PHOTOGRAPHY
FLEEING SYRIA
Memories of a refugee
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAKOB JESSEN
KHALED IS A CHAIN-SMOKING baker from Busra, who had never met a Syrian rebel in his life.
One morning, Khaled’ s mother got a piece of shrapnel stuck in her back. The army had been showering the old Roman city in south Syria with all sorts of artillery grenades, scud missiles and white phosphorous, and now, a piece of it was inside Khaled’ s mother.
Khaled left Busra with his younger brother and wounded mother that afternoon. They hitched a ride south from the city, driving fast and far into the desert.
Closing in on the Jordanian border, they got out of the car. Khaled’ s mother leaned heavily on her crutch. Her son had brought her along on one of the world’ s most dangerous hikes.
A few kilometres north of the border, the Free Syrian Army turned up. It was the first time that Khaled met the men who are fighting for another kind of Syria. The rebels drove them the rest of the way to the border, where the Jordanian army took over.
The moment Khaled and his family, entered the northern entrance, they became the kind of people whose home belong to“ The United Nations Refugee Agency”. That was yesterday.
When France and Britain split this strip of desert, now spanning southern Syria and northern Jordan, between them during the First World War, no one here considered themselves‘ Syrian’ or‘ Jordanian’. Khaled’ s grandparents didn’ t know their nationalities.
Instead, they identified with their tribe, their extended family, as was traditional in the area.
The border, when it came, was a directive from above that brought little practical change on the ground, except for the introduction of border bureaucracy.
The border and the countries it separated, were abstractions, invisible lines in the sand. The wives and brothers and mothers and cousins crossing the border to meet, marry, or trade were tangible – an everyday reality.
When the Syrian uprising began in 2011 that reality was turned around.
The ZAATARI Refugee Camp is less than 40 kilometres away from Khaled’ s home in Syria. Tomorrow he is going back, once again venturing across a line that now separates a country of war from a country of refuge.
The border has eventually taken on its full meaning, the invisible line in the sand has become a wall dividing what used to be one people into two.
Khaled’ s mother will stay in Jordan. To Khaled, she will become an abstraction, a distorted voice over the telephone, a faded picture of a woman in a wheel chair, old and frail, staring down into the desert sand.
She will become a memory; like every one of the 178,000 refugees have become to the people they left behind.
The following pictures are reminders of those who fled.
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