IDP tent turned into a shop in Newroz camp, north-eastern Syria

Derik – North-Press Agency
Solnar Muhammad

 In a one and a half meters tent, and with a few bags of chips and biscuits, the young man Hamid Suleiman from Afrin, decided to open a shop in which he challenges his conditions to support his displaced family to the Newroz camp in in the town of Derik (Malikiya), north-eastern Syria. Despite his two times displacement due to the Turkish military invasion in northeastern regions of Syria and northern Aleppo, Hamid Suleiman refused to surrender to his destitution, explaining to North-Press that because of the Turkish military and its affiliated armed opposition groups’ attack on Afrin region, he was displaced along with his family.

Suleiman and his family took refuge in the town of Tal Abyad (Gre-Spi), where he had to move thereafter to Newroz camp in Derik, due to the latest Turkish military invasion in northeastern Syria. “I do not know anyone here and I am a stranger. We suffer a lot from alienation," Suleiman added, indicating that he had opened a shop in the camp "in order not to remain unemployed, and to support his family with what he earns from this shop."

Two times in a row, the bitterness of displacement has overburdened Suleiman, who had nothing left to support his family with, to resort to the opening of a small shop in an attempt to earn livelihood. The small shop in a camp in the far north-east of Syria is affected, like other shops, by the high dollar exchange rate against the Syrian pound, Suleiman notes that children in the camp were buying more stuff, adding: "Children previously used to buy a lot, materials were cheap, but now after the rise of the dollar and the commodity price, children could no longer afford to buy."

Turkey and affiliated armed opposition groups began a military operation in north-eastern Syria on the 9th of last October, in an attempt to establish the so-called "safe zone", causing the displacement of thousands of families from the areas of Ras al-Ain and Tal-Abyad.