The Syrian civil war's cities of the damned - GQ.co.uk Getty Images The Syrian civil war's cities of the damned By Stuart McGurk 13 March 15 The Syrian civil war has forced more than one million people from their bomb-ravaged homes into neighbouring Jordan. But with no end to the chaos in sight and the new threat of Isis, the exiles know they may never go home. GQ reports from Azraq and the refugee camp being built as a desert city. A father escorts his daughter home from school 19 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen Every morning, for more than six months now, Houmam Ahmed, 42, father of three, wakes at first light. It's cold, but not overly so, and he is wrapped warmly in one of the many blankets he managed to save from his home before he fled. It is November now, and the temperature, though it rises to more than 38C in the height of summer, is now a chilly 8C or so. Sometimes he sees his breath, but the first thing he hears, from outside on the dusty veranda that he built himself, is birdsong.Some days he will remember he bought two canaries, following an arduous three-day journey via smugglers. He will remember being carted from car to van to truck across the Syrian border and into Jordan, along with the eight family members he and his brother took with them; he will remember the journey that wiped out nearly all his savings, the 30 Jordanian dollars he had left, the city they stopped at, and the two caged canaries he bought to remind them all of home. And he might think of the two caged canaries they left behind, the ones his brother tended to, the ones still in his garden, near his olive tree, who surely sing no more. He will look around his 6x4.5m metal container home, one that he has fastidiously altered and added to and modified in the months since he arrived. He may look to the floor, which he first cleared of stones, then levelled with concrete, then padded with foam insulation. He may look to the walls, which he covered with the 18 grey blankets his family collected when they arrived, and which now act as both wallpaper and insulation, to keep the chill of the cold banished without and the ignoble sight of corrugated metal walls hidden within. He may even look at the kitchen pan holders, wardrobe and cupboard, all of which he made himself after working as a labourer for the Norwegian Refugee Council building the community centre, each day asking if he could take the spare wood home. Back in Syria he was a minicab driver, but he has discovered himself to be a talented carpenter in a crisis. At a pinch, he may think of his new garden, small as it is, created in the half-metre gap between his 27-sq metre home and his brother's, in which currently grows a patch of spinach, and for which his son has big plans, or, at least, as big as it will allow. The soil is not great, the alkaline concentration makes growing things hard, but he hopes, at some point, for some more seeds, and he hopes they will grow. Houmam may think of the horrors he has seen and haunt him still. His brother-in-law arrested by the regime and not seen since; the cousin he witnessed tortured and killed. He may think of the horrors he has seen; the ones that haunt him still. The brother-in-law arrested by the regime two years ago, and not seen since; the cousin he witnessed tortured and killed; his head put in a vice by soldiers, tightened, he says, "closer, closer, closer" until his skull finally cracked.Yet some mornings, before he is fully himself, he will forget all this. He will hear the birdsong of the two canaries. And he will think, for just a moment or two, before he remembers he has no hope of return ("Like Palestine, maybe I will never go back. It can't be cured or saved. My country is on fire"), before he remembers he is in Azraq, in the desert, in Jordan, 55 miles from the Syrian border, in what will soon be one of the largest refugee camps in the world, yet one that thinks it's a city; the one where he may live for a few years, the one where he may live forever, that he is home. Visually impaired refugee Hassan al-Hawash with his niece - whose parents are missing in Syria - and his son inside their shelter in Azraq 20 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen In the week I spend in Azraq, it is clear it is no ordinary refugee camp, but then Syria is no ordinary conflict. A war without end requires a refugee camp without a check-out time. That's Azraq. It's not so much a camp as a city-in-waiting.When the first refugees fled across the Jordanian border in July 2012, following the 2011 Syrian uprising against the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, which had plunged their country into a bloody civil war, the UNHCR - the United Nations High Council for Refugees - had less than a week to set up a camp for them. UNHCR workers tell me how they laboured through the night, pegging up tents in the headlights of their trucks until the batteries ran dry.Situated just eight miles from the Syrian border, the Zaatari camp was meant as all modern refugee camps are meant, ever since the UNHCR's formation in 1950 to aid Europeans displaced by the Second World War: a rapid yet temporary relief. The relief remains rapid, but has often proved less than temporary. Since Zaatari was formed in 2012, Syria has become a maelstrom of competing wars. The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) - in