“Every day in Syria a new plane dropped a bomb on us. We ran away [to another part of Syria]; then bombs also fell there, so we ran here. This is a very bad climate—there is a shortage of water. Sometimes they don’t bring the water and the taste is bad.,.All the children in the camp have diarrhea from the water or the food. The biggest quantity of food is stolen by a tribe. When there are food shortages sometimes we don’t get any for one week…It’s not a life.” 50-year-old woman trapped at the Jordan-Syrian border, as told to Doctors Without Borders in May 2016
We were pulling away from the border when a sandstorm came on, fast and hard. In front of the car was swirling sand; behind, the sky was clotted black. Everything went red, and then dim, as though we were passing through a cave. It only took a few minutes for the wind to pass, but in that time, it raged through a nearby refugee camp, tearing apart flimsy structures and blanketing everything with dirt.
The border between northeastern Jordan and Syria didn’t look like a border. It was an endless stretch of sand. It was an informal camp and city and economy, a pile of fabric tents and plastic canteens, populated with families and smugglers. A man-made dune separated the land that was theoretically Syria from that of Jordan, and separated some 80,000eighty thousand people from life in Jordan and confinement in the desert.
As the Syrian war forced millions of people to flee, the historically porous borders around Syria remained open for the first few years of the conflict. But in 2014 they began snapping shut. Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan—countries that had accepted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees—were now following Europe’s lead and adopting policies of containment. By early January 2016, tens of thousands of Syrians were trapped at the edges of their country. The growing population at Jordan’s northeastern border lived in a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
The closest I got to one of two settlements, called the Rukban berm (for the sand dunes marking Jordanian and Syrian territory), was to stand on this small ridge and look out over it. It was May 2016; I was at the berm as a humanitarian-affairs officer with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). We were prohibited from actually entering the camp and had to set up our mobile health clinic on a swatch of land on the other side of the dune. The Jordanian government tightly controlled every hour of access to the berm, citing safety concerns. MSF determined we couldn’t construct a clinic there, because there was no security at night, and the structures other aid agencies put up had gone missing. Instead, we drove in and out every day in trucks that transformed into a women’s clinic, a pediatric room, and a pharmacy. Jordanian doctors and nurses, working with a smaller number of expat medics, saw, on average, two hundred people a day.
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