Ibtisam did not want to state her surname. She is soft-spoken and unassuming and cries easily. Her husband was killed by shrapnel on July 14, 2012, when government forces entered their village of Sheikh Maskeen in Daraa province. Her eldest son, Haikim, 20, defected from the army and returned to his village after hearing of his father’s death. He was snatched by regime troops from outside his home less than a month later, and his whereabouts and fate remain unknown. She took her remaining four children to Zaatari in January.

Ibtisam’s pain is still raw; it rolls down her cheeks in tears caught in the edge of her gray and white hijab. She sits cross-legged in a friend’s trailer, covering the large holes in the soles of her dark gray socks with her olive green abaya, the loose ankle-length cloak many Muslim women wear. “Do you think there is anybody here in Zaatari who isn't hurt?” she asks. “Everybody is hurt. Nobody happily left their country or did so unless compelled.”

She was a housewife in Syria who had never been employed, but she’s trying — without success — to find work in the camp as a cleaner. Her second-eldest son, 16, can’t find a job either. Unlike some refugees, she doesn’t have other family members here who can help support her household.

“Look at us. We're just sitting here. Just sitting, sitting,” Ibtisam says. “Wherever I go, I feel suffocated. I'm choking. Lately I've been thinking about going back to Syria. I think I'll go there and die and be done with it. It's easier. My heart is tired.” She continues, voice firm but tears flowing, “How am I going to look after these young ones here? How am I going to, with this wounded heart?”

She is too shy to ask for help in a place where the weak are easily trampled and just as easily ignored.

GALLERY: THE ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP ECONOMY

The camp can be a dangerous environment. Older parts close to the entrance, like the Street of Widows, are generally safer than the newer areas; they have streetlights and established communities, often organized around clans or villages, and offer safety in numbers and familiarity. In the newer parts, the trailers and tents are more widely spaced, people often don’t know one another, and streetlights are not always installed, making a nighttime dash to the communal toilets a heart-palpitating trip.

There are whispers of rapes and other gender-based violence in some places. Mafias are alleged to be running brothels and controlling access to the few jobs in the camp. And some of those street-level power brokers are involved in turf wars.

“We had a number of very, very hairy moments when people were really fighting, nasty behind-the-scenes activities against each other,” says Kilian Kleinschmidt, camp manager in Zaatari for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Zaatari camp is fertile ground for criminality, not least because it lacks a law-enforcement system. Kleinschmidt says he’s in the process of training some 600 Syrians — 50 in each of the camp’s 12 districts — to police their neighborhoods, while Jordanian community police units are being trained by the United Kingdom to operate in the camp.

The policing initiative is meant to supersede the current system of street leaders (often self-appointed), who, in theory, serve as community representatives. Many have exploited their positions to procure a greater share of food parcels or jobs at the expense of others, and some have even resorted to violence to intimidate and extort or to subjugate potential rivals.

Kleinschmidt hopes to gradually isolate the “corrupt and selfish” among the current street leaders and find new interlocutors. “It's not a revolution from one day to the next,” he says. “It’s going to take time.”

For now, some nongovernmental organizations have placed more vulnerable refugees in the older part of the camp, in streets with leaders in whom they have greater trust.