In many ways, the story of Yarmouk camp is a familiar one from the Syrian war. Once a diverse and lively neighborhood, much of it now lies in ruins, its population scattered. Yet Yarmouk carries another weight on its shoulders. For decades, it was the heart of Palestinian life in Syria.
At Yarmouk, tens of thousands of refugees from the Nakba eventually found a home in exile, somewhere they could settle and build a new life of sorts.
Through the heady years of political revivalism that followed, the camp became the center of Palestinian life in Syria. All the factions were here, along with all the political intrigue, the joy and despair of that era. Syria’s civil war brought the darkest years: starvation, destruction and new displacement.
Mohammad al-Mouawad has seen it all. Born in 1957, Abu Wissam — as he is known to most — is the same age as the camp itself. “I was born in Midan, very close to the camp. We moved here when I was 2 months old. The camp and I grew up together,” he chuckles.
We meet on a road just off the main boulevard that stretches the length of the camp, which grew to resemble a neighborhood in the decades after its founding. There is dust in the air, and in the cold, washed-out light of a February morning the place looks abandoned. Before the war, more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees lived here; today, the population is in the hundreds. A few street vendors with handcarts roam the streets, but nobody answers their calls. Life remains, but the community has gone.
Mohammad’s parents fled their home in the village of Saffouriya, just north of Nazareth, during the Nakba and eventually settled in Damascus. In the mid-1950s, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees gave each Palestinian family a small plot of land and 300 Syrian pounds to construct their homes. “The refugees started building their homes with simple materials like wood, not concrete,” Abu Wissam says. “My father and his generation all thought that they would return to Palestine, so they didn’t make substantial buildings to start with. It was temporary. But that all changed with the Six-Day War.”
Just 10 years after Yarmouk was founded, the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 was a turning point in the relationship between Palestinian refugees and the governments of their host countries. The Israeli air force destroyed Arab air power in a matter of hours and, within days, had routed the armies, capturing the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. As many as 300,000 Palestinians fled their homes, adding to the 750,000 who were driven out during the Nakba.
It was a disaster for Palestinians, exposing the weakness and division of the regimes in Amman, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus that so often claimed to speak for them. For those already displaced during the Nakba, it forced a reassessment of the chances of return to Palestine. “I was young,” Abu Wissam recalls. “But I remember I was with my father at a bakery. He told me that Palestine was gone, and we would never go back. After that, my father decided to stay here and build a more substantial home.”
The failure of the conventional armies on the battlefield also prompted the turn toward unilateral armed resistance. It was during this period that the cocktail of Palestinian factions that made up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began to emerge as actors in their own right. The heightened militancy and political fervor of this time are often referred to more simply as “the revolution.”
“It was very exciting, everybody supported the revolution,” Abu Wissam recalls with an eager nostalgia. “Yarmouk was the center of the revolution. All the factions were here, particularly Fatah, and the Popular Front of George Habash. My brother joined Fatah at this time. Everyone wanted to fight, politically and with weapons. Everyone gave money and volunteered to help.”
But the factions were only allowed to exist in Syria by the grace of the Baathist regime, and that came at an increasingly heavy cost. When I ask about the relationship between Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat, Abu Wissam exhales. His nostalgia takes a rueful tone, as the names of old factions and militants roll off his tongue.
“Before Hafez al-Assad, the revolution was so strong,” he says. “But Assad — and all the other leaders, like Saddam [Hussein] — stole the revolution, using it for their own ends. Hafez al-Assad destroyed George Habash and created Ahmed Jibril and Saiqa [a Palestinian Baathist faction]. Saddam did the same thing, creating the Arab Liberation Front. Then there was Abu Nidal. This organization had just one job: to kill anyone against the Arab leaders. The organizations stopped thinking about Israel and just thought about fighting each other.”
Jibril was to become an important figure in the relationship between Yarmouk and the Syrian regime. He split from Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, forming what became known as the “General Command,” or PFLP-GC. The PFLP-GC was on the payroll of the Assad regime and became its enforcer against rival Palestinian factions.
But it was not just those who signed up for the armed groups that found themselves fighting on Assad’s orders. All young men in Syria, Palestinians included, were required to do military service. Palestinians had to join the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA), which itself came under the command of the Syrian Army, and in the late 1970s, Abu Wissam found himself sent to Lebanon with the PLA.
“The point of [the PLA] was to get rid of anything that could bother the [Assad] regime and to make them have all the blame for anything dirty that the regime wants to do, whether in Lebanon, Syria or other countries.”
