Rukban is a no man’s land off the border between Syria and Jordan. The area became inhabited by refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war in 2014.

UNOSAT has been keeping count of shelters in Rukban area since late 2014. Available data cover the past two years with the most recent count released just last month.

This post is an exploration of UNOSAT data on Rukban refugee camp covering the period between May 2016 and June 2018.

I plotted shelter count over time in Figure 1. As of June 2018 there is a total of 11702 shelters. Shelters have been consistently increasing in number since December 2016.

Figure 1

In Figure 2, I mapped the density of shelters at twelve different points in time between May 2016 and June 2018.

Figure 2

Finally, I was curious about how Rukban shelters look from space. So, I used open satellite imagery captured around the time UNOSAT assessments were done. Imagery is shown in Figure 3. Shelters are the dark and bright pixels best visible in the bottom right quarter of the image.