truth, never more than an uncomfortable mash of militias, an idea rather than an army, teachers and farmers taking up rusted rifles - has since splintered into groups of the original rebels, their more extremist elements, and their more extremist elements still, now all fighting each other as well as the troops of Assad. In all, even a conservative estimate puts more than a thousand warlords, militias, armed gangs and insurgent groups in Syria, all fighting in a war that no longer has a centre of gravity.Then, last year, came Isis.Acting far more like a genuine army than the FSA ever did - and with millions of US dollars in funding, partly from horse-trading hostages to the countries who'd buy - they tore through the country, razing villages to the ground as they went, taking women as slaves, murdering anyone who would not convert to their brutal brand of hardline Islamism, making Syria's hell on earth that much hotter.Finally, the coalition airstrikes began against them - and Houmam Ahmed was of course right. There was no return. In all, more than three million Syrians have fled the country. It is a crisis not just without precedent in number, but perhaps more importantly, without equal in hope. There is none.In Azraq, I speak to a Syrian dentist, Tarek, who fled Assad's regime and is now with his wife and five boys, in his own 6x4.5m metal box home. It is a bit chilly - they didn't arrive with their own blankets, so can't use the UNHCR ones as home insulation; the chill desert wind occasionally whips through the gaps between the roof and walls - but they are safe. He is 34, has a sad, careworn face, one that has creased too much, with large eyes, and mostly stares at the floor, but a ready, dry humour when called on.He fled, he says, when it became clear even medical professionals were targets in this war without sides. His most recent job had seen him working for a hospital on the outskirts of Damascus, in charge of ordering the medical equipment and supplies. His deputy in this post was kidnapped - he assumes by Assad's soldiers, but can't be sure - and hasn't been seen since. "I will not set foot in Syria again for 50 years. What comes after Assad?" To most of the fighters, he says - Assad's men, the rebel groups - anyone treating an enemy of theirs is considered their enemy too. "Some doctors are still there [in Syria]. One of my colleagues, a very close friend, passed away recently because he was helping injured people. They bombed his hospital. They bombed it on purpose." Another colleague, he says, was tortured - his ankles tied so tight with strong metal wire that gangrene set in and his captors had to amputate the feet they had previously been lashing. "And he's still in prison, that man. He's still there. With no feet..."He pours more tea for us both."I will not set foot in Syria again for 50 years," he says. "It's not Assad going. Because what comes after? There are lots of rogues. Lots of people fighting. There is Isis... I will only go will back to Syria before I die." A refugee charges his phone from solar lamps 20 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen To compare the Azraq camp I walk in now to the Zaatari camp for whose sins it is meant to atone is to compare a prison camp to a jungle. The former is barren and soulless - for now at least - but still preferable to lawless anarchy.Here, the thoroughfares are grid-like, neat and ordered, the white 6x4.5m metal houses stretching off into the distance. In all, there are currently just over 10,000 of them, enough for 50,000 people, but there will soon be many more, with a capacity for 130,000, which would make it the second-largest refugee camp in the world, and Jordan's fourth largest city. At the horizon they become dots. In Zaatari, a tent-city constructed at pace, the current second-largest refugee camp in the world and so close to the border you can hear shelling, the roads are rabbit-warrens, organic like an ancient town, and with all the ancient vices that go with it. I speak to several UNHCR workers from Zaatari off the record in Jordan's capital Amman after they have finished for the week, and they all say the same thing: Zaatari became a nightmare. That, in all honesty, they have no idea how many people are there any more, because they're only really counting them, now, on the way out, as they are moved. The official UNHCR figure of 130,000 at its peak was just a guess. It was probably much higher. The figure now, of around 80,000, even more so. At Zaatari a class system soon sprang up. A black market developed. Prostitution and rape were commonplace. The troubles began with inequality - most refugees received standard UNHCR tents, but others were given solid metal shelters. People who had nothing now had even less. An unwanted class system soon sprang up; there were protests, and at least one death. A black market quickly developed - tents originally worth $600 (?400) went for $300 (?200); metal shelters were stolen down to their foundations; smugglers would wait on the camp's outskirts for criminals to steal any UNHCR equipment they could get their hands on. Prostitution became rife, and, without adequate lighting, rape commonplace. Mothers, fearing for the safety of their daughters, started selling them off, some as young as 14, as wives to rich Jordanian men, each of whom would arrive at the camp with thousands of dollars in hand, as