LETTER FROM AMMAN
In front of one of the buses parked in Abdali Square, in the center of Amman, shortly before eight o’clock in the morning, several dozen people exchanged goodbyes. Families have sometimes come in full to accompany one of the passengers, only about thirty, who are preparing to leave the Jordanian capital for Damascus.
A Jordanian trader goes to buy 40 kg of low-cost clothes made in Syria. A Syrian-Jordanian who has been living in Amman for thirty years is going to visit her family. Two Syrians who graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Damascus are returning home after coming to take tests at the Goethe Institute in order to obtain a scholarship to residency in Germany.
The last to climb is a Syrian, a refugee in Jordan for ten years, who leaves briefly to find a second wife, who has remained in the country. Jamal (all names have been changed), his eldest son of 27, watches him leave alone, with regret. He had not been able to accompany him on a first trip in 2019, a year after the reopening of the border following the reconquest of the province of Deraa (south), in the hands of the rebels, by the forces of the Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and the warming of relations with the Hashemite kingdom.
He does not accompany him for this second trip, after a two-year hiatus imposed by a new border closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “My father is not afraid to go there, his papers are in order. For me, it’s dangerous: I didn’t do my military service.”he explains.
“If the regime does not change, people will not return”
Syrians who have escaped compulsory conscription due to forced or voluntary exile risk being recruited as soon as they set foot in Syria. Among those who fled the war from 2011, few are able to return. They must first obtain permission from the Syrian interior ministry to enter, and permission from the Jordanian authorities if they want to return to Amman. The authorization granted by Damascus does not protect them from being arrested on their return on the mere suspicion of having supported the anti-Assad rebellion. The fact of having gone into exile is often enough to make them guilty in the eyes of the regime.
“Even if you pave the golden road, I will not go back. It’s war over there, why expose us to danger? Maybe I’m on the wanted list, maybe not: nobody tells you about it.”, storm Mohamed. This Syrian doctor, who has been living in Jordan for twenty-seven years, has brought his daughter, Rana, who is returning to Damascus for ten days to take her pediatric exams. In 2011, then in her third year of medicine, she stayed there alone to complete her studies. His mother and five siblings fled Qussair, on the border with Lebanon, to join their father in Amman.
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