldier serving in the Islamic State-held city Deir ez-Zor.

Tearful

In a third house, a tearful young woman nurses an 11-day-old boy called Jude. Her husband went to Idlib, then

Lebanon

.

“He rings every day and promises to take me to Lebanon,” she says, though this is an impossibility as Beirut refuses any more than the 1.5 million refugees it has already hosted.

There are many abandoned women and children here. A Muslim cleric in white turban and cream kaftan has come to arrange for divorces for those whose fighter husbands went to Idlib and took new wives.

The UN-run centre providing food and medical treatment to Daraya’s displaced is in a school housing several hundred civilians driven from the countryside east of Damascus.

Many are employed at plants making cheese and other products. In the stifling communal kitchen a quartet of women are cooking bean stew with rice in great, gleaming pots.“We feed a thousand every day,” says volunteer Umm Khaled.