Women in camp in Syria’s Raqqa struggle to get bread
RAQQA, Syria (North Press) – Every morning, dozens of women in Yunani Camp, south of Raqqa, north Syria, set out on a miserable journey towards Raqqa in an attempt to beg bread distributers for the material needed for their families.
60-year-old Safia al-Rajab and the other women in the camp have tried to request bread from the distributers, but these attempts have always failed.
Displaced people living in the camp described their camp as a “mass grave” due to its lack of any basic necessities.
Al-Rajab keeps repeating the phrase “we want bread,” hoping that she may find attentive ears to her suffering and the suffering of the camp residents.
The majority of bread distributers refuse to give the camp residents bread, on the pretext that “there are allowances for the residents of the city’s neighborhoods, and giving bread to one of the camp’s families will cause a shortage of the rations for the residents of those neighborhoods.”
The camp, which is located in the village of Kasra Faraj in the southern countryside of Raqqa, is inhabited by more than 250 families, most of them from the Rusafa area in the southwestern countryside of Raqqa, which is currently controlled by the Syrian government forces.
Al-Rajab wondered how long it will take for the camp’s residents to obtain their allowances of bread, despite the passage of four years since the camp’s construction.
Dozens of random camps are spread across Raqqa and its countryside, whose residents are often from areas under the control of the Syrian government in the countryside of Homs, Hama, and the southwestern countryside of Raqqa.
Recently, the media office of the Raqqa Civil Council published a video clip in which it said, “People steal the residents’ allocations of bread and sell it as fodder.”
The video scenes show, large quantities of bread were placