In the heat of the Syrian summer in 2018, presidential candidate Catherine Connolly, alongside TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O’Sullivan, stood amid the rebar and flattened concrete of Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp with a number of camouflage-clad guards led by a man in civilian clothes.
They had embarked on what Connolly has since described as a ”fact-finding trip” to Syria’s Yarmouk camp. The man they met was Saed Abd Al-Aal, the commander of the Free Palestine Movement (FPM), a pro-Assad militia that fought against the opposition during the years-long siege of the camp.
The group, initially founded as a social organisation, was “one of the first militias to form” in the face of anti-regime protests in the camp in 2011, says Nidal Betari, a Syrian-Palestinian writer from Yarmouk, and former neighbour of Al-Aal.
“[Its leadership] had longstanding links to the regime before the civil war,” he says. “The transformation was a way to further ingratiate themselves with Assad, likely to benefit [the leadership’s] business interests.”
RM Block
Referring to Al-Aal with an unpublishable expletive, he says coyly, “let’s just say, we’ve all heard many stories about him”.
Al-Aal’s reputation certainly precedes him in Yarmouk, a southern district of Syria’s capital, Damascus, and largely populated by Palestinian refugees. Everyone knows his name, but few have a good word to say. The FPM has been linked to a number of human rights violations, most notoriously what the residents of the camp refer to as “the aid massacre”.
In Yarmouk’s Rijeh Square, I stopped Moaz (24), to ask him whether this was where the massacre happened. “No, the massacre that happened here was a daesh [Islamic State] car bombing in 2019,” he says. “The aid massacre was just over there.”
He had only been 12 at the time and doesn’t remember the day itself.
“It was war every day; there were many killings like this,” he says with a shrug.
In 2014, as a group of hungry men and women crowded round a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid station, Mowaffaq Dawa watched from a rooftop, angry over the death of his nephew two days earlier.
Seeking revenge, Dawa fired an RPG into the crowd, killing seven, for which he earned the grisly moniker, “The Butcher of Yarmouk”. A decade later he would be arrested in Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killings.
Court files state that he was “affiliated with the FPM”, although some in the camp claim that he belonged to a different militia at the time of the attack and only joined the FPM later.
“I would consider [Saed] a war criminal,” says Abu Yasser (50), a Palestinian resident and self-professed autodidact on the camp’s history. “His group helped the former regime to kill the Palestinian people.”
Only a few weeks prior to Connolly’s visit, Al-Aal’s militia had aided the now-toppled regime to wrestle control of Yarmouk camp back from a motley association of rebel factions - one of which was the Islamic State.
By 2018, with the camp shattered by years of barrel-bombings and siege, Connolly was photographed with Al-Aal in front of a pancaked building. Yarmouk remains eerily unchanged seven years later, a broken city, home only to rubble and skeletal homes.
Anti-Assad sentiment is prominent in Yarmouk and its residents dismissed the idea that any minded tour could offer an accurate picture. In the summer of 2018, “there was no possibility to meet normal Palestinians,” says Abu Yasser, “basically everyone fled in the face of that final regime offensive”.
According to UNRWA - the body responsible for managing Palestinian refugees - as few as 40-50 residents may have remained following the regime’s takeover. “If I had met her, and she was accompanied by someone like Saed, I would have been too scared to speak honestly.”
One of the few who remained throughout was Qassem (45). “My brother starved to death under their siege in 2014,” he casually says. “Everyone went hungry in those days.” Amnesty International found at least 128 cases of death by starvation in 2014.
Qassem is originally from Gaza; nine of his siblings are still there. “They are living through a siege, there is hunger and bombings just like here,” he says. “What happened in this camp is being repeated in Gaza.”
“Anyone who opposes what is happening now [in Gaza] must also oppose the actions of Assad.”
Cian Ward is a freelance journalist based in Damascus, Syria, who covers conflict, politics and humanitarian issues
