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All the cheerleading for intervention was not merely a product of practical interests; it was the reflection of fresh wounds, and not only the psychological kind. Besides the traumatic stress disorder that afflicted the entire camp, shrapnel scars pockmarked the bodies of many of residents, including children. Perhaps the only thing guarding Zaatari from slipping into an abyss of nihilism was the promise of return.
"When Bashar falls," a rail-thin 12-year-old girl told me beside a row of tattered tents, "I am going to walk from here all the way back home to Syria."
"In those sandals?" I asked, pointing to her flip-flops.
"No," she replied emphatically. "I am going to return in my bare feet."
In place of toilets, Zaatari residents are forced to dig ditches in the ground.
I was able to enter Zaatari thanks to a friend who, like the refugees inside the camp, asked not to be identified out of fear of imperiling family back in Syria. After a 45-minute drive northeast from Amman on a barren stretch of desert highway, we were near the Syrian border, and just south of Dara'a, the working-class city that gave birth to the Syrian revolution. By the road outside the camp, a line of refugees hawked third-hand merchandise; among them was a small boy in a tank top saturated in dirt trying to sell a single rusty hammer. I had not been able to secure permission from the government press office in time to enter the camp today and would have to slip through the military cordon. At a checkpoint, as processions of families squeezed beside our car, I kept my gaze straight ahead, hoping none of the soldiers would notice me. We rolled by slowly without stopping. At a second checkpoint, we passed through undetected.
We parked inside, in a fenced-off section reserved for the array of NGOs and foreign aid agencies stationed in the camp. It was the only place in Zaatari where I could find toilets or running water. From there, we walked along a dirt road beside the perimeter, past a Jordanian intelligence station on our right and a long row of trenches to our left, freshly dug by the military to prevent smuggling. The ditch offered a rare recreation space for a group of young boys, who took turns tumbling into it from atop a dirt mound. My friend recognized three of them from a visit to the camp a week ago, telling me how they lifted their shirts to show her the shrapnel scars decorating their torsos.
Finally, we were on the main road in the western section of the camp, a dust-choked pedestrian thoroughfare lined with makeshift shops. Behind a barbed wire fence surrounding a French military field hospital, a sign marked the road as AVENUE DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES. An arrow on the sign pointed west and read, "Paris -- 3305 KM." This is where the Zaatari's first wave of residents set up camp over a year ago. Though the aid agencies have kept them in decent health, as I walked down narrow lanes flanked with UNHCR tents, residents emerged to show me the holes they have had to dig in place of toilets, and to complain about the food. "Everything is terrible here," a man from Dara'a named Ayoub told me. "The grain they give us is the kind we used to throw out back in Syria."
The Champs Elysees.
During the early days of Zaatari, coming and going was far easier for the refugees. But in recent months, the Jordanian military has established a virtual cordon sanitaire around the the camp, taking strict measures to keep residents inside and harrying those who attempted to escape into Jordan. Inside a caravan off the "Champs Elysees," a group of women who fled Dara'a over 11 months ago told me their IDs had been seized by the military, effectively trapping them in the camp. Almost all of those I spoke to in Zaatari said they had not left their sunbaked confines since they arrived. And many told me that thanks to the military's heavy hand, the flow of refugees into the camp had been reduced to a trickle, with thousands stuck on the border, including family members in dire health.
On the other side of the camp, where the newer arrivals live, conditions were perceptibly worse. "All of the people here are thieves," a widow from Dara'a named Jamila complained to me. "It is the world of the most powerful, where all the weak get weeded out."
Jamila fled five months ago from her town after regime forces killed four of her cousins. "They burned my house and I left with nothing but the clothes I'm wearing right now -- with this same scarf on," she told me. We sat on mats inside a cramped tent with two of her friends and six of their children. While Jamila poured me rounds of coffee into a small cup, she heaped curses on the self-appointed "street leaders" who took the caravans supplied by UNHCR and sold them back to residents for 200 dinars (around $280). When a snake attacked her inside her tent, she said she was forced to move in with her friends. "I've been dying from the heat here and they won't give us a caravan," she exclaimed. "I'm terrified here, I'm all alone. Why can't I have a caravan?"
Walking east through Zaatari. The camp is vast -- "a really big prison," as one resident put it to me.
A 7-year-old boy with spiky, sandy blond hair named Mansour interrupted the interview several times to ask me for 200 dinars so his family could buy a caravan. The tin structure was the only thing that could provide them with a semblance of protection from the ravages of their environment. Mansour's mother complained that wild dogs had been attacking their family every night for the past two weeks, forcing her husband to forgo sleep to keep watch over the tent. Even with a Who's Who of international aid groups encamped a few hundred yards away, adequate shelter has proven elusive for residents of Zaatari.
When I began to photograph the children in the tent, the women reflexively covered their faces with headscarves. "Look how afraid we are," one of the women's husbands grumbled to me.
The man had practiced law for 25 years in Dara'a, working with the government and supporting both Assads, Hafez and Bashar. But after the regime's harvest of death visited his town, he was forced to switch sides. "For you," he said to me in an eerily calm tone, "this is an adventure. You will hear our stories and then you'll go back to your world. As for me, my whole future is destroyed. I left a good income and a good life to come here, and now I can't even protect my own son from wild dogs."
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