Middle East Strains Under the Weight of Syria's Two Million Refugees

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By NOUR MALAS

September 3, 2013, 8:30 p.m. ET

The U.N. reported Tuesday that a staggering two million refugees have fled Syria’s civil war. WSJ’s Nour Malas traveled to the neighboring nations of Iraq and Jordan to assess the situation. (AP Photo/Raad Adayleh)

ZAATARI CAMP, Jordan—With the Syrian refugee numbers passing the two million mark Tuesday, governments and aid officials are coming to the same reckoning as Mohammad Hariri, an air-conditioner repairman who came here for one night and stayed for a year.

"My opinion is now, on the ground and politically, it's going to take a long, long time," he says. 

In early August 2012, Mr. Hariri brought his three children across the border to escape some particularly intense shelling. Today, the camp remains his home—along with some 130,000 other Syrians.

"We used to see refugees on television," says Mr. Hariri, who is also a neighborhood camp leader. "We didn't know what it meant to be one."

The camp, Zaatari, now ranks as Jordan's fourth-largest city, the United Nations says, and as the second-largest refugee camp in the world. Only Dadaab in Kenya, with more than 400,000 people, is bigger, the U.N. estimates.

"Most refugee camps in the world take decades to populate," says Andrew Harper, the country representative in Jordan for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Mr. Harper oversees the U.N. aid effort for over half a million Syrians there.

Down the sandy road from Mr. Hariri's home—a trailer paid for by a Saudi businessman whose name is on a steel plate tacked to the wall—at least 30,000 kiosks form a bustling mini-economy run by other Syrian refugees. Between butchers and grocers, there are signs that residents don't see themselves leaving anytime soon: a ladies' salon, a costume store, a wedding-gown shop.

Across the region, Syrian refugees are competing with locals for mid- to low-wage jobs. Within Jordan, Syrians are also taking some work from Egyptian migrants, who are starting to complain. Water has stopped flowing into some northern Jordanian villages for periods of a month or more as demand soars, village residents say.

It is a scene playing out across the Middle East. In Lebanon and Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, Syria's refugee exodus has stretched resources, sparked political and sectarian tensions, and changed economies and demographics. 

"We were prepared for 200, 300 people coming per night, but then all of a sudden you started having 2,000, 3,000 people every day," says Mr. Harper of the U.N. "It's been 12 months of continuous humanity crossing into Jordan."

As the threat of U.S. military strikes sends thousands more across borders daily, the refugee crisis has started to ripple beyond the region. The number of Syrians applying for asylum in European Union countries in 2012 tripled, to just over 24,000, from the year before, a European Parliament report said Tuesday. 

Jordan and Lebanon, Syria's economically weakest neighbors, have become the focus of efforts by the World Bank to help them cope with refugees, including potentially setting up an assistance fund—the first sign that the scope of the crisis has moved from emergency response to development aid. The World Bank said that, at the Lebanese government's request, it is collaborating with U.N. agencies, the EU, and other partners to assess the impact of the refugee influx on Lebanon. 

"We're in a chronic situation," says Ted Chaiban, director of emergency programs for the U.N. Children's Fund, "with a wide number of countries affected."

On Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency—which has called Syria's crisis the worst since Rwanda's—said the number of Syrian refugees surpassed two million, rising by 1.8 million over the past 12 months. Including the 4.25 million more people displaced inside Syria, the agency said, there are more Syrians forcibly displaced than currently is the case with any other country.

In interviews in four countries bordering Syria, local and international aid officials characterized Syria's crisis as one of the most far-reaching and troublesome in the region's modern history. In humanitarian terms, they suggest it is the most serious refugee crisis globally since the start of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo more than two decades ago. That conflict generated a refugee problem that continues today.

The destruction within Syria has few parallels. In the Lebanese civil war, Beirut bore the brunt of urban damage. In the Bosnian war, Sarajevo became a global symbol of the destruction and human suffering exacted by siege and warfare. But inside Syria, "You have five or six major population centers affected," says Unicef's Mr. Chaiban.

