Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk find themselves at Ground Zero of jihadist battle - Middle East - Israel News | Haaretz
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Once an oasis of calm, the camp in south Damascus is now under siege, torn between militants from Islamic State, armed opposition groups and forces that are loyal to the Assad regime.
By Jack Khoury
The battles for control of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, which has been in the headlines over the past week after most of it was seized by Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL), disclose the power struggles between the militias that ostensibly constitute the armed opposition to the regime of President Bashar Assad as well as Palestinian groups in the refugee camps in Syria and in Lebanon.
It is clear that the Palestinian refugees in the camp are paying the heaviest price for the unrest. The overwhelming majority of the camp’s inhabitants have been repeatedly forced to relocate to different camps, which has placed their dreams of returning to Palestine even further from their reach.
Yarmouk was once Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, with a population of 180,000. In contrast to the refugee camps that were established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in Lebanon and in Jordan, after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 or the 1967 Six-Day War, the Yarmouk camp was established in 1957. The Syrian government gathered all of the Palestinian refugees who were living in the Golan Heights, in the area surrounding Damascus and a few other locations in Syria into an area of 2.11 square kilometers, eight kilometers south of the southernmost reaches of Damascus.