if it were a shop for spouses, and the sales were on. In a way, they were. One aid worker tells me of the lesser-known, but apparently popular, practice of families selling their daughters into "temporary marriages", where, for a fee, they would marry a man for two months and then return, perhaps to be married again. Contracts would even be drawn up, and paperwork spirited across the border to ensure it was legal. With no sense of geography - the camp as one colossal mass spreading out over 1.3 sq miles - it was carved up by rival gangs, rectangular scratch marks in the ground claiming ownership to each district. Crime was rife. Vandalism was everywhere. Boys without purpose were recruited by the very extremists their parents had fled.But it wasn't all bad. To understand Zaatari you must first understand that, in many ways, Syrians are not your usual refugees. Many refugees are from poor African countries, often subsistence farmers, with limited education and a basic diet. Syria, meanwhile, has a large middle class; the literacy rate for men over 15 is 86 per cent; many are traders or professionals. For all its problems, there was an undeniable entrepreneurial spirit to Zaatari. When some street lighting did come - hooked into Jordan's electricity grid - it was immediately hacked into to provide power to the many traders who had set up shop along the camp's unofficial main drag, nicknamed the Champs-?lys��es. Sometimes it overloaded, and the power went down. But when it stayed up, the men and women who had carried their business on their backs during their arduous exile traded again. Take your pick from barbers, coffee and tea houses, baklava joints, roast-chicken shops or beauty salons. You could hire a taxi, a wedding dress, buy a fan or a flat-screen TV. One man carted his candyfloss maker through the Syrian foothills as the shelling rang in his ears, and sells it now to kids who can't believe their luck. The international press delighted in this - the New York Times ran a story last summer titled "Refugee Camp For Syrians in Jordan Evolves as a Do-It-Yourself City" - but behind it lay a darker truth. It was controlled, mostly, by gangsters, who charged as much as $2,000 for a prime spot, and more specifically, by a slight man with a bushy beard, who went from being a teacher on the subject of air-conditioning repair in peacetime, to a commander in the Free Syrian Army in wartime, to, as a refugee, the Tony Soprano of Zaatari. Azraq would be the first camp that didn't feel like one. No tents. No temporary measures. They had to build a city. Legend has it - the truth gets slippery when it comes to tales of his character - that when he first arrived at the camp, and was presented with his standard ration of two UNHCR blankets, he demanded more, only to be told no. "Give me the stuff now," he replied, "or I will separate your head from your body." He got his blankets, and now lives in three trailers, all air-conditioned (naturally), with a private water-tank, private bathroom, three refrigerators, a TV, an Astroturf courtyard complete with water fountain, and all electricity unwittingly provided by a nearby Italian hospital; the de facto mayor of the city of the damned. To say he is a headache to UNHCR workers at Zaatari is an understatement.So as the numbers swelled, the UNHCR began thinking of a new camp. One that would learn the mistakes of Zaatari, to be sure, but also build on its unique successes, where traders could trade, and people once again had some small purpose, sons no longer spirited away. But more importantly, it would be the first camp in the world that didn't feel like one. Where there were no tents, just structures. Where there were no temporary measures. They had to build a city. Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, the UNHCR head of Azraq, 19 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth is in her late thirties, dark, tall, sharply beautiful, impossibly French, and the camp manager of Azraq. Even in the barren bleakness of the Jordanian desert, she wears Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, and is pretty much glamorous enough to play herself in the biopic of her own life. For Zaatari, the UNHCR dispatched a thickset no-nonsense German named Kilian Kleinschmidt to be the boss - a cross between Bruce Willis and a bulldozer - because they needed someone to stand up to that camp's criminal elements; they assigned Castel-Hollingsworth the task of Azraq, meanwhile, in the hope such force would not be needed. Kleinschmidt was parachuted in at a time of crisis after the camp had already turned sour; Castel-Hollingsworth was standing in this spot a year and a half ago when it was all just desert. Since, she has overseen everything from the camp layout to working with engineers and architects to negotiating with the Jordanian government over where the burial site should be (just as a camp needs a hospital for its births, it needs a burial site for its deaths). It was an almost unheard of level of control for a UNHCR camp manager, but then, of course, Azraq is not really a camp."Basically," she says, "my role has been to give the green light or say no to almost anything." The first thing they learnt, she says, from the failure of Zaatari, was that a camp this size must be planned like an inner city: separated into districts, rather than one homogeneous mass. "So we used