For the past year, Yarmouk has stood as a stark symbol of the misery endured by civilians in Syria’s raging war, after an iconic picture of its hungry residents waiting for food handouts was broadcast to the world from New York’s Times Square.
Since the Islamic State surged into the Palestinian refugee camp on the southern edge of Damascus this month, the misery has turned into a nightmare.
The Islamic State fighters arrived with their trademark beheadings, decapitating three Palestinian fighters in the first days of the assault. The battles forced the United Nations to halt deliveries of the food on which an estimated 18,000 people besieged by government forces have relied for the past two years.
Simultaneously, the government launched the first wave of barrel bombings against the stricken camp, bringing death and destruction on a scale not seen before in this small corner of the war.
The camp’s only hospital was destroyed. Its doctors fled, and those injured in the bombings are going without medical treatment.
“It’s beyond a nightmare,” said Salim Salamah, a former Yarmouk resident who heads the Palestinian League for Human Rights and speaks daily to people living in the camp. Already weakened by months of hunger, he fears that they will soon start to die of starvation.
Camp residents reached via the Internet say they don’t know which to fear most — hunger, bombings or the Islamic State.
“We are afraid of everything, of the future and the unknown,” said Sameh Homam, an activist living in Yarmouk who uses a pseudonym because he is wanted by both the government and the Islamic State.
The United Nations, warning of a catastrophe unless food reaches the camp soon, on Saturday dispatched to Damascus the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, charged with caring for Palestinian refugees, in an attempt to negotiate access for humanitarian aid.
“We simply cannot stand by and watch a massacre unfold,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last week, urging concerted international action to save Yarmouk residents.
“In the horror that is Syria, the Yarmouk refugee camp is the deepest circle of hell,” he said.
But Yarmouk is a microcosm of the complexity as well as the anguish of Syria’s war, making solutions elusive. While the United States and its allies have rushed to offer military support to groups fighting the Islamic State elsewhere, Yarmouk presents challenges.
More of a neighborhood than a camp that had housed at least 160,000 people on the eve of Syria’s war, Yarmouk grew up around a settlement of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes after the creation of the state of Israel. Many of them have since fled again, and by the time the Islamic State assaulted the camp, only 18,000 remained.
The myriad factions competing for control of this small enclave of territory represent a mosaic of the disputes ravaging the wider Middle East.
Besides the Islamic State, they include affiliates of al-Qaeda, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and an array of Islamist and moderate Syrian rebel factions, some of whom are allies and others who are not.
Ringing the camp and enforcing the siege are forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom U.S. officials have repeatedly made clear they do not want to confront. The siege also encompasses a wider circle of neighborhoods adjoining Yarmouk that are under rebel control.
“It’s a battle within a battle in a siege within a siege,” explained Salamah, who escaped to Sweden in 2012.
The Islamic State fighters surged in from a besieged neighborhood south of the camp called Hajar al-Aswad, where the group had been steadily building up a presence in recent months. Their new push puts them within five miles of the heart of the capital, a reminder of their continued encroachment on territory in Syria even as they are on the retreat in Iraq.
The onslaught, however, may have as much to do with local disputes as with the larger war; many of the Islamic State fighters now overrunning the camp are former rebels who were expelled because they were criminals and then subsequently pledged allegiance to the extremists, camp residents say.
The residents say the Islamic State advance was aided by members of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate that is at war with the Islamic State elsewhere in the country.
Fighters with the main Palestinian faction defending the camp, the Hamas-affiliated Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, have been squeezed into a small strip of territory on the northern edge of Yarmouk, between the government and the Islamic State.
Yarmouk residents are afraid the government plans to take advantage of the Islamic State presence to storm the camp, something that would have been difficult for the international community to accept given the previous publicity about the suffering of its residents.
“The scariest thing for us is the regime, because the bombing is killing a lot of civilians and destroying the whole area,” said Jihad al-Shehabi, an activist in the camp who uses a pseudonym because he also is wanted by the government and by the Islamic State. The remaining residents would like to leave, he said, but they dare not because they fear government retribution.
For the United Nations, the biggest concern is hunger, said Chris Gunness, the spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The agency estimates that camp residents are surviving on 400 calories a day or less, he said, and conditions soon could become critical.
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