Irbid, Jordan: Barely one year into the Syrian war, Abu Eyad made the hardest decision of his life.
With uncanny foresight of the horrors that were yet to unfold, one afternoon in mid-2012 Abu Eyad left his job with the Syrian Ministry of Water and did not come back. That night, together with his wife and three of their children they packed as much of their belongings as they could into suitcases and left Yarmouk camp, just outside Damascus, heading south towards the Jordanian border. While siege and starvation lay ahead for the residents of Yarmouk, as a Palestinian the decision to leave Syria for Jordan presented somewhat of a Gordian knot.
Fleeing a job at any Syrian government ministry essentially meant defection and a death sentence should Abu Eyad remain inside the country. Unfortunately, when the family reached the southern Syrian border, they found that while the border remained open to Syrian refugees (since June 2015 it has been closed to all civilian traffic), earlier that year Jordan had moved to deny entry to any Palestinians attempting to enter from Syria.
Read the full article by Marika Sosnowski and Darrian Traynor at The Sydney Morning Herald.