Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The UN and Jordan are closing in on a deal to provide aid to more than 75,000 Syrian refugees stranded in dire conditions in open desert in a remote part of the Syrian-Jordanian border, according to officials.
The refugees, in camps at Rukban and Hadalat in Jordan’s eastern panhandle, have not received any food or medical aid other than water for more than seven weeks, the last time Jordan’s military, which controls the area, allowed humanitarian agencies into the area.
The government says the Syrians, who are mostly from northern and eastern Syria — including areas controlled by Isis — pose a security threat. The refugees, who fled the five-year war in their country, are mostly camped in a no man’s land between two earthen berms that mark the border. Amman has been calling on the international community to help devise and pay for a solution to what they see as a global problem.
Aid officials told the Financial Times that a plan is now being discussed by UN and Jordanian officials that would see aid distributions resume a few kilometres west of the main encampment at Rukban.
“We need to recognise that this population is in a dire situation,” said Mageed Yahia, country director in Jordan for the UN World Food Programme. “There is a lot of disease spreading; old people, children, pregnant women — and there is nothing, no medical aid, absolutely nothing.”
A government official confirmed Amman was in talks on “new logistical arrangements through which aid and water can reach the stranded Syrians a couple of kilometres inside Syria”.
“There will be distribution points inside Syria, in which community leaders can receive aid and distribute it,” he said.
The Jordanian office of UNHCR, the main UN agency responsible for refugees, declined to comment.
Jordan declared the area a closed military zone in June after a suicide bomber drove a car from the encampment at Rukban and rammed it into an army post, killing six people and wounding 14 others.
Since then, the kingdom’s military have only allowed one aid distribution to the area. UN contractors have been delivering water. Jordan, a US ally which is buckling under the financial, social and security strain of hosting more than 1.3m Syrians, has recently taken a more assertive stance on refugee issues with world powers.
However, aid agencies say about three-quarters of the refugees in the camps at camps at Rukban and Hadalat are women and children, and the people there are among the most desperate of the millions uprooted by Syria’s war.
Because of the encampment’s remote location and the military’s decision to seal off the area to humanitarian workers, aid agencies have had to study satellite images, which that the number of tents and shacks erected by people fleeing the war has grown since June.
“The figure we are using to be conservative is more than 75,000 people,” said Luis Eguiluz, head of mission in Jordan for Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical charity. “They are not looking for humanitarian assistance, not even for settlement; they are looking for protection, mainly from air attacks.”
MSF, which worked in the camps for three weeks in May and June, found rampant diarrhoea among children, skin diseases related to lack of sanitation, and cases of malnutrition, including 10 severe ones, Mr Eguiluz said.
Amnesty International this month published video footage and satellite images showing what appeared to be makeshift graves and burial mounds in the no man’s land.
“There may be people who are besieged and living in similar need of aid, but I don’t think there is any place in Syria similar to the harsh environment these people are living in,” said Mr Yahia, at WFP.
Working out a way of helping the refugees has proved logistically difficult and politically sensitive because of security considerations and questions of international law.
Jordan’s army says that in addition to Isis, armed criminal groups are active in the encampment. During the last aid distribution in August, Jordan did not allow refugees to cross the southern berm so aid agencies used a crane to supplies over it.
The government describes the space between the berms as no man’s land, or territory disputed with Syria. However, some aid officials and human rights activists assert the Syrian-Jordan border runs through the middle of the camps, adding that any relocation of the refugees north to allow Jordan a bigger buffer zone would amount to refoulement, the legal term for returning refugees to the country they fled.
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