TEL SAMEN, Syria (North Press) – The displaced people of Tel Abyad (Gre-Spi) who reside in the camp of Tel Samen, 40 kilometers north of Raqqa, live in fear of the spread of coronavirus in the densely-packed camp.
The camp is home to 700 families living in over 800 tents, with the camp administration forced to provide two tents to some of the camp’s larger families.
Abla Darwish, a resident of Tel Samen camp displaced from Tel Abyad, expressed her fears of the spread of the pandemic in the camp, explaining that “all IDPs share the same toilets, bathrooms, and water tanks.”
For every four tents, the camp’s administration allocated a tank of drinking water with a capacity of five barrels, and a unit consisting of two toilets and two bathrooms.
“How can we protect ourselves? Every four tents share the same unit, which forces us to have contact with each other; also, the tents are too close, about one and half meter…if one person gets infected the whole camp will get infected,” Darwish told North Press.
Turkish Armed Forces and Turkish-backed armed opposition groups took control of the cities of Sere Kaniye and Tel Abyad and their surrounding countrysides in October of 2019. Since this time, residents in the region have reported many human rights abuses, including theft, looting, assault, kidnapping and murder.
The Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) opened the camp for Tel Abyad’s IDPs in Tel Samen town in November 2019.
Hansen Ali (a pseudonym), who lives in the camp, said that nobody adheres to the preventative measures inside the camps, and that “children play with each other all the time, and adults gather to chat.”
With the spread of coronavirus, the camp administration established a medical point in the camp, which included sterilizing and measuring the temperatures of the arrivals to the camp.
According to Ali, the measures taken at the medical point are not sufficient. “The temperature measuring is not sufficient; if a person is infected, the symptoms do not appear until several days later.”
Ali called on the camp administration to impose restrictions regarding the entry of people from outside the camp, and health awareness must be spread on a larger scale to avoid infections.
The administration of the camp has not yet registered any cases of coronavirus.
Muhammad Sheikh Nabi, co-chair of Tel Samen camp, said that the camp’s location, in a desert area far from settlements, was one of the factors that helped prevent infections, adding that measures taken by camp administration also helped.
With the spread of the virus in northeastern Syria, the administration of Tel Samen camp prevented the displaced from leaving, “except in cases of extreme necessity,” according to Sheikh Nabi.
Visits from outside the camp were also completely banned, in conjunction with bi-weekly sterilization operations for residential sectors and vital facilities inside the camp.
“We also remove garbage from the camp on a daily basis; also, we provide each tent with a hygiene basket once a week, a basket which contains sanitizers and detergents,” Sheikh Nabi said.
Sheikh Nabi indicated that they are working on holding health awareness sessions for the camp’s residents by summoning one person from each family to attend awareness-raising sessions within physical distancing conditions.
He added, “We have given every family of eight an additional tent. These measures are not sufficient, but this is what we have.”
He pointed out that all these measures were taken “without any support by international organizations operating in the city of Raqqa.”