Looking at a map, nothing would seem easier than to drive a convoy of food and medical supplies to Rukban, a camp for refugees and displaced civilians on the Syrian–Jordanian border some 260 kilometers east of Damascus. Though the terrain is rough, the camp is located in an area of relative calm and stability, and it could be reached from Amman, Damascus, or both. But Syria’s seven-year civil war says otherwise.

All sides now blame each other for preventing aid deliveries to the tens of thousands of Syrians trapped in this desolate desert region, and Rukban has emerged as a cruel illustration of how civilians are snared in the tangled threads of sovereignty and proxy control that constitute current-day Syria.

For half a year, aid convoys to Rukban have been held up by disagreements among a dizzying array of actors, including: President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which uses its status as Syria’s internationally recognized sovereign to twist the rules guiding international humanitarian missions; the kingdom of Jordan, which bans UN cross-border assistance to the camp; the U.S. military, which controls the area but won’t guarantee the safety of aid workers seeking access to the camp; armed fighters inside Rukban, who tangle with humanitarians and with each other for control; and the jihadi extremists of the so-called Islamic State, whose infiltration of the camp has cemented its isolation.

This report, which seeks to shine a light on the deadlock in Rukban and on the broader problem of Syria’s fragmentation, has been supported in part by a research grant from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It draws on more than a dozen interviews with government officials, experts, and humanitarians interviewed remotely and in Jordan, on unpublished UN and humanitarian reporting, and on a survey of Arabic and English press coverage, social media, and think tank research, including a previous TCF study of the Tanf–Rukban problem.

Though the Rukban crisis is in many ways unique, it also illustrates the complexity of humanitarian operations in a fragmented country such as Syria, where every supply route seems to stretch through rival spheres of influence, and where unreliable proxies regularly upend agreements signed by their supposed masters. What is happening in Rukban is a bizarre form of starvation-by-committee, and its victims are Syrian civilians whose only crime was to ask for safety and sustenance.

No Man’s Land

As described in a TCF report by Sam Heller in September 2017, the Rukban camp first began to form in 2013–2014 when Jordan closed several informal border crossings further west. The fact that a sometimes-open crossing remained for a time in the Rukban area lured thousands of civilians to this otherwise uninhabited region, creating a small border settlement of hopefuls. The population at Rukban grew as violence engulfed eastern Syria following the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and Daesh, and more people arrived from the tribal areas of the Badiyah, the Syrian desert.

The camp itself is a makeshift affair, but it has been estimated to hold as many as 50,000 people, 75–80 percent of whom are women and children. The region around Rukban and the nearby Syrian–Iraqi border crossing at Tanf consists of flat, rocky desert with little to sustain human life. “It’s like Mars out there,” a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post. “Just desert and a road.”

Conditions in Rukban are bad even by Syrian standards, with humanitarian reporting from 2017 indicating that more than one out of ten newborns died for lack of proper care while four out of five inhabitants were unable to secure enough food to eat. In the absence well-functioning camp administration, clan leaders, criminal bosses, and armed factions have filled the void, extorting civilians and skirmishing with each other for control over the mostly smuggling-based camp economy. Water is piped in across the Jordanian border, but the flow is sometimes disrupted, forcing inhabitants to pay militia-linked merchants that control nearby wells.

The political status of the camp is no less complicated. Outside actors cannot even agree on where Rukban is located: in Syria, in Jordan, or both? The question has political and legal implications, since Syrians in Syria would be regarded as internally displaced persons (IDPs) while Syrians in Jordan would be seen as refugees seeking asylum.

In reality, Rukban straddles both countries. Satellite photographs show that while one part of the settlement is clearly located inside Syria, other parts are found in a no-man’s-land between the two sand berms that mark the border, including right next to Jordan’s berm—i.e. on Jordan’s side of the border. But although the evidence might seem hard to argue with, Amman has continued to insist that Rukban’s inhabitants are displaced inside their own country and that their welfare is therefore a Syrian or international responsibility.

For its part, the Syrian government may lay claim to the border region, but it exercises no control over it. For years, the area around Rukban and the nearby Tanf border crossing has been held by the U.S.-led Global Coalition Against Daesh, set up to fight the Islamic State in 2014.

In a further twist, the coalition forces that rule the sky and the surrounding desert have only limited influence over Syrian armed factions inside the camp, whose internal politics remain opaque to outsiders. As obscure as they may seem, these issues of overlapping and contradictory control are now at the heart of Rukban’s predicament.