the geographic features - the wadi, or old natural river paths - to create villages of 10,000 to 15,000 refugees." Village councils of refugees will oversee each. Second, and most importantly, "We needed to adapt our thinking of the shelter." Syrians traditionally live with extended family, so rather than see shelters as single family units, they allocated them in batches of six whenever possible, putting as many family and friends together as they could. "The idea is that the more people know each other, the more they will take ownership of the infrastructure, the more they will take care of them." It's former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's broken window policy, in other words, transposed to the desert. The elephant in the room in all this, of course, is the x-factor of time. Why go to the effort of housing families together if it's a temporary relief? The answer, naturally, is that you don't."You know," says Castel-Hollingsworth, "many times the UNHCR has established refugee camps for three months, or six months, and they're still there 20 years later. And so because of the nature of the conflict, we knew we needed to have better conditions than just for an emergency." The scale is daunting. The Norwegian Refugee Council led the charge on the 10,000 shelters. Constructed from zinc and steel to withstand high wind and high temperatures, designed specifically for Azraq's harsh environment, they cost more than $2,000 (?1,330) each, were built pre-fab off-site by three Jordanian companies, and trucked in on mass. That number could triple, but each will last much longer than UNHCR tents, which cost $600 but have to be replaced every six months to a year. Miles of water pipes were laid. Almost 100 miles of roads, 100 speed bumps, 40 tonnes of medical equipment. A hospital structure was donated by the Italian government, which is modular, meaning wards can be added or removed. Rather than truck in the millions of gallons of water that Zaatari required (more than three million gallons last year), they drilled a borehole in a deep aquifer running under the site, and will draw their own. More than 40,000 blankets have been handed out, 40,000 general-purpose mattresses, 50,000 sleeping mattresses, enough gas canisters to sink a battleship. More than 100 international aid agencies were involved, drawing money from everywhere - direct donations from countries, individual donations across the globe, the UN itself, the International Monetary Fund, and everything in-between.In just over a year, they built a city in the sand. So far, it has cost more than $65m (?43m), and it's just the start. It could end up costing triple that. Walk through Azraq's desert streets, and the permanence is everywhere you look. It's in the spacing between the shelters - Azraq is four times the size of Zaatari but has the same capacity - and the simple fact not a single one is a tent. It's in the sprawling 130-bed hospital, the interior of which could pass for the NHS. "We're equivalent to a community hospital back home," the female French-Canadian doctor there tells me. "We've got an operating room, we've got wards, and because we're here longer-term, we're not operating in tents, which is a quite a luxury." It's in the fully regulated marketplace, which - when the Jordanian government finally passes the paperwork after months of delays - will see it become something akin to a city centre, Syrian refugees selling to Syrian refugees, not a gangster in sight. It is there in Azraq's solitary bus service, which loops the camp every hour, a piece of comforting banality on an otherwise barren plain. A couple sit by the gates to Azraq's Sameh shopping mall 19 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen It is even there in the streets themselves, on which the children have already planted trees, and which the UNHCR plans to fully pave (Zaatari and Azraq are the two first refugee camps in the world to be charted by Open Street Map; or, put another way, the only refugee camps in history you can navigate by sat-nav). And it is there in the street names, which Azraq's residents recently voted to name after prominent Muslim scientists. It is there, also, in perhaps Azraq's most incongruous sight, that of a giant supermarket at its centre, at the bus' final stop - a tendered outpost of the Jordanian equivalent of Tesco. When I am given a tour by the manager, they are doing a roaring trade, the check-out beeps the same as any beeps across the world. They have a great deli counter. When the World Food Programme opened their standard-issue tent in Zaatari, an aid worker tells me, doling out airplane-like containers of rice and chicken, the Syrians complained. They said food was crucial to their culture; they needed diversity. So the WFP began giving out basic rations instead - rice, tinned tomatoes, sugar - and the UNHCR built community kitchens for them to cook in. No dice. They said they wanted to choose themselves; things went missing from the kitchens; one entire kitchen area, Kitchen 77, was built with concrete blocks but stolen down to its foundations. Others were turned into de facto houses. It was not a success. For Azraq, the UNHCR gave out tens of thousands of gas canisters and hundreds of thousands of pots and pans; the WFP struck a deal with the supermarket and gave out top-up cards. The manager even had to order in better-quality