Confronting Horror at the Jordan-Syria Border
JABER AS SERHAN, Jordan—On a hill overlooking this village in northern Jordan, locals gather each day to watch as desperate Syrians amass at the border. With black smoke billowing on the horizon behind them, they pitch makeshift tents in a no-man’s-land that locals call the “free zone,” a former duty-free commercial zone where Jordanians and Syrians once did business. Now it’s a makeshift displacement camp, hosting thousands of Syrians who fled over the past two weeks as Russian planes and Syrian ground troops attacked their homes in Daraa, a governorate in southern Syria.
The Syrian army’s offensive came after a year of relative calm in Daraa and its surrounding governorates, which were declared a “de-escalation zone” under a ceasefire negotiated by Jordan, Russia, and the United States last July. The ceasefire decreased fighting but never ended it completely. While the Syrian government continued to retake swaths of territory, southern Syria was cloaked in an illusion of calm, under which opposition-held towns set
