AMMAN, Jordan — Islamic State militants have seized most of a sprawling Palestinian
refugee district in the southern part of the Syrian capital, Damascus,
an area that has been under siege and bombardment for nearly two years
already, according to Palestinian and United Nations officials and
residents.
The
officials called for quick action by international organizations, the
Syrian government and all armed groups to head off an unfolding
catastrophe. Reports of killings and even beheadings were beginning to
circulate on Saturday, worsening what is already a longstanding
humanitarian nightmare for the 18,000 residents of the Yarmouk refugee
camp.
By seizing much of the camp, the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, made its greatest inroads yet into Damascus, a significant
step for a group that rose largely in the northern and eastern provinces
of Syria, far from the capital. Yet at the same time, the move suggests
that as the Islamic State loses ground in Iraq and northeastern Syria,
the most daring response it could muster on the ground was to attack one
of the most vulnerable populations in Syria.
Most
of all, the attack was a perverse answer to the question of how life in
Yarmouk could get worse. Many residents’ very presence there is a scar
from a previous war; they are descended from Palestinians who fled or
were driven from their homes in the 1948 war over Israel’s founding.
More recently, they have been blockaded and bombarded by the Syrian government
for nearly two years, and ruled internally by a tangled web of armed
groups, including Syrian insurgents and Palestinian factions, said by
residents to siphon scarce food to their own fighters and families.
While
Palestinian leaders had initially sought to maintain neutrality in
Syria’s war, in reality, Palestinian refugees living in Syria — who had
more rights there than in other countries and therefore had a greater
stake in society — have strong sympathies on both sides of the conflict.
Some supported President Bashar al-Assad, seeing him as a champion of
the Palestinian cause, while others became leaders in the initial
political uprising against him. Hamas, the powerful Palestinian Sunni
militant group, broke with Mr. Assad over what it saw as his repression
of an uprising led by fellow Sunni Muslims, but has lately sought a
measure of reconciliation.
Nevertheless,
Palestinians are caught in the middle, and most of the camp’s 160,000
prewar residents, once the world’s largest concentration of Palestinian
refugees outside the West Bank and Gaza, have been scattered in what
some are calling a second Nakba, or catastrophe, the Palestinians’ name
for the events of 1948.
“For
over 700 days, the camp has been the victim of a draconian siege, which
has resulted in the death by starvation of at least 200 Palestinians,”
Saeb Erekat, the longtime Palestinian peace negotiator with Israel, said
in a statement issued Saturday that called on all parties to provide
civilians with safe passage out of the “death trap.”
He
said the humanitarian disaster underscored the vulnerability of
Palestinian refugees and their need for a “right of return” to reclaim
homes in what is now Israel, one of the thorniest issues in world
affairs. But for the time being, he added, “Yarmouk shall remain a
testament to the collective human failure of protecting civilians in
times of war.”
The
fighting in Yarmouk was also a testament to the complexity of the
Syrian conflict, where various insurgent groups are battling both the
government and the Islamic State amid shifting and contradictory
alliances.
At
first, the latest chapter appeared to have begun with low-level
disputes between ISIS militants in the neighboring suburb of Hajar
al-Aswad and members of a Hamas-affiliated militia in the camp, Aknaf
Bayt al-Maqdis.
But
as the Hamas-linked fighters clashed with ISIS and tried to keep it
from establishing a foothold in the camp, members of the Nusra Front, a
Qaeda affiliate that has a major presence there, did not help, several
residents said. Some said that despite its rivalry with the Islamic
State elsewhere, the Nusra Front actively prevented other insurgent
groups from sending reinforcements from nearby suburbs, and that many of
its members defected to ISIS.
Anwar
Raja, a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine-General Command, a pro-Assad group, said Nusra and the Islamic
State were “all the same” and the latest fighting showed that recent
talks to reach a settlement for the camp were “nonsense and promotion
for terrorism.”
In
spite of the difficulties they face, Yarmouk residents have continued
to produce films and music about their and Syria’s plight, making the
camp a symbol of resilience as well as suffering. But adding an ISIS
occupation onto everything else, one Palestinian resident of Damascus
said, “would be catastrophic.”
