Syrians trickle out of Rukban desert camp with memories they want to forget

Apart from palm saplings in tin cans and the olive shoots in the garden of his mud-brick dwelling, there is very little Hajj Khaled wants to take with him from the isolated Rukban camp in Syria's eastern desert to go home with his family to Palmyra.

“There are two things very precious to us in Palmyra – palm trees and olives. We want to take them back with us, and plant them,” the 56-year-old father of three told The National.

Since the overthrow of the Assad regime last month, Mr Khaled has been desperate to make the 250km journey north-west to the Syrian desert oasis city, which was under the control of regime forces and their Russian and Iranian allies.

While his problem is raising the cost of transport, for others in Rukban it is that they have nowhere to go after their homes were destroyed during the civil war that began in 2011 when president Bashar Al Assad's forces brutally cracked down on anti-government protests.

Mr Khaled and his family are among the thousands of Syrians who have been trapped in the camp for about a decade after fleeing Palmyra when the extremist militant group ISIS seized the city in 2015. The hardships they have faced represent the panoply of humanitarian crises that have gripped Syria over more than 13 years of civil war.

Mr Khaled once worked as a chef at upmarket hotels in Palmyra, whose Unesco world heritage site of pre-Islamic ruins attracted tourists from around the world. In Rukban, he found work here and there as a butcher and a cook, but he cannot afford the hundreds of dollars it would cost to rent a lorry to carry his family and their belongings back home.

“We can't pay $200, $300, or $500 to go to Palmyra. If we had the money, we wouldn't have waited until now,” Mr Khaled told The National at his simple but tidy home. Inside are a basic stove, thin sheets covering the floor and a small wall mirror with a grass-green frame.

“If a car comes today or tomorrow, I'll take my belongings and leave. You saw my house, I don't have many belongings. I'm ready to pack and leave as soon as I receive help. We remain hopeful.”

Grim, dusty life

Rukban is extremely remote, accessible only via rocky, sandy tracks along Syria’s border with Jordan. Between the squat homes, which replaced the tents where people lived when they first arrived, children play in the sand and mud. There are no paved roads and electricity comes from generators and battery packs. There is one simple medical clinic, staffed by nurses but no fully qualified doctors. Residents wage a constant battle against the dust.

According to residents and human rights observers, the camp was essentially besieged by the Assad regime and its allies, who set up checkpoints and limited the supply of food and other essentials, causing prices to soar on its rough high street.

People were allowed to leave in special cases, such as for medical treatment, but only after going through security screenings and being forced to paying regime authorities between $400 and $7,000 – far beyond the reach of most people, residents told The National.

Conditions got so bad that tens of thousands opted to go through so-called “reconciliation” procedures with the Assad regime and move to territory under its control, despite documented cases of arrests and forced disappearances among the returnees. Last year, the camp was home to about 8,000 people, Amnesty International reported.

“Those who stayed were either revolutionary activists or former rebel fighters,” said Hammoud Aboura, an owner of a grocery store in the camp who also runs a local news webpage. “That was why the regime besieged us, to force the people, the rebels and their families to return to areas under its control.”

Conditions continued to deteriorate as the years passed. At least three babies died in the camp last year, including at least one from malnutrition, Amnesty International reported. The organisation also reported Jordanian authorities deporting Syrians to the camp.

About 16km away from Rukban lies the Al Tanf military garrison, home to a contingent of US military forces and Syrian partner fighters focused on combating ISIS cells in the desert.

Rukban residents say they never had any fallings out with the Americans at Al Tanf, but they could have done more to help people in the camp, which lies within an area under de facto control of the garrison.

“We lived with them [the Americans] as friends, but they didn’t provide to us the things we needed,” said Mohammed Abdullah Kashaam, 60, who was among those preparing to leave Rukban. He was gathering his belongings to return to what remained of his wheat farm in Palmyra.

The US forces have also faced criticism from rights groups over not doing more to help people trapped in Rukban. The US military base “has provided sporadic assistance to the camp’s residents, including a bread oven, flour and fuel, as well as medical care in exceptionally rare situations, according to the camp’s residents, but has not ensured regular assistance to address critical needs”, Amnesty International said last year.

Long journey home

In a clearing in the camp, three families have piled mattresses, metal containers and other belongings on to the back of a lorry for the long drive back across the desert to Palmyra.

Ibrahim Kashaam, the lorry's owner and driver, told The National he had driven for two days through the desert from the city of Raqqa to carry relatives from his extended family to Palmyra.

“The house is destroyed. We just need a bit of time and we will repair it,” said Mr Kashaam, who is originally from Palmyra but fled to Raqqa during the war. “The diesel from Raqqa costs six million Syrian pounds ($460), I am doing this from my own pocket,” he added.

Despite the destroyed homes they will be returning to in Palmyra, Syrians in Rukban want to focus on their futures rather than dwell on memories of the past decade in the camp – painful recollections that they often did not want to talk about.

A local voluntary council is providing basic services such as water and electricity for returnees to Palmyra, although the city remains a ghost town. Around 7,000 members of the pre-2011 population of 100,000 people have returned since ISIS's departure in 2017, according to local officials.

Among them is Ismail Shalil, 23, covered in grey dust from his hands to his eyelashes as he sifts through the rubble and dust of what was once his home in the city, moving a single stray bullet carefully out of his path at the door. He was told that the building was used as a base by Iran-backed fighters and hit by an Israeli air strike in November 2024. In the rubble, The National found a copy of Keys to Heavens, a collection of prayers stamped with the words, “a gift from the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Mr Shalil, currently unemployed, moved in with one of his uncles in another part of the city when he returned from Rukban. His eyes well with tears as talks about his years in the camp. “I don’t really want to remember it,” he said.

Rather, he recalls happier times from his childhood in Palmyra. “My best memories are of going up to the castle, the theatre and Triumphal Arch that were blown up,” he said, referring to locations within the Unesco world heritage site that Isis destroyed after seizing the city.

“If we are able to rebuild the house, we hope to come back to live here, because this is our land, our house, all our relatives are here,” Mr Shalil continued. “We hope all countries and organisations will help with this.”

Back in Rukban, Mr Khaled gently touches the leaves of one of his olive plants in a wide pottery basin. “We cannot leave without them,” he says.