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The Rukban travel camp, which opened and was cut at the height of the civil war in 2014, housed thousands of people.
The famous Rukban travel camp in the Syrian desert, a dark emblem of the country’s civil war, closed, with the last remaining families returning to their hometown.
Syrian Minister of Information, Hamza Al-Mustafa, said on Saturday on X that with the dismantling of the camp, “a tragic and painful chapter of displacement stories created by the war machine of the revolted regime ends”.
“Rukban was not only a camp, it was the death triangle that witnessed the cruelty of the siege and famine, where the regime has left people to face their painful fate in the sterile desert,” he added.
The camp, created in 2014 at the height of the country’s ruinous civil war, was built in an area of deconfliction controlled by the coalition forces led by the United States against ISIL (ISIS).
The camp was used to accommodate the fighters and the leaked bombing of ISIL by the government then President Bashar al-Assad, seeking refuge and possibly hoping to cross the border in Jordan.
But the al-Assad regime has rarely allowed the help of entering the neighboring countries, also blocked access to the region, which makes Rukban isolated for years under a punishing seat.
About 8,000 people lived in the camp, staying in mud brick houses with food and basic products introduced in smuggling at high prices.
But after Al-Assad was overthrown following a lightning offensive led by the current president of the interim government of Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, in December, the families began to leave the camp and return home.
Al-Sharaa promised to unite Syria after the fall of al-Assad and rebuilding the country at home and joining the international fold abroad.
Last month, Al-Sharaa met with world leaders, including US President Donald Trump, who announced that sanctions against Syria would be returned to a decision that would allow the country a “chance of magnitude”. The European Union has followed suit and also raised sanctions. The two measures gave Syria an essential rescue buoy for economic recovery after almost 14 years of war and economic devastation.
‘A castle in my eyes’
Yasmine Al-Salah, who returned to her house after nine years of travel to the Rukban camp and marked the Muslim celebration of Eid Al-Adha, the Associated Press News Agency said on Friday that his feelings are a “happiness that cannot be described”.
“Even if our house is destroyed, and we have no money, and we are hungry, and we have debts, and my husband is old and cannot work, and I have children – it’s still a castle in my eyes,” said Al -Salah.
His house in the city of Al-Qaryatan, in the eastern part of the province of Homs, was damaged during the war.
The Syrian Minister of Emergency Situations and Disasters, Raed Al-Saleh, said that X said that the closure of the camp marked “the end of one of the most difficult humanitarian tragedies facing our displaced people”.
“We hope that this stage marks the start of a path that ends the suffering of the remaining camps and returns their residents to their homes with dignity and security,” he added.
According to the International Migration Organization, 1.87 million Syrians have returned home since the fall of al-Assad.
