IDLIB, Syria – Among the millions of Syrians who fled as the government bombed their villages, destroyed their homes and killed their loved ones, 150 families crouched in a football stadium in the northwestern city of Idlib, hiding in tents under tribune or in the rocky courtyard.
Work is scarce and fright grips them when jets buzz overhead: new airstrikes can come at any time. But the fear of retaliation from the government prevents them from returning home. More than 1,300 similar camps see Syria’s last rebels under rebel control, devouring fields, stretching along irrigation canals and filling many next to apartment buildings where refugee families crouch in damaged units without windows.
“People will stay in these places with all the disasters before going to live under the regime of Bashar al-Assad,” said Okba al-Rahoum, the manager of the camp in the football stadium.
On a rare visit to Idlib province, there were many examples of shocked and impoverished people trapped in a dark and often violent limbo. Tucked between a wall to prevent them from fleeing the nearby border with Turkey and a hostile government that could attack at any moment, they struggle to secure basic needs in an area controlled by a militant group formerly was linked to Al Qaeda.
In the decade since Syria’s war began, President Bashar al – Assad’s forces have crushed communities that have revolted against him, and millions have fled to new lives of insecurity – in neighboring countries, Europe and the pockets of Syria outside. Mr. Al-Assad’s. grip, including the northwest held by rebels.
The Syrian leader has made it clear that these people do not fit into his conception of victory, and that few people are likely to return as long as he remains in power, making the fate of displaced people one of the thinnest pieces of the unfinished business of war. . .
“The question is: what is the future for these people?” says Mark Cutts, the United Nations’ deputy local humanitarian coordinator for Syria. “They can not live forever in muddy lands under olive trees along the road.”
During the war, the rebel northwest became the last resort for Syrians, with nowhere else to go. The government took them here after conquering their villages. They piled up trucks with blankets, mattresses and children. Some arrived on foot, with little possessions besides the clothes they were wearing.
Last year, an offensive by the Syrian government, backed by Russia and Iran, infiltrated nearly a million more people into the area.
About 2.7 million of the 4.2 million people in the northwest, one of the last of two territories owned by a rebel movement that previously controlled much of Syria, fled from other parts of the country . The influx has transformed a pastoral strip of farming villages into a dense conglomeration of temporary settlements with strained infrastructure and displaced families crammed into every available space.
After fighting devastated his hometown, Akram Saeed, a former police officer, fled to the Syrian village of Qah near the Turkish border in 2014, settling on a piece of land overlooking olive groves in a valley below. Since then, he has seen waves of his countrymen stream into that valley, where the olive trees have made way for a dense tent camp.
“In the last year, the whole of Syria has ended up here,” he said. Saeed said. “Only God knows what will come in the future.”
Humanitarian organizations working to stop hunger and infectious diseases, including Covid-19, have struggled to get enough help in the area. And this attempt could be more difficult than Russia, the closest international ally of Mr. Al-Assad, a United Nations resolution blocking summer renewal to keep one border crossing with the Northwest open for international aid.
The international role that Idlib helps is further the complicated role of the militant rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.
The group developed from the Nusra Front, a jihadist organization that declared its allegiance to Al Qaeda early in the war and distinguished itself by the abundant use of suicide bombers against government and civilian targets.
Turkey, the United States and the United Nations regard HTS as a terrorist organization, although its leaders publicly distanced themselves from al Qaeda in 2016 and have since taken down their jihadist roots. These efforts were evident around Idlib, where flags, badges and graffiti announcing the group’s presence were absent, although residents cautiously referred to it as ‘the group controlling the area’.
Unlike the Islamic State, the terrorist group that fought both rebels and the government to control an area of the border between Syria and Iraq, HTS does not advocate for the immediate creation of an Islamic state, nor does it propose them the police officers of morality in not strictly enforcing social codes.
During a tour of the group’s positions in the group, a military spokesman who went through the nom de guerre Abu Khalid al-Shami met reporters with a dirty staircase hidden in a bunker, after a long underground tunnel led which led to a network of trenches and shooting positions manned. by fighters.
“The regime is on the way, this way the Russians are, and the Iranian militias are there,” he said, pointing across green fields to where the group’s enemies were buried.
When asked how the group differs from its predecessor, the Qaida franchise, he pointed it out as part of the broader rebel movement. Overthrow al-Assad.
To administer the area, HTS helped establish the Syrian Salvation Government, which has more than 5,000 employees and ten ministries, including justice, education and agriculture, the head of the administration, Ali Keda, said in an interview said.
It is not recognized internationally and struggles to meet the area’s overwhelming needs.
Critics reject the administration as a civic facade allowing a banned group to communicate with foreign organizations; they accuse it and HTS of continuing to criticize and stop activities that were contrary to the strict Islamic view.
Last month, Rania Kisar, the Syrian-American director of SHINE, an education organization, urged a group of women at an event in Idlib to refuse polygamous marriages that are allowed under Islamic law.
The next day, armed men closed SHINE’s office and threatened his driver to go to jail, she said. Kisar said.
A government spokesman, Melhem al-Ahmad, confirmed it closed the office “until further notice” after she heard the words of Ms. Kisar regarded as an insult to public sentiment and morals.
A spokesman for HTS said aid and media organizations are free to work within a revolutionary framework that respects the norms and is not allowed.
An advance by government forces last year increased the pressure on Idlib’s already strained services.
In a maternity hospital in Idlib, dr. Ikram Haboush remembers giving birth to three or four babies a day before the war. Because there are so many doctors fleeing and there are so few facilities, she regularly oversees 15 deliveries a day.
The hospital is overcrowded and does not have the means to handle difficult cases.
“We have babies born prematurely, but we have no place to put them, and by the time we can transfer them to Turkey, the child is dead,” she said.
Since last year, a ceasefire between Russia and Turkey has halted the legal battle in Idlib, but on one day last month there were three attacks. A shell hit a refugee camp; an air strike ignited a fuel depot on the Turkish border; and three artillery shells hit a village hospital in Al Atarib, and according to the Syrian American Medical Society, which supports the facility, seven patients died, including an orphan who went for a vaccination.
While the area’s displaced people are struggling to survive, others are trying to provide simple pleasures.
In the city of Idlib, the Disneyland restaurant attracts visitors to eat salads and fried meats, and to forget their misery with video games, buffer vehicles, air hockey and stuffed animal stuffing machines.
The basement storage room also serves as a shelter if the government is sheltering nearby, and the terrace is covered with plastic coverings instead of glass so that it cannot break on the table if something explodes nearby.
The manager, Ahmed Abu Kheir, lost his job at a tourist restaurant that closed when the war began, he said, so he opened a smaller place that was later destroyed by the government shelling.
He opened another restaurant, but left it behind when the government seized the area last year and he fled to Idlib.
Like all the displaced from Idlib, he longs to take his family home, but is happy to work in a place that has meanwhile spread a little joy.
“We are convinced that normal life must continue,” he said. “We want to live.”