members had been frantically organizing a defense. In town, meanwhile, about fifteen hundred S.D.F. Without informing anyone, the management staff, armed guards, and aid workers had all disappeared. forces down the road would never let so many high-value detainees escape.Īs the Turkish forces approached, however, an alarming development inside the camp deepened the communal panic. A fenced-off part of the camp held more than eight hundred wives and children of killed or captured ISIS militants: if nothing else, Khairi reasoned, the U.S. Khairi assured his fellow-refugees that someone surely had a plan to protect them. One of the bases, at the former Lafarge Cement Factory, served as the joint-operations center for Kurdish and American commanders. military bases, which housed hundreds of American troops, contractors, and Foreign Service workers, who had supported the S.D.F. The town of Ain Issa, less than a mile away, was the headquarters of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led army that had vanquished ISIS in northern and eastern Syria. The camp stood on a strategic intersection of the M4 highway, which traverses Syria from the Mediterranean Sea to its border with Iraq. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Outside their entryway, Khairi tended a small garden, with neat rows of radishes and bell peppers. In cold weather, the camp provided kerosene for their stove, and during the summer they kept their tent cool with a fan powered by a generator. His children received an education and had access to health care. Khairi knew everyone in his section, oversaw the distribution of food rations, registered every birth, and seldom missed a wedding or a funeral. Since then, the camp had come to feel like home. A fruit vender before the war, Khairi had fled his village, in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour, with his wife and seven children, after ISIS captured it, in 2014. As news spread of the Turkish offensive, Nashat Khairi, a camp mukhtar, or selected representative, urged the roughly thirty families in his section to remain calm. The camp had evolved from a few tents in a muddy field into a sprawling grid complete with shops, cafeterias, falafel stands, schools, clinics, mosques, a full-time administration, and offices of more than two dozen local and international N.G.O.s. In recent years, some fourteen thousand people had moved there, displaced by ISIS, Russian and American air strikes, or the repressive regime of President Bashar al-Assad. By the time Turkey invaded northern Syria, in October, the Ain Issa refugee camp-twenty miles south of the Turkish border-resembled a small city.
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