“We felt bad,” Abu Wissam says, with a look that suggests the feeling has never left. “We were always asking, ‘Why do I want to fight Lebanese people or Jordanians? Why do I do the work of Hafez al-Assad?’ But we had no choice. All the Palestinian youth, in my generation, before and after, had to do this.”
It has been more than 40 years since the PLO evacuated from Beirut after the Israeli invasion of 1982, and yet young Palestinian men from Yarmouk are still fighting and dying in southern Lebanon. Only a block up the road from Abu Wissam, the derelict buildings look entirely empty, just bare breeze block walls punctured here and there by shell holes. But in the midst of these desolate streets, a banner has been strung across one of the side alleys. Muhammad al-Masri gazes down at us, wearing military fatigues and a gentle smile, the cupolas of Al-Aqsa Mosque superimposed behind him. It is a martyr’s banner, commemorating his death on Nov. 3, 2024, while fighting in southern Lebanon. He was 22.
Abu Wissam knocks on a black iron door and calls up to the empty window frames. A moment later, a woman pokes her head from the top floor, and soon enough the iron door swings open and we are ushered inside. We climb five flights of stairs, each floor badly damaged and seemingly abandoned. It is not until we reach the final flight, where potted plants begin to line the steps and a few pairs of shoes guard the threshold, that it becomes clear that this is somebody’s home. Mohammad’s mother returned to Yarmouk only recently and has fixed up two modest rooms where she now lives with her other son. It is sparse but homely, with an oil-burning stove in the middle of the room and some fairy lights strung across one corner. On the walls, there are three pictures: a small framed photograph of Mohammad as a young child in dungarees, a martyr’s poster of Mohammad as a young man and a portrait of Yasser Arafat.
Um Muhammad, as his mother is known, offers us coffee and then sits on the edge of the sofa, her hands in her lap. A beautiful white and ginger cat lounges on the rug among little pools of winter sunlight. “My son died in southern Lebanon fighting Israel,” she says. “He spent nearly nine months going back and forth to Lebanon. The last time he went was a month before his death.”
The family do not know the exact circumstances or location of Mohammad’s death, but they understand why he decided to go and fight. “His family is in Palestine, in Gaza,” his mother says. “He saw a video of his uncle after he was captured by Israeli forces. They were torturing him. After he saw that, he refused to stay without doing anything about it.
“He was assertive about his decision, especially after he saw his uncle being tortured and abused. And then there was the death of his cousin and his family being displaced from their homes. He took a stand and said, ‘I will take revenge for the people of Gaza.’ He made his decision by himself.”
Whereas Mohammad’s mother speaks with a distance that feels almost like shock, his brother answers directly, as if a question has been asked about his own decisions. “We are Palestinians from Gaza,” he says. “Our duty is to defend our country. Our family is in Gaza. My aunts and uncles, my cousins, are in Gaza. We see everything about the war on social media.” Each sentence ends with the same word, “Gaza,” as if he is saying: The explanatory power of the genocide needs no further proof.
“The last thing he said to me was, ‘In case I die, do not cry. I want you to be happy and proud. This is all I ask for,’ Um Mohammad says in her quiet and steady voice. “He was a good man. He had a good character. He was never violent or a troublemaker.”
Mohammad’s short life was marked by war. He was born in 2002 and was not even 10 when the Syrian uprising began. But his earliest years were a time of relative peace for the Palestinians of Syria. After the Oslo Accords, the political focus turned to the West Bank and Gaza.
Noor, who asked that her name be changed for this article, is another young Palestinian born in Yarmouk at the turn of the century. “My childhood there was very happy. It was beautiful,” she says fondly. The home Noor grew up in was built by her father’s family, with each uncle owning an apartment in one large building. “We used to play in the street with our neighbors. We used to play hide and seek and race each other.” But the respite from politics was temporary, and the lives of the generation born during those calmer years were about to be interrupted by an unparalleled cruelty, as Yarmouk was dragged into the morass of civil war.
As protests across Syria grew in 2011, the Assad regime would not allow Yarmouk to remain neutral. Nidal Bittar recounts how, in the summer of that year, the regime tried to divert attention from its domestic repression by encouraging and facilitating Palestinian protests against Israel in the Golan Heights. These “marches of return” resulted in scores of young Palestinians being shot by the Israeli military. Back in Yarmouk, anger at the Assad regime and its Palestinian enforcers in the PFLP-GC boiled over into protests.
Initially, Noor’s family went to stay with an aunt in the adjacent neighborhood. “But we thought, ‘OK, it’s not going to get worse, it’s going to be OK,’ so we went back,” she remembers. “But then we got stuck there. Things went crazy. Things went very bad. Very, very f—— bad.”
