Airstrikes push waves of Syrians to Jordan camps
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ZAATARI, Jordan — The five Jamous brothers were early recruits to the Free Syrian Army, eager to oust President Bashar Assad.
But two weeks ago, Assad's air force began hitting their tiny village with new force, destroying houses and killing residents. With at least three brothers wounded and their own home destroyed, the Jamouses finally handed their Russian rifles to fellow rebels and fled, vowing to deliver their wives and passel of small children to the safety of a desolate refugee camp in the Jordanian desert before returning to battle.
"We tried to keep fighting, but we can't keep up," said Mahmoud Jamous, 27, standing with his clan, "so we are here."
They joined a sudden and unexpected exodus of as many as 20,000 Syrians who have poured across the border from the province around Daraa, the birthplace and symbolic heart of the Syrian uprising. The refugees describe burned-out villages all but emptied of residents. Some say their villages were deprived of power, water and communication for weeks before they left, or that graffiti scrawled after the shelling warned those who had fled not to return. Aid workers here who interviewed the refugees suggest there was a deliberate attempt to drive out any civilians who might sympathize with the rebels.
"The thinking may be, this is where it started, this is where it is going to finish," one aid worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid entanglement in the conflict.
While rebels have boasted of gains around northern towns like Idlib and Aleppo, the testimony of refugees here indicates that at least in the south the Assad government's overwhelming air power has knocked the rebels back on their heels. And as families like the Jamouses send away their women and children, refugees and aid workers say, the area around Daraa is increasingly becoming a province of men: fighters, prisoners and the dead.
Caught between the violence at home and the squalor of the camps, some have even begun to question their support for the 18-month-old insurrection.
A former colonel in the Syrian army said he would not have defected to join the rebels had he known he would end up in a refugee camp. "We thought the regime would collapse in two months," said the colonel, who gave his name as Mohamed Sultan.
"The Syrians are getting killed in a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran," he said, referring to regional supporters of the two sides. The refugees cross the border at night under the protection of rebels, and some of those fleeing arrive wounded by the bullets of the government soldiers trying to stop them, said Andrew Harper, the top official of the U.N. refugee agency in Jordan, who is in charge of its camps. Some are killed trying to cross.
But since the air assaults picked up about two weeks ago, Syrians have been arriving at a rate of about 2,000 a night, up from about 500 a night before that and hitting a peak of more than 5,000 in just 36 hours about five days ago, making the Zaatari camp here the fastest-growing in any of the three countries housing Syrian refugees.
Nearly half of the refugees here are younger than 12, and women outnumber men almost 2-to-1. Those ratios are expected to grow even more lopsided, Harper said, because some men deliver their families and return.
Over the last week, hundreds of people have boarded buses back to Syria, most of them men, said aid workers. "Dying there is better than the slow death here," said Mohamed Salama, pushing for a place on a bus Saturday to the border so he could join the Free Syrian Army.
The Jordanian military keeps about 1,400 Syrian army and police defectors in a separate, comfortable, facility here, with limited chances to visit their families, a common practice to avoid the militarization of the civilian camps.
But at the main Zaatari camp, about 25,000 people remain in a vast city of white tents turned yellow by lashing sand that quickly coats clothes, faces and young lungs with a thick layer of fine dust. The provision of water, electricity, bathrooms playgrounds and schools still trails the soaring population. Gales and cyclones of sand blow through the endless avenues of tents.
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