olive oil as the Syrians refused to buy the cheap stuff he stocked. And just like that, the residents of Azraq became the first refugees that weren't meekly standing in line and asking for hand-outs to eat, but catching the bus to their weekly shop. Of all the refugees I speak to, most point to this, after all the horror they have seen, as the thing that makes them feel normal again. One refugee - six months pregnant with her eighth - fled when she returned to find her house had been bombed. "No," says a women buying chicken and spices with her seven children, almost laughing at the idea. "I did not expect to find a supermarket here!"She fled when, out with her children, she returned to find her house had been bombed ("I had to flee"). She was also six-months pregnant with her eighth. It is there in the schools, the community centre, the football courts and the (pre-fab, sky blue) mosque. And finally, it is there in what may finally see Azraq cross the line from camp to city: sustainable street lighting and power for every home. Power is the thing all the refugees tell me they now crave. They currently muddle by on puny solar chargers and lanterns hung on every dwelling. In Zaatari, with all the illegal hook-ups, the UNHCR has to foot an electric bill to the tune of $1m a month. With the help of funding from Ikea, the UNHCR recently installed thousands of solar street lights in Azraq. At night, from a certain vantage point, it could be any city.Paul Quigley, a phlegmatic, follicly challenged Irishman in charge of installing the lights, tells me that when they were first turned on, the Syrian mothers hugged the lamp posts, and some cried. In the dark of the camp, many feared rape just venturing to the toilets. Their daughters didn't have to be afraid any more. To bring the remaining street lights and a solar farm to provide power in each home will cost just over $30m (?19.9m), or roughly the electricity bill for Zaatari for two and a half years. Put like that, there's no choice to make. But you have to first accept they will at least be there that long, and the patience of Jordan's people - though the camps are funded internationally - is running out. Currently, with more than one million in camps and the general population, the Syrians make up almost a sixth of Jordan's meagre six-and-a-half million population."Why do they need another camp?" was a typical reaction - this said to me by Amman's main media officer. The taxi driver who picked me up from Amman airport told me the following joke: "Did you hear they're setting up a new foreign embassy? This one's in Amman." For the refugees, there is also a huge irony to face. For each, the more normal this becomes, the more they know something for certain. They are never going home. In my time in Azraq, I speak to scores of refugees: a farmer in his twenties who was smuggled here on a single truck with 80 others ("I couldn't move for days"); a mother sick with worry for her son, stuck back home, who cries every day at the thought of him ("I am all on my own!"); a 22-year-old student, who was studying engineering until the regime soldiers came to his university and started throwing students out of the fourth floor windows ("From above, you could see them falling") and who tortured him for a week, finally letting him go without asking a single question ("They sounded drunk"); a blind man whose young son led him to safety amid gunfire, but also away, perhaps forever, from his wife and daughter, both of whom he desperately hopes survived; a farm owner who watched men with rifles walk through his field, and put a bullet in the head of every single one of his 50 cows, just because they could ("I was rich back home. Now I beg"). And for each, I ask the same simple question. Will you ever go back? Some actually laughed. No, they all said, in various ways and in various words, they would not. What would they return to? Signs of permanence A refugee and her children outside their shelter, complete with solar lamps Muhammed Muheisen There are now more displaced people in the world than there have been at any time since the end of the Second World War. Thanks in large part to the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, 16.7m people, according to a January report from the International Organisation for Migration, are now refugees, while another 33.3m are displaced within their own war-ravaged countries.The Arab Spring protests that seemed so modern and new - stoked by the internet, spirited by social media - mostly ended with history's oldest punchline. From Egypt to Bahrain, oppression was replaced with more oppression. From Syria to Libya to Yemen, infighting became all-out civil war. Revolutions, it seems, are actually more like turning a few sides of a Rubik's Cube. In most part, it's just a slightly altered version of what came before; you have to be very lucky for everything to fall into place. Of all the Arab Spring revolutions, only Tunisia's - the so-called "Jasmine Revolution" of December 2010 from which the rest sprung, and which heralded its first democratic elections - lucked out on block colour."The numbers," says Leonard Doyle, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration, "are unprecedented.""Many have accepted that Syria is a protracted conflict, that there is no return to Syria right now," adds Castel-Hollingsworth. "In their first week of