The fervor of discontent in Yarmouk had not escaped the attention of Syrian revolutionaries, who increased their efforts to recruit Palestinians to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and build a presence in the neighborhood. In December 2012, clashes broke out between the FSA and PFLP-GC. At this point, the regime used airstrikes against the camp for the first time, further enraging the residents. The regime and PFLP-GC were forced out but then besieged the neighborhood, leading to years of privation and misery.
“We tried to leave, but we couldn’t. [The regime] trapped us,” Noor says. “They wouldn’t allow anyone to move, and they cut off all sources of life: electricity, food, whatever. We reached a point where we couldn’t find a piece of bread or make a cup of tea. We didn’t have anything.
“I wasn’t actually capable of understanding the political situation. I was a kid. But I knew that this person who was allowing this to happen was a monster. He was a cruel, vicious human being. He left us to die.”
As the war stretched on, the situation in Yarmouk only continued to deteriorate. In 2015, the Islamic State group fought its way into the camp, prompting a pitiless bombing campaign by the regime. “I used to hear the helicopter above our building, and I would hear explosions,” Noor recalls. “I thought our house would be next. We were not afraid of dying from hunger anymore, we were afraid of dying from the explosions.” In 2016, the regime finally ordered all the residents of Noor’s district to leave or be buried beneath the rubble along with the Islamic State fighters. “Then they destroyed it,” she says with contempt.
At the start of the year, Noor went back to see her house for the first time since 2016. “It was very hard. I went there and I didn’t recognize the streets. I hardly recognized my house. It’s all destroyed. And I’m not just talking about the building itself, I’m talking about the whole neighborhood. It ripped my heart. I had my friends there and a lot of memories.” After the fall of the Assad regime, Noor’s family discussed the idea of going back to live in Yarmouk, but the reality is that there is nothing to go back to and no money to rebuild.
In many parts of Yarmouk, the destruction is total. Entire blocks are now great concrete carcasses, to be picked over but not resurrected. The buildings that still stand are damaged, many irreparably so. The war has turned homes inside out, effacing all privacy. In one building, the facade has been torn away to reveal interior walls painted with the silhouettes of palm trees, hills and a horse galloping along a beach. Beside the mural, a man-sized hole has been knocked through the walls by gunmen trying to avoid snipers.
We use concrete so frequently, as both material and metaphor, that we barely notice it. It is the foundation of our homes and the go-to idiom to describe giving substance to the conceptual. In Yarmouk, the distinction between these two meanings is blurred, and I cannot help but be reminded of Laleh Khalili’s work on the architecture of remembrance in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. Just like in Lebanon, the walls of Yarmouk provide the structure of homes and of remembrance. The buildings are named for families. The streets are named for lost towns and villages: Deir Yassin Street, Safad Street, Al-Quds Street. The walls are covered in murals that invoke a halcyon Palestine: the golden dome of Haram al-Sharif, the golden beaches of Gaza. These “footprints of memory,” to borrow Khalili’s phrase, help sustain the nationalist claims of Palestinians and connect their physical homes to their homeland. Their destruction in Yarmouk is a double domicide.
There was one more interview I wanted to do before writing about Yarmouk, but this time with an old friend. His mother’s family had lived in Yarmouk, and he spent many happy summers there before being forced — like so many of his generation — to flee Syria in 2012. You have probably heard about him already: Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student abducted by the Trump administration for playing a leading role in student protests against the genocide in Gaza.
I last spoke to Mahmoud a few days before he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. I wanted to gauge his thoughts on the article and see whether he would be happy to have a more formal interview. We talked a bit about Yarmouk, about his childhood memories and his mother’s family, but mostly we talked about his impending fatherhood and the situation in Syria. For those of you who have heard Mahmoud speak, or read his statements from prison, you will know how eloquent he is, and it is his words that help make some sense of the tragedy of Yarmouk.
In a recent statement from the detention facility in Louisiana, Mahmoud denounces the repression he has suffered as the actions of “a state terrified of an awakened public.” The reference is to the Trump administration, but he might as well be talking about Assad’s Syria or Israel’s occupation of Palestine. When Assad could no longer control the Palestinians of Yarmouk, he tried to break it over their heads. There is no escaping the scale of destruction in Yarmouk. While it is true that some, like Abu Wissam, have managed to stay throughout the war, the vast majority have left. Too many, like Mohammad al-Masri, will never come home.
There is no silver lining to this story, but there is reckoning. The Assad regime has fallen, but the Palestinians of Syria remain. And so, too — if Mahmoud is any yardstick — does their yearning for justice.
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