On Syria's southern border, proof of the world's failures

by Hassan Hassan Link

Last week, I spent four days with the UAE's Red Crescent, visiting various camps, neighbourhoods and tent sites in Jordan's Al Mafraq area. It is one thing to hear stories of suffering, and quite another to listen to children, women and men - victims of Bashar Al Assad's brutality - speaking about what they have suffered. The consequences of this war will be long-lasting, as Syria's children - the country's future - bear a significant portion of Assad's aggression.

The current circumstances in which refugees live - in official camps, with families or in tents - are an easy recipe for fatal illness. For many refugees, wounded or in poor health when they arrive, life across the border means one war has ended but another has just begun.

In the tent site where Radwan lived, other children are unkept, their hair, eyelashes, nails and ears filled with layers of sand because they have no place to bathe. Their state of health is equally poor. One boy I met had recently fallen, fracturing his hand on impact. A doctor explained to me that malnutrition had made his bones brittle.

When a 6-year-old boy was offered a bottle of water by a female Emirati volunteer, he grabbed it and finished the half-litre in one go. A 10-year-old child lost the ability to speak because of trauma, according to a teacher in the study unit in the UAE's field hospital in Al Mafraq.

In many cases, injuries or the effect of the violence would be discovered by coincidence, sometimes too late. Some refugees had bullets or shrapnel in their bodies for weeks. In one case, an 8-year-old girl began having fits three months after she reached Jordan; doctors later traced it to bomb fragments lodged in her skull.

Amman says the refugee crisis is draining its annual budget while only one third of the estimated $700 million (Dh2.57billion) needed to care for refugees is provided by donor countries. Indeed, Jordan is shouldering a large part of this burden. As the number of refugees increases - up to 600 Syrians a day are crossing the border - even the Jordanian army is being pulled in, frequently clashing with Syrian forces to protect fleeing refugees.

And yet the aid pledged to date has not been enough to stem this crisis. As the physical and emotional toll on Syrians, and especially children, grows, Jordan will need help providing adequate medical checks, food and housing to all the Syrian refugees in need.

Today, refugees mostly live on the handouts of passers-by. Housing or tents are provided by Jordanian families. Access to health and education outlets, meanwhile, are nearly nonexistent. Some tents I visited were made of plastic sacks with no mattresses. Killing scorpions has become a daily chore for families.

Many of the refugees had to leave their homes in Syria quickly, carrying little with them beyond their clothes. To survive, some are now marrying their daughters off, often minors and to strangers. A taxi driver in Amman told me that four of his colleagues had married Syrian girls, on condition of providing homes to them and their families. He said he planned to marry a refugee but changed his mind after considering the costs of hosting her family.