How America Came to Own Rukban

In 2016, American, British, and Norwegian special forces began deploying to Jordan and to the Syrian side of the Tanf crossing. U.S.-backed rebels had captured it from the Islamic State that spring, reportedly with Jordanian assistance.

Damascus objected loudly to their presence, but Coalition members did not view their mission as being directed at Assad or his allies. They wanted to use the area as a jump-off point for attacks on the Islamic State in eastern Syria’s Deir al-Zor region.

To reduce the risk of great-power clashes inside Syria, U.S. and Russian officers negotiated a fifty-five-kilometer aerial deconfliction zone around Tanf, and Moscow communicated to its Syrian and Iranian allies that it would not challenge U.S. control there. The flip-side of this understanding was that the Coalition would stick to its anti-Islamic State mandate and provide no support for rebel attacks on Assad’s forces.

“The Coalition does not hold territory in Syria, but takes appropriate measures to ensure the safety and security of its forces and Defeat ISIS partner forces,” said Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway of the U.S. Marine Corps, a Pentagon spokesperson. “The most effective means of ensuring the safety and security of our forces is the deconfliction line, which we use to communicate with Russian forces to ensure that our respective forces, and partner forces, are not endangered.”

Until 2017, Coalition forces seem to have felt no special responsibility for the people trapped in Rukban, viewing the camp as just one more strange and disturbing piece of Syria’s political geography.

In early summer 2017, however, Iranian-led militias and Syrian government loyalists moved into the surrounding desert, attacking both U.S.-backed rebels and the Islamic State, which was then already in retreat. Whenever pro-Assad forces strayed into the deconfliction zone, they were hit by U.S. air strikes to drive them back across the fifty-five-kilometer perimeter—yet they kept testing the limits of America’s commitment to the area. “It was a scary few weeks,” a senior State Department official told the Washington Post.

However, since the U.S. Air Force would not strike in defense of its rebel allies outside the fifty-five-kilometer limit, Iranian- and Russian-backed Syrian loyalists could sweep through the wider desert with ease. By late summer, they had captured all territory outside the perimeter and severed Tanf’s land route to Deir al-Zor. The deconfliction zone remained as an isolated bubble of Coalition-held land, jutting out into the Syrian desert from the tri-border area.

Inside that bubble lay the Tanf crossing, but also Rukban—and from that point on, the U.S.-led coalition was saddled with at least some responsibility for the camp, whose continued existence was entirely contingent on U.S. protection. Still, Coalition forces declined to establish a direct presence inside Rukban, viewing it as unruly, unsafe, and—most of all—unrelated to their mission.

At that point, most of America’s allies had already left the area. The British and Norwegian troops appear to have pulled out of Tanf during summer and autumn 2017, arguing that clashes with pro-Assad troops would be incompatible with the narrow anti-jihadi mission they had signed up for. While reluctant to discuss specifics, defense ministry spokespersons from the United Kingdom and Norway acknowledge that they are no longer involved with operations at Tanf.

A Coalition spokesperson insists that the deployment at Tanf remains a multi-country effort: “There are Coalition and partner forces operating in Tanf, not solely U.S. forces,” the official said in May 2018, possibly referring to the involvement of Jordanian special forces. Nevertheless, it seems overwhelmingly clear that the foreign presence around Tanf and Rukban had by late 2017 boiled down to what is in practice an American mission, run by American troops for American reasons.

Rebels without a Cause

Now heading into its third year as an American mini-protectorate, the Tanf–Rukban zone is patrolled by Coalition forces and their chosen Syrian partner, Maghawir al-Thawra, to “interdict and find ISIS fighters that are trying to transit the area.” Clashes were reported as recently as June 4, when a Maghawir al-Thawra patrol reportedly killed seven Islamic State fighters trying to bypass its checkpoints.

A small, Tanf-based band of fighters originating in eastern Syria, Maghawir al-Thawra’s members—numbering in the dozens or low hundreds—have fought the Islamic State under U.S. supervision for the past three or four years. Described by the Coalition as “a trusted partner,” its fighters have been carefully security-vetted for inclusion in the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program. Though the group continues to fly the Free Syrian Army flag and portray itself as a force for Assad’s overthrow, Maghawir al-Thawra is held on a tight leash by its American masters and barred from attacking Syrian government forces.