arrival, they register the children in school, they plant trees by their shelter, they settle for the future."But what is Azraq's future? Granted, it is a far cry from early UNHCR efforts, such as when they set up the Sa Kaeo Refugee Camp on the Thai-Cambodian border to deal with displaced Cambodians in 1979, but made the mistake of building the camp on a rice paddy, using plastic sheets to make temporary "houses" for them. When it rained, the refugees - exhausted from the journey and severely malnourished - drowned in mere inches of mud, too weak to lift their heads up. The marketplace and relative proximity to produce, meanwhile, should ensure Azraq doesn't suffer from the nutrition problems of the Sahrawi camps, set up in 1975 in the baking western Sahara desert. According to the UN, the lack of fresh vegetables means 40 per cent of its children suffer from a lack of iron, while almost a third suffer from a chronic lack of nutrition. There may, indeed, even be unexpected upsides. For all their struggles with food, children's education is obligatory in the Sahrawi camps, and has raised the literacy rate from five to more than 95 per cent. Even so, the problem remains: what use to make of it? After all, even babies born in Azraq don't gain Jordanian citizenship; they remain Syrian. Twice a week, a Jordanian official comes to check on births. A home will never be home if you can never leave it. Chances are, they will become another population of the world's long-term dispossessed. A people without place. They need only look to Kenya's Dadaab camp, formed in 1991 and the world's largest with a population of almost half a million, for their possible fate. It has existed so long there are now tens of thousands of "Dadaab grandchildren" - children of children born there. A generation that has never known home. Leisure time for men on a basketball court 19 November 2014 Muhammed Muheisen For now, there are more pressing concerns. Paul the electrician, along with being responsible for Azraq's illumination, is attempting to solve the camp's rat problem. Over lunch, he tells me he's seeing a vet tomorrow about the possibility of bulk-buying cats ("Young, hungry cats!"), a plan only slightly hindered by a Syrian aid worker telling him Muslims would not keep the cats in their houses ("Hmm, yeah, the cats couldn't stay outside, really..."). But the bigger problem is the border. Ever since Jordan joined the UK and US in bombing Isis late last year, they closed it due to security concerns, leaving thousands of Syrians stranded, desperate to get to a camp for which shelters - and, who knows, cats - await them. I talk again to Houmam. Of all the people I meet, it is he, more than anyone else, who seems to have accepted his fate, and is attempting - maybe just for the sake of his family - to make the best of it. He has truly made his shelter a home. He still has plans, he says, for many improvements. More storage is needed. I ask him again about the canaries. "Actually," he says with a smile, "one of them is pregnant. So we keep them inside at night for the warmth. After two weeks, you will find more."Could he be happy here?"Before I was happy," he says. "Living a good life. But not now."He suddenly gets out his mobile phone, and wordlessly starts playing a video for me. It shows Assad's troops - one even waves at the camera - with two captured rebel soldiers in the ruins of a bombed-out house. Both are blindfolded, and facing the wall. The solders have knives and start stabbing the rebels, almost playfully, in the back and ribs. It rapidly becomes more intense, each strike hitting deeper; prods become slashes. Soon, each man's back is stained red, and the troops are laughing. After what must have only been five minutes, but which seemed like an hour, the men buckle forward against the wall, the solders grabbing nearby chunks of masonry to crush their heads, finishing them off, and burying them in rubble.Houmam looks at me but doesn't speak. The point is clear. There are worse things than being unhappy. There are worse things than not being home. And yet, as I leave - watching young children fly kites made out of UNHCR foam insulation, parents having sacrificed their warmth to give their child a solitary toy - I can't help reflect on the most poignant story I heard in my time in Jordan. UNHCR workers at the Zaatari camp told me that, when there was still unfettered movement in and out of Zaatari,
http://www.nextag.pw/, they would watch as the refugees streamed in, many of them young mothers, many pregnant, desperate to get somewhere safe for their children. But they also noticed something else - very old men and women, who had arrived months before, walking the other way, out into the desert, back towards the Syrian border, sometimes passing the pregnant women as they went. They only later discovered why. These people had decided they didn't want to die here, in a refugee camp, in the Jordanian desert where nothing grew. They didn't want their bodies buried in this earth. They wanted, simply, come what may, to walk their bones back to the land of their fathers, where the olive trees grow, and, finally and forever, return home.Originally published in the March 2015 issue of British GQ Stuart McGurk Stuart McGurk is a Senior Commissioning Editor at GQ. He has written for The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and the Telegraph.
