'They’ve forgotten us': The Syrians unable to return home inside their own country

For Qibal Abdulhadi, seeing people around her put years of displacement behind them and return to their homes is almost unbearable.

“Our neighbours returned to their villages and rebuilt their houses,” she told The National from the shack that has been her home for the past decade, in the Al Karamat camp in Idlib, Syria. “I saw pictures of them and I envy them, because they have the money to rebuild.”

Qibal fled her village of Al Lataminah in rural Hama province during the civil war when her home was destroyed during heavy bombing of the area by forces loyal to the former regime of Bashar Al Assad.

A year after the fall of the Assad family’s 50-year, iron-fisted rule over Syria, she is among the millions of Syrians still displaced within the country and unable to go home and rebuild because they lack the money to do so.

“I want to go back, but I don’t have a house to go back to,” she said. “Everyone here is in a terrible situation.”

A combination of aid cuts and the sheer stresses on the new government in Damascus mean that life is as hard as it has ever been for residents of Al Karamat, which is close to the Turkish border.

The camp's residents are some of the 760,000 people who remain internally displaced in this pocket of north-western Syria, a government migration management official told The National. Before the fall of the Assad regime, the area had been long held by rebels and hosted people seeking refuge from bombing, forced conscription and arrest elsewhere in the country.

Al Karamat's residents are also among the roughly six million who remain internally displaced across Syria as a whole, according to the International Organisation for Migration. This is one of the huge challenges still facing Syrian authorities.

While nearly two million people have returned to their homes since the Assad regime’s fall, enormous destruction, poverty and continuing instability are preventing many more from doing so.

Shanty town

The Al Karamat camp is a shanty town-like cluster of rough breeze block buildings, with electricity supplied only by solar panels. Sewage water runs into the empty homes of those who have left over the past year.

Of the 11,000 households here before the Assad regime fell, around half have returned to their original homes, mainly in rural Hama province, says camp manager Yassin Salloum Adahina.

Evidence of those who have left Al Karamat is all around, in the shells of their former homes, which stand as peculiar skeletons among the houses of those who remain. Some people dismantled their homes to use the components for rebuilding in their home villages, taking with them tarpaulin roofs, breeze blocks and sheet metal. Children in Al Karamat have taken over other homes with hammers and their hands as makeshift playgrounds.

But others, like Qibal, who is a mother of seven, simply cannot afford to leave. Working eight hours a day as a farm labourer earns her just 100 Turkish lira ($2.30) – the common currency in this part of Syria, which is under heavy influence from its northern neighbour.