Inside Rukban, things are far more complicated. There are no Coalition troops on the scene and the camp has repeatedly been rocked by bombings, assassinations, and factional shootouts. Awash in arms, one fighter has called it “a jungle.” The situation is so bad that Coalition patrols steer well clear of the camp to avoid coming into contact with its volatile mix of half-defunct insurgent groups, smugglers, suspected jihadi sleeper cells, and gun-toting clans of uncertain allegiance.

“The Americans do not control the camp,” said Sam Heller, who is now a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “That falls to Maghawir al-Thawra and to these other armed factions that have now nominally come under Maghawir al-Thawra’s leadership, although to what practical extent seems debatable. You also have armed elements at Rukban that are not part of a flagged faction, including armed clan elements from the Badiyah [desert] and eastern Syria.”

Although a Coalition official told the author that Maghawir al-Thawra has no presence inside Rukban, the group certainly does hold some sway there, including through its ties to a handful of half-demobilized Free Syrian Army-flagged insurgent factions. These include a proxy force known as the Free Tribes Army, which has been Jordan’s preferred intermediary in the Tanf–Rukban area. Also present are the remnants of a formerly Pentagon-backed group called the Qaryatein Martyr Battalions and three factions formerly linked to the CIA’s covert war in Syria: the Army of the Eastern Lions, the Martyr Ahmed al-Abdo Forces, and the Shaam Liberation Army.

Since about a year ago now, these have been rebels without a cause. When pro-Assad forces surrounded the Tanf–Rukban enclave in summer 2017, they found themselves locked inside a small patch of empty desert, lacking U.S. approval for any action that would violate the deconfliction line. The Qaryatein Martyrs Battalions refused these orders and consequently lost their Pentagon support, while, in an unrelated decision, U.S. President Donald Trump canceled CIA payments to all other factions.

All in all, several hundred trained and armed rebel fighters found themselves without pay or protection. In the months that followed, some gave up the war and returned to government-held Syria, while others appear to have been co-opted into a Maghawir al-Thawra-run scheme to maintain order in and around Rukban. The rest have simply melted into the camp’s chaotic stew of guns, clans, crime, and simmering extremism.

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Jihadism and Border Violence

The Jordanian government takes Syria very seriously: it can’t afford not to. According to authorities in Amman, the kingdom now hosts some 1.3 million Syrians. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) puts the number of registered Syrian refugees closer to 662,000, but there is no disputing the strain that this has placed on Jordanian infrastructure, education, and health services. Attempts to raise taxes and cut subsidies to shore up the country’s ailing economy recently triggered street protests in Amman, forcing the prime minister to resign. In the past few years Jordan has also been rattled by a string of jihadi attacks, including against the all-important tourism sector. Some were linked to Syria.

In Rukban, all of Jordan’s Syria-related fears seem to have been wrapped into one single, scary package: a large refugee camp teeming with militancy, ready to spill across the border at any moment.

The breaking point came on June 21, 2016, when an Islamic State suicide bomber drove his explosives-packed car from Rukban into a Jordanian border post, killing seven soldiers. The authorities responded by declaring the area a closed military zone.

Since then, the Jordanian government has continued to report sporadic clashes and armed attacks near Rukban, often blaming “terrorists.” When NBC News visited the border in May 2017, military helicopters refused to fly too close to the camp, claiming that they were at risk of being shot down by Islamic State fighters armed with anti-aircraft weapons. Brigadier-General Sami Kafawin told reporters Rukban could be hosting as many as four thousand gunmen. “They consider the camp a safe haven,” he said. “We consider it an imminent threat.”

Western officials recognize that the camp is unsafe and that it seems to have been penetrated by jihadi cells, but also accuse Jordanian authorities of fear-mongering and demonizing civilians in the camp.

“It’s not easy to say how many of the perhaps 50,000 inhabitants of Rukban are Islamic State warriors,” said a European diplomat based in Amman. “Many of them are from areas where the Islamic State used to be strong, but the majority are women and children who fled from there.”

Amman Bans Cross-Border Aid

In the months before the Islamic State attack in June 2016, Jordan had reluctantly bowed to American requests to screen thousands of Rukban inhabitants for possible resettlement in the kingdom. But after the bombing, all such plans were shelved and replaced by a harshly enforced border closure.

“The Jordanian border really is closed,” a humanitarian worker told the author during an interview in Amman in April. “If you come too close, they shoot you, and this is well understood by the population living on the other side.”

The Jordanian government even banned aid teams from accessing Rukban, forcing groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross to evacuate the berm area. Despite growing international criticism, the kingdom stuck to its guns after pro-Assad forces cut rebel-controlled smuggling routes in mid-2017, worsening Rukban’s humanitarian crisis.

“The residents of the Rukban camp are Syrian citizens on Syrian soil, which makes dealing with the camp a Syrian and international responsibility and not a Jordanian one,” Minister of Foreign and Expatriates Affairs Ayman Safadi said in a meeting with reporters in October 2017. “Jordan will not permit refugees from the Rukban camp to enter the kingdom,” he added, “and it will not accept any mechanism for dealing with it that could make treating the situation there a Jordanian responsibility in the future.”

That month, several Western governments made a formal demarche criticizing Jordan’s attitude towards Rukban.

“The EU stands united on the issue of Jordan’s responsibility per international humanitarian law, and a demarche was made to try to persuade the government,” the Amman-based European diplomat said, explaining that the union “has voiced repeated and at times sharply worded criticism against Jordan over its opposition to aid deliveries.” Regardless of any security issues, the diplomat argued that it should be possible “to hand over food packages to people in the camp without incurring any risk, and mothers should be allowed to give birth in hospitals, which is something the UN has consistently demanded.”

But such demands have fallen on deaf ears, with Amman only permitting the delivery of water, very limited medical assistance, and a small number of one-off food drops by crane across the berm, to avert outright starvation. Jordanian decision-makers seem to fear that any sign of flexibility will turn into a slippery slope, ending with the resettlement of Rukban’s inhabitants in Jordan and potentially encouraging more Syrians to head south.

“To Jordan,” the diplomat concludes, “this is primarily about not wanting to have a greater responsibility for the future of these refugees.”

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Damascus Stalls Deliveries of Cross-Line Aid

There is, of course, another way to get aid to Rukban: by delivering it from inside Syria. But moving food from Damascus is easier said than done, since Rukban is in the hands of insurgents working under a U.S. Air Force umbrella, while the aid would have to be transported from the heart of government-controlled Syria.

No convoy in Damascus can load its cargo and move east without Syrian government permission, nor could it safely negotiate the checkpoint-cluttered road into the deconfliction zone without security guarantees from all parties. With so many actors involved, politics immediately enter into the picture.

In most instances where the UN has tried to provide cross-line assistance to Syrians, the obstacle has been Assad’s government. In theory, UN Security Resolution 2165, which was unanimously adopted in 2014 and has been renewed annually, allows the UN to send aid from Damascus into opposition-held territory without awaiting permission. In practice, this is impossible, given the government’s physical control of the space in which humanitarians operate. UN offices in Damascus have therefore continued to request permission from the Syrian government for all cross-line aid missions—and it is rarely granted. More than two out of three cross-line convoys requested by the UN in 2017 were blocked by a lack of Syrian government approval.

In Rukban’s case, however, Damascus has lately shown some flexibility. Assad has political incentives to permit aid to flow from Damascus, as a way to keep the Tanf region structurally linked to his capital, instead of letting it drift toward dependence on Amman—and perhaps also as a way to force the U.S.-led Coalition to grapple with conditions inside Rukban.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

The UN first requested permission for a food convoy to Rukban in September 2017. UN agencies and international humanitarian organizations in Damascus then drew up a plan for a thirty-truck convoy of UN and Syrian Arab Red Crescent assistance to some 30,000 people in the camp. However, Assad’s government responded in traditional fashion: it did not respond at all, thereby blocking the mission.

As conditions in the camp deteriorated with the onset of winter, and Damascus still would not budge, the Jordanian government finally relented and permitted another emergency cross-border delivery in early January 2018. Like in the past, aid workers weren’t allowed to enter the camp—they had to lift food crates across the border berm by crane.

No American Security Guarantees in Rukban

“Ever since the crane operation to deliver humanitarian assistance to these people came to an end in January 2018, we’ve been trying to send humanitarian convoys to Rukban,” UN Resident Coordinator in Syria Ali Al-Za’tari recently said, in a recorded comment provided to the author by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA.

In mid-March, finally, there seemed to be a breakthrough. The Syrian government green-lighted a convoy to Rukban on March 18, with a slight twist: the convoy should not be led by the UN, as requested, but by the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC.