Much like with the exodus of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, neighboring states have absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees. But they are now recalculating, with the Palestinian experience specifically in mind. 

 

In Jordan and Lebanon—both home to large quasi-permanent Palestinian populations, and now, the bulk of the region's Syrian refugees—officials have over the past three months alternately closed borders to new streams of Syrians or tightened entry restrictions, locals and international aid officials say. The measures reflect a widening concern, officials in both countries say, that the influx may only grow in coming months.

In Lebanon, Syria's fragile and much smaller neighbor, the aid effort has focused nearly as much on helping the host Lebanese community as it has on providing for the refugees themselves. A USAID project, for instance, aims to boost electricity generation in the north so locals don't blame the newcomer Syrians for straining the power supply. 

Lebanon is a main route for aid delivery into Syria. So, the closure of borders or the outbreak of war in Lebanon is a particular concern, regional aid officials say.

Tensions have run so high that the government is taking the controversial step of authorizing temporary settlements to better control the refugee deluge from Syria. The move is creating a sticky political debate there: Lebanon remains haunted by its past relationship with refugees—specifically, Palestinians—whose presence in an earlier era played a big role in dragging the country into a 15-year civil war.

"Lebanon has had to surrender to the reality that there is a need for camps," says Wissam Tarif, a human-rights expert who has coordinated the aid response for Syrian refugees in several neighboring countries. 

Turkey, which shares the longest border with Syria, has taken in the widest range of Syrians. Impoverished villagers, wealthy businesspeople, ethnic Kurds and military defectors all turned the Turkish border region, and cities farther inland, into a combustible microcosm of the conflict tearing Syria apart.

The latest spillover is a new type of challenge for authorities: disease. Public health services and the water sanitation system have all but broken down in rebel-held northern Syria. As a result, Turkish officials say, they fear the spread of infectious diseases into Turkey from across the border.

"This is difficult," says Ayse Gokkan, mayor of Nusaybin, a Turkish border town. "Diseases don't know of borders."

Iraq had quietly, slowly received 150,000 Syrians with little impact—until a three-day period last month. Between the 15th and 17th of August, at least 25,000 Syrians flooded Iraq's northern Kurdistan region. Some were fleeing fighting between Kurdish and Islamist militant factions, but many more say they were simply seeking a better life. 

Within 10 days, a settlement sprouted on the edges of Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan's capital. It poses an agonizing dilemma for the regional government there, which officials say wants to portray itself as the protector of Syria's Kurds but doesn't have the financial prowess to do so.

"Of course it is difficult. Turkey and Jordan, we are not comparable to them," says Shawket Berbihary, a local government official overseeing the Peshkhabour crossing in Iraq's Dohuk governorate. "They are states, we are a regional government."

On Aug. 17, thousands of Syrians trekked over a small bridge usually used to transport goods over a tributary of the Tigris River, which separates Syria from northern Iraq. Weighed down by the mass of Syrian families, the bridge plunged to less than a foot above the water's surface, Mr. Berbihary says.

"We were a moment away from a catastrophe," he says.

Officials closed the crossing to repair the bridge and diverted the refugees to a nearby point at Sahilla. There, however, Syrians must traverse desert plains on foot, or on hired donkeys, from the last Syrian Kurdish checkpoint to Iraqi territory.

On a recent day, in the midday heat, women carried as many as three children apiece and plastic bags full of belongings into Iraq. Stopping first at a table laid with water bottles, they stood in line to dump cold water on their children's reddened faces before moving into a tent set up by the U.N., where they waited for buses to take them to Erbil. They are sent there because Domiz, Iraq's largest camp for Syrian refugees, is already over capacity.

Mr. Berbihary and other officials say the government has diverted 20% of its budget to Syrian refugee aid. But beyond the immediate crisis response, some KRG officials fret the influx is quickly setting up long-term consequences. 

At the Kawrgosk camp outside Erbil, patched together last month to host 15,000 Syrians, men leave their wives and children in the tents to work in construction during the day, several families said in interviews. Many said they wanted to start building a new future now, rather than later try to salvage what was left of their war-tattered lives in Syria.

Small children roam the shabby tent settlement, adjacent to a chicken pen and herd of goats. Where there was an open, dusty field two weeks ago, there are now electricity poles, water trucks and a mobile field clinic.

The camp is being expanded to take in another 5,000 refugees, U.N. officials say. Another camp is being built with a concrete foundation and wall "to prevent the chaotic proliferation of living space and families," a local U.N. official says.

Petty crime is on the rise and hostility runs high toward a Western aid effort seen by Syrians as lacking.

 

To better manage Zaatari, the U.N. has devised a new plan to administer the camp's 12 quarters through local councils, with the oversight of Jordanian police. Eventually, refugees who run businesses in the camp will be required to pay for basic services like electricity and water. Local leaders like Mr. Hariri, who now oversees 21 streets in an informal arrangement with camp officials, will help administer sections within each quarter.

A Jordanian official called Zaatari "a slum" that posed a security threat to the country. 

U.N. and other aid officials defend the camp's management, saying it has evolved extraordinarily well given a funding shortfall and the scope of needs from poverty-stricken and traumatized refugees. "It has been a crisis of expectations," a Western aid official at Zaatari says.

On a street in the camp that might seem straight out of an old market in Homs or Aleppo—selling Syrian sweets drenched in syrup, white cheeses, knickknacks of all sorts—Mr. Hariri strolled through, greeting shopkeepers. Zaatari's main market is called the Champs-Élysées, after the famous Paris avenue. Camp officials say it was given the name after French military officials set up a field hospital at one end of the street. Syrians, twisting the name, have taken to calling it the "Cham-s-Elysees," Cham being one name for Syria in Arabic.

Mr. Hariri, recalling his arrival here a year ago, says the camp "started as an experiment." Sand would reach mid-shin, he says, gesturing below his knees. Scorpions and snakes were common sightings, he and other residents say.

Today, he and others are reluctantly settling in. "I remember my neighborhood, my friends, my country, every day. I still remember all this," he says. But at the same time, "We forgot what life is like outside this place. I'm used to living here now." 

At the shop selling wedding gowns, store-owner Abu Muhammad says he receives about 20 bride-to-be customers a week. "They used to say they want to wait it out, until the war is over. But no one wants to wait any longer," he says.

—Ali A. Nabhan in Baghdad, Ayla Albayrak in Istanbul and Matina Stevis in Athens contributed to this article.

Getting Away From Syria

 The United Nations' Zaatari refugee camp, shown here in July 2013, holds roughly 120,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan about 8 miles from the Syrian border.

The conflict in Syria has already forced more than 2 million people out of the country, and the figure is expected to reach 3.5 million by year-end, U.N. officials said Tuesday. Thousands of Syrians streamed across a bridge over the Tigris River into Iraq, Aug. 15. 

Syrian refugees crossed into Iraq at the Peshkhabour border point in Dahuk, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, Aug. 20. Almost 5,000 citizens a day on average are flowing out of Syria, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said. 

Syrians arrived at a camp in Arbil, about 220 miles north of Baghdad, Aug. 16.
Refugees reached out for food being handed out in Dahuk, Iraq, Aug. 20. As of the end of August, the agency counted 716,000 refugees in Lebanon, 515,000 in Jordan, 460,000 in Turkey, 168,000 in Iraq and 110,000 in Egypt. 
A man delivered mattresses at a camp in Arbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Aug. 19. 
The U.N. agency said more than half of the Syrian refugees were children. Here, Syrian children at a camp in Yayladagi, Turkey, Tuesday. 
A woman hung laundry outside a tent at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, near Arbil, Aug. 26, 2013. 
Syrian families crossed into Iraq at the Peshkhabour border point in August.
Syrian refugees crossed into Iraq at the Peshkhabour border point in August.
Refugees from Syria prayed during the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the Zaatari refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan, Aug. 8.
A police officer talked to Syrian refugees on the border of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Aug. 19.

Syrian refugees took a rest on their way to Dahuk, northwest of Baghdad, Aug. 20.