As soon as the dictator was out, Samer Jalbout was on the move.
Within 24 hours of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall in early December, Mr. Jalbout was en route from Idlib in northwest Syria, heading back to his home in the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus.
The father of three had not been there since pro-Assad forces drove his family out seven years ago. What he found was a concrete wasteland.
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Palestinians flocking back to the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus, Syria, say it’s more than a physical place. It’s central to their sense of belonging, their last physical tie to a Palestine they have never seen.
Now, day after day, Mr. Jalbout and his brother Youssef shovel debris and slowly – cinderblock by cinderblock – restore the bombed-out family compound where they were born and later raised families.
“This is the first time I have relaxed in 14 years,” when Syria descended into civil war, Samer Jalbout says. “We are home and no longer live in fear.”
An outsider might wonder why he and thousands of other Palestinians in Syria are rushing back to a refugee camp, destroyed nearly beyond recognition, to live in exposed half-buildings with neither water nor electricity.
“The rest of the world sees this destruction and doesn’t think this is a home,” Mr. Jalbout says, piling concrete shards into a wheel-barrow and raising a cloud of white dust. “But to us this is home. This is everything.”
More than a physical place, returnees say, the 68-year-old refugee camp is central to Syrian Palestinians’ sense of belonging, their last physical tie to a Palestine they have never seen.
Against the odds, they are proving that you can return home, whether it’s livable or not.
Emptied by war
Yarmouk, covering less than a square mile, was founded in 1957 to house refugees driven from northern Palestine by the 1948 Mideast war. The United Nations-administered camp’s population grew to some 120,000 before the civil war, making it one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in the world.
Strategically located on the southeastern edge of Damascus, between the capital and the Shiite-revered Sayeda Zainab shrine, the camp saw some of the civil war’s most vicious combat. Various rebel militias aligned with Hamas, the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat Al Nusra, and later the Islamic State seized parts of the camp and made it a base from which to launch attacks against Mr. Assad’s forces in Damascus.
Residents recall vividly the brutal siege imposed by the Assad regime from 2013 to 2018, during which little food was allowed into the camp. Residents ate grass for weeks, and 128 people died from starvation.
In 2018, the regime retook the camp from the militias and emptied it of its residents in forced evacuations, allowing only a handful of select families to return in 2020.
Now thousands are flocking back.
As of late February, some 5,000 families, around 25,000 people, had returned to Yarmouk camp, community leaders estimate.
Nidal Abu Mahmoud left the apartment he had rented in a nearby Damascus neighborhood to restart his family business, selling vegetables from two stands in the camp.
“There is no electricity, cars have difficulty with the roads, there are no schools or pharmacies, and you have to walk a mile out of the camp just to get bread,” he says, in between serving a handful of customers after Friday prayers. “It’s a difficult life here.”
So why, then, are people returning?
He smiles.
“Because Yarmouk is a second Palestine,” he says. “This camp is our last tie to our homeland. If we give up on the camp, we are giving up on our right to return.”
Syria’s “Gaza”
According to U.N. estimates, 60% of the camp’s buildings, roads, and water networks are completely destroyed; the other 40% are severely damaged and barely usable.
The camp’s 16 U.N.-run schools, three health centers, and one youth center are either completely destroyed or severely damaged and out of service.
A sliver of the camp that is connected to power lines gets an hour of electricity a day.
Safed Street, once the camp’s main commercial and industrial artery, lined with dozens of workshops and blacksmiths, is littered with rubble.
“This was the economic center of the camp, and it’s completely destroyed,” says community leader Qassem Abdulkader as he and a group of returnees survey the destruction. “Most of these buildings can’t even be saved.”
The only signs of life are lines of laundry and blankets that returnees have hung where walls once stood.
Even the influx of people has done little to alleviate the sense of desolation and emptiness. Wild dogs roam and howl. The camp goes completely dark at night; few dare venture out past sunset.
“It looks like Khan Yunis and Jabalia,” says one passerby as she points to the collapsed buildings. “But this is not Gaza. This is Syria. This is Yarmouk.”
And for them, residents say, returning to this camp-turned-wasteland was an existential urge.
“This camp is the physical address for the right of return of Palestinians to Palestine,” says Mr. Abdulkader. “Our parents and grandparents didn’t surrender it; neither can we.”
The Jalbout brothers consider themselves fortunate. Although government soldiers stripped their building of steel and ceramic tiles, the family compound is still structurally sound. Many neighboring buildings have collapsed, some reduced to piles of dust.
They hope that the two rooms they have cleared on the ground floor – which formerly housed an automotive garage and a grocery shop – can once again be rented out.
They have fixed up two rooms on the second floor: one for Samer Jalbout; his wife, Nisreen; and daughter, Thirayaa, to live in, the second for Youssef.
Three floor cushions and a portable gas stove sit on the bare concrete floor. Two blankets do service as an outer wall, though they offer little shelter from the wind and rain.
“Our situation has changed 100%,” Mr. Jalbout says, his smile caked in concrete dust. “Now we can express our identity and our religion. We can relax and just be. Before we couldn’t live openly as Palestinians.”
Omar Khalil, a former bus driver for a U.N. school, has also renovated his third-floor apartment. He affixed a wooden door to the ground floor entrance, to prevent wild dogs from getting in, and patched the walls with cinderblock and cement so that his daughter, a university student, can study in peace.
“There is nothing like having your own roof over your head,” says Mr. Khalil. “After years of displacement, we finally feel centered.”
“This is our place, our land, our memories,” his wife, Nisreen Jamal, says. “Despite the destruction, we see it as heaven.”
