Syrians have faced unspeakable horrors over the past fourteen years of civil war. Now that the Assad Regime has been dispatched to the dustbin of history, Syria has, at the very least, a chance for a new beginning.
I visited the country recently to hear directly about the most pressing issues people are facing in this period of great transition. I spoke with human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, community leaders, internally displaced people, and others from various communities, including the Druze, Assyrian, Yazidi, Armenian, Sunni Arab, Kurdish, and Alawite communities.
Universally, those I spoke to expressed a fervent hope that conditions will change so the many people who have been forced from their homes by war are able to return to those homes and live in peace. Indeed, there are still hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDP) in Syria, in addition to those who have fled the country, and in some cases, continue to flee the country due to ongoing violence.
In April, I visited with some of those internally displaced people at Serekaniye, an IDP camp in the Al-Hasakeh governorate. Serekaniye Camp is home — if you can call it that — to nearly 17,000 souls.
By way of context, in October 2019, Turkey launched a military operation in northern Syria that it perversely dubbed “Operation Peace Spring.” This offensive came after an infamous phone call between Turkish President Recep Erdogan and U.S. President Donald Trump, during which Erdogan said he wanted to attack Kurdish areas in northern Syria. In response, President Trump ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces that had been stationed there.
As ground forces and the Turkish air force attacked during “Operation Peace Spring,” approximately 300,000 people were forced to flee their homes. Many who escaped with their lives were from the city of Serekaniye (Ras al-Ayn in Arabic). They headed to safer locales, including Hasakeh, a city to the southeast. In Hasakeh, local authorities created a camp called “Serekaniye” and other camps to accommodate the huge influx.
Little did those who landed in Serekaniye Camp know that they would be there six years later.
To say that things are grim in Serekaniye Camp is to state the obvious. I spoke with a family of eight there that lost two children to Operation Peace Spring. The family lives in one tent. In an attempt to supplement their diet, the family, which used to own a farm, has planted a garden in a plot behind their tent.
The plot measures perhaps 5 feet x 5 feet. It is entirely to the family’s credit that vegetables appear to be growing in that tiny patch of soil in a dust-filled camp that endures water shortages due to Turkish attacks on the Alouk Water Station.
This family of farmers, like all I spoke to at Serekaniye Camp, desperately want to return home — and home is only about 45 miles away. Why can’t they go back now that the criminal Assad regime has been ejected from Syria and a new era is being trumpeted? Quite simply, Turkey and allied militias that kicked people out of the city of Serekaniye still occupy the area. And the small number of people who have attempted to return have reported ongoing abuses. Those I spoke to said that they just cannot risk going back to their houses while Turkey and its allies control the area militarily.
Making things even worse for those who have survived six years in Serekaniye Camp is the Trump Administration’s gutting of foreign aid, which resulted in a nearly complete cutoff of outside assistance to the camp. I would defy anyone who visits Serekaniye Camp to say it’s better for the U.S. to abandon the people there — even if it might let us buy an extra Cybertruck or two.
But for anyone who is able to look at kids in squalid conditions and say, “not our problem,” it is worth remembering that ISIS still has operatives who work secretly in what are known as sleeper cells around Hasakeh and elsewhere in Syria. Indeed, the U.S. military is in the region to help fight that very threat. Cutting off aid to civilians can only destabilize the area (as has been the case with U.S. aid cuts to camps where ISIS suspects are held).
Destabilization is, of course, what ISIS wants. So, even for those who purport to care only for U.S. strategic interests and who proudly proclaim their disinterest in the suffering of people outside U.S. borders, the aid cuts make no sense.
Beyond that, there can be no building a genuinely new Syria while hundreds of thousands of people remain stranded and unable to return to their homes in peace.
We will continue to examine developments in Syria in the period ahead.