Yet, three months later, no aid has been delivered, as new obstacles appear to have cropped up inside the Coalition-controlled deconfliction zone.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the essential security guarantees from the controlling power in that area, and therefore the UN is unable to go with personnel into Rukban, because of the unmitigated risks that exist there,” Al-Za’tari explained, noting the presence of numerous armed factions inside the camp.

Although UN officials dance diplomatically around the point, the problem appears to be that Coalition forces refuse to escort aid workers all the way to the camp. They are only willing to provide security from the deconfliction perimeter to a point located some ten kilometers from Rukban itself.

The reason seems to be that the U.S. military views Rukban as too volatile and dangerous to approach, perhaps particularly with hundreds of tons of aid in tow. The number of armed camp-dwellers is believed to outnumber the small Coalition garrison at Tanf by some margin, and entering with an aid convoy could very easily trigger clashes: desperate civilians could storm delivery sites, outlaw elements could try to grab the trucks or set off a bomb, or fights could break out among aid recipients. Unwilling to wade deeper into the political mess that is Rukban, the United States has apparently decided to wash its hands of the problem and leave it to aid workers to sort out the related security issues on their own.

ICRC representatives are now trying to negotiate directly with Rukban-based insurgents and clan leaders, but talks appear to be progressing very slowly.

The attitude of the rival factions ruling Rukban remains unclear. Some in the camp appear to have objected to the involvement of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), which is an indispensable local partner for the ICRC but remains close to Assad’s government. Given past experience of armed groups interfering with humanitarian assistance, it is also likely that factions are competing for influence over the distribution of aid for the same reasons that Assad’s government wants to be involved: they want to siphon off resources and control who gets to benefit.

Dropping off aid at the ten-kilometer mark for pickup by local representatives would seem an unorthodox and politically problematic solution, but in his recorded comments, Al-Za’tari said that the UN is willing to deliver aid “at a distance” if no other solution can be found.

However, if Syrian authorities see an outcome taking shape that isn’t to their liking, they could rescind their own permissions and security guarantees on the argument that the ICRC must not let its aid be commandeered by terrorists (which is how the government views all armed groups in Rukban). Assad’s allies have already picked up on the problem, and appear to be laying the groundwork for such a rejection.

“The U.S. regional command refuses to guarantee safe entry for UN and ICRC aid convoys, insisting that all products, water and necessities should be transferred only to militant gangs controlled by Americans,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Major-General Igor Konashenkov told reporters in early May.

The U.S. military disputes that, pointing back to the other side. “The Coalition welcomes the arrival of humanitarian aid to Rukban and, contrary to repeated Assad regime and Russian misinformation, has done nothing to impede the flow of aid to the site,” said the Pentagon’s Maj. Rankine-Galloway, who also claimed that “the Assad regime has continuously obstructed aid convoys traveling from western Syria to Rukban.”

Neither the Russian Foreign Ministry nor the Russian mission to the United Nations responded to requests for comment.

A Tragedy with Many Authors

That’s where the situation still stands. Since June 2016, the Jordanian border remains closed, and the Damascus–Rukban convoy proposed in September 2017 has yet to happen. Meanwhile, all sides continue to blame each other, clouding the issue in propaganda and disinformation.

The truth seems to be that all major parties involved share at least some of the blame for Rukban’s disastrous deadlock: Amman, for its ban on cross-border aid; Damascus, for long obstructing cross-line aid and for the untrammeled persecution of dissidence that dissuades so many displaced civilians from returning home; the armed factions in Rukban, or at least some of them, for refusing to let humanitarians work without interference; and Washington, behind its Coalition fig leaf, for its evident lack of effort to secure the rights of civilians in an area where it is the de facto occupying power.

Perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The fact that the dispute has been whittled down to the very last leg of the convoy’s journey is a sign that progress can be made. Talks continue, solutions to outstanding issues may eventually be found, and, once that happens, the trucks are ready to roll.

But the absurdity of the problem is galling. Were it not for military roadblocks and political manipulation, the distance from Damascus to Rukban could be traveled in the space of several hours. Failing that, there would still be access from Jordan.

Yet Syria’s splintered geography continues to prevent cooperation, inviting all sides to exploit the issue in order to frustrate and scandalize each other instead of working constructively to address a pressing humanitarian crisis, even though that could be done swiftly and in isolation from political concerns. With tens of thousands waiting in the windswept no-man’s-land between the berms, the clock is ticking—and even if aid may one day reach them, a sustainable solution to Rukban’s ongoing tragedy is nowhere in sight.