Living in mud-brick huts in the middle of the desert, under the toughest siege of Syria’s civil war, the 8,000 displaced people left to rot in the isolated Rukban camp thought they would never make it out alive.
For nine years, the Assad regime strangled supplies of food, water and medicines into the camp, closing even smuggling routes, earning it the moniker the forgotten “no man’s land”. This is despite the fact it is located just a few kilometres from a US military base and the Jordanian border and in territory that the US had de facto control over.
Families who lived there had fled chemical weapons attacks and besiegement in other parts of the country, hoping to escape via the Jordanian border which was all but sealed in 2015, leaving them stranded. For nearly a decade, they survived on rotten bread and bits of rice, watched their children die from preventable diseases, and prayed for survival in the wastelands where they lived.
The last UN convoy allowed into the camp was in September 2019. The only lifeline was a small grassroots US-based NGO – the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) – which begged the American military to allow it to ferry supplies from US bases and smuggle them into the camp.
“It was by far the toughest siege of the whole war,” says Ahmed Sheikh al-Ghanama, 27, originally from an eastern suburb of Damascus, in tears as he entered his home city for the first time in over a decade.
A teenager at the start of the 2011 revolution, which quickly descended into civil war, Ahmed joined the rebels and fled to Rukban after surviving an August 2013 sarin gas weapons attack on Ghouta, an eastern suburb of the capital, that is thought to have killed as many as 1,700 people.
