Dressed in a crisp grey suit and red tie, Khalid Khalif (65) surveys the pile of rubble strewn in front of the crumbling structure that once housed his family’s home in Yarmouk, a once-thriving southern suburb of Damascus.
It’s the first time since 2011 that the Palestinian physics professor has returned to the suburb. “I wish I never returned,” he says. “I expected to find my home but instead I found nothing.”
Established by the Syrian government in 1957 as a camp for Palestinian refugees forcibly displaced when Israel was established in 1948, Yarmouk’s population grew to 180,000 Palestinians and several hundred thousand Syrians. The suburb’s famous markets drew buyers from across Damascus, with Yarmouk often viewed as the capital of the Palestinian diaspora.
Only a few small shops and stalls now serve the estimated 3,000 people who today live in a wasteland of shattered buildings. The family of 14-year-old Sundoos returned to Yarmouk three years ago because they couldn’t afford rent elsewhere in Damascus. Sundoos says she can’t remember what Yarmouk was like before the Syrian war – “when people visit us, they say we’re living in caves”.
Having paid a heavy price during the bloody civil war in neighbouring Lebanon, residents and Palestinian militant groups in Yarmouk, including Hamas, attempted to remain on the sidelines as a wave of protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government spread across Syria in 2011. But the strategically located suburb near Damascus soon became a bloody arena for Assad regime forces waging war on armed opposition groups, Islamist groups and Palestinians.
After rebels from the Syrian Free Army entered Yarmouk at the end of 2012, Assad forces began a prolonged siege on the suburb that quickly unravelled the life and security that Palestinian refugees had spent six decades building in Yarmouk. Syrian military checkpoints restricted supplies of food, water and medicine on the roads leading to the camp and arbitrarily detained Palestinians and Syrians attempting to flee.
Many of the Palestinians whom The Irish Times spoke with in Yarmouk mentioned relatives – uncles, grand-uncles and cousins – who vanished into the network of detention centres overseen by Assad’s military. The Palestinian Working Group in Syria says more than 3,000 Palestinian were imprisoned during the war, with only 630 found alive when prisons were liberated by rebel Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces in December 2024. Khalif wants those responsible to be executed – “what they did is unbelievable; the human mind can’t imagine what they did”.
During the siege, Yarmouk residents resorted to eating cats and dogs, and dodging snipers from Assad’s forces as they foraged for edible plants. “Assad was no friend of the Palestinians,” says Abu Kifara Tameem (57), a gravedigger at the Palestinian Martyrs’ Cemetery in Yarmouk. “We buried 200 people who died of hunger during the siege.”
As Hamas and armed opposition groups left Yarmouk, the vacuum was filled by Sunni Islamist militant groups including Jabhat al-Nusra (which later rebranded as the more moderate and pragmatic HTS) and its rival, Islamic State, which seized full control of Yarmouk in 2015.
The already besieged Yarmouk residents faced the imposition of strict sharia law and punishments including hand amputations and executions. By 2018 only a few hundred Islamist fighters remained in Yarmouk but the Syrian military operation to oust them involved missile strikes and barrel bombs dropped by Syrian and Russian air forces, which reduced much of the camp’s remaining infrastructure and buildings to rubble.
Many residents saw the month-long military operation as an attempt to render Yarmouk unliveable for Palestinians rather than solely a mission to oust Islamist militants, most of whom were bused out of the camp to rebel-controlled Idlib under the terms of a negotiated surrender. “The regime is the major reason for the destruction,” says Khalif by the remnants of his home. “Russian war planes and Syrian war planes destroyed the area, claiming that there were terrorists here, but the place was empty.”
The trio of gravediggers overseeing the cemetery, Tameem, Abdullah Ghanaim (71) and Abu Ahmad (61) stayed in Yarmouk throughout the war. Their own homes, as well as 20 graves in the cemetery, were destroyed or badly damaged during the war – “the bombs fell from the sky everywhere”, says Tameem.
The men hold the Palestinian Syrian militia leader Ahmed Jibril in particular contempt for his role in the onslaught on Yarmouk – “he was one of the most vicious”. A Palestinian born near Jaffa, Jibril and his family were displaced to Syria after the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He later served in the Syrian army before joining the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and orchestrating several high-profile kidnappings, hijackings and bombings on Israeli targets.
Opposed to mainstream Palestinian politics and peace with Israel, Jibril established the PFLP-GC in 1968 as a radical pro-Assad Palestinian militia backed by Iran. One of Jibril’s last major operations before he died in Damascus in 2021 was against fellow Palestinians and opposition groups in Yarmouk, where his PFLP-GC fighters fought alongside Assad forces.
Over sweetened tea at the gravediggers’ work shed the men turn to camp politics. Ghanaim says Palestinian groups that sided with Assad like the PFLP-GC are not welcome in Yarmouk, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad are both popular and have helped deliver food and water, and clear roads. Posters of the groups’ fighters who died in Israeli strikes on Syria are plastered on building fronts around Yarmouk, but the gravediggers say they would support a peace deal with Israel. “The country is exhausted, and the country is not able to fight any more,” says Ghanaim. “We need help rebuilding Yarmouk.”
Who will and should represent Palestinians and their interests in Syria under the new HTS-led government remain contentious points. On January 9th a group of young Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese protested against a delegation organised by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, which was meeting the new Syrian government in Damascus. The PA partially administers the Israeli-occupied West Bank and is widely viewed by Palestinians as corrupt and a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation.
At the Palestinian embassy, the anti-PA protesters were met by pro-PA counterprotesters who were allegedly bused in from Palestinian camps. Five of the young anti-PA protesters were detained by security personnel, who forced them to delete photographs and videos, and allegedly beat one protester. After being released from detention, one of the protest organisers said, “We have the right to protest peacefully in front of [the Palestinian embassy] and against the Palestinian delegation sent to represent us as Syrian Palestinians.”
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