Displacement camps in the line of fire as northwestern Syria’s factions clash

IDLIB — At five o’clock Wednesday morning, Umm Reda (a pseudonym) and her five children woke up with a start in the Atma displacement camps in the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-controlled Idlib countryside. Outside their plastic tent, they could hear the buzz of bullets and mortars fired during clashes between HTS and the Syrian National Army’s (SNA) Third Legion.

Umm Reda and her children were alone that “terrifying night,” she said, as her husband stays in the Sarmada area and visits the family once a week. “I knocked on my neighbor’s door to shelter from the bullets in their cement-roofed house, and to ease my children’s terror,” she said. Umm Reda’s family has lived in the camp since they were displaced from Kafr Sajna, in the southern Idlib countryside, three years ago. 

Like Umm Reda, residents of the Atma, Sfuhun, Umm al-Shuhada, al-Jazira and Kafr Sajna camps—which lie in HTS-controlled Idlib, adjacent to SNA territory in the northern Aleppo countryside—faced hours of terror amid clashes near the camps.

Fighting broke out near the camps on Tuesday evening, after HTS entered the fray of intra-SNA clashes that began on Monday. The hardline group intervened to support the Hamza Division, an SNA faction implicated in the assassination of media activist Muhammad Abdul Latif (Abu Ghannoum) and his pregnant wife last week. 

After an investigation pointed to the involvement of members of “al-Hamzat,” as the faction is locally known, in the killing, the SNA’s Third Legion stormed headquarters belonging to the faction in al-Bab and the surrounding area on Monday and Tuesday. The fighting then spread, reaching the Afrin area of the Aleppo countryside.  

Camps in SNA-controlled territory are also in the line of fire, including the camps of Deir Balout and al-Muhammadiya in Afrin, which are close to the area of current clashes. Several civilians have been injured, according to media activist Fadi Shubat, who lives in al-Muhammadiya, and residents fled areas closest to the fighting. 

In a video clip media activist Fadi Shubat posted on his Facebook page, gunfire can be heard in the al-Muhammadiya displacement camp in the Afrin area of northern Aleppo province, 12/10/2022 (Fadi Shubat)

“Four people, including a woman, were injured due to the clashes, and the civil defense could not reach the camp to take them to the hospital,” Shubat said. Medical staff also could not reach the health center in the camp on Wednesday, “as the road between Jenderes city and the town of Deir Balout is cut off,” so residents had to take the injured “by private car to a medical point outside the camp,” he added. 

Residents of the Deir Balout and al-Muhammadiya camps—around 1,600 people, mostly displaced from south Damascus—called for “the camps to be kept out of the clashes, and for the entry of ambulances to be facilitated,” Shubat said, but these demands have not been met. 

One nurse who works at the medical point in al-Muhammadiya confirmed that staff had not been able to reach it as of the time of publication of this report. Medical personnel instructed one civilian in the camp on “how to deal with another civilian’s injury, over the phone, because we haven’t been able to get him out,” he said. 

During the clashes on Tuesday night, two babies were born in al-Muhammadiya and Deir Balout, and with medical staff unavailable a local midwife oversaw the deliveries, Shubat said. 

Residents of camps within the firing zone between HTS and the Third Legion fled towards other camps, according to Muhammad Ismail, a resident of Idlib’s Sfuhun camp. He fled with his family to the Mashhad Rouhin camps in the Deir Hassan area of the northern Idlib countryside to escape the fighting, he told Syria Direct. 

The Syrian Response Coordination Group, an Idlib-based NGO, documented displacement at more than nine camps in the Idlib and Aleppo countryside on Wednesday. Six of the camps came under fire during the clashes, leading to “deaths and injuries,” the organization said in a statement posted on Facebook. 

Ever since clashes first broke out in SNA areas of the Aleppo countryside on October 10, residents of the al-Muhammadiya and Deir Balout camps expected the area where they live to see military tension “because the camps are close to the Deir Balout checkpoint, which saw an unprecedented mobilization by the SNA,” Shubat said. But he did not expect the fighting to reach the extent it has. 

Civilian cars were held at the SNA checkpoint near Deir Balout on Tuesday evening, where fighters did not allow vehicles to enter their areas of influence or return to the HTS-controlled Atma area, said Haitham Mahmoud, one driver who was detained. He told Syria Direct he was held at the checkpoint from 10pm to 3am, and claimed personnel there told him they would be used “as a human shield” against an expected HTS attack. 

Mahmoud, who lives in the Atma camps, had gone to Azaz city in the SNA-held northern Aleppo countryside on Tuesday to meet relatives who entered Syria from Turkey via the Jarablus border crossing for a visit. On their way back to HTS-held Idlib, “unluckily, our arrival at the checkpoint coincided with military tension between the two sides,” he said. His guests had to “walk on foot from the crossing to the Atma camps,” while he and other drivers were held for five hours before “we were allowed to pass, but through side roads between the olive fields.” 

As clashes expand and grow in frequency, Shubat has considered fleeing the camp where he lives with his wife and infant son for the surrounding orchards. “But with heavy weapons being used, we have no other choice but to stay inside the camp,” he said. Still, “our tents are not bulletproof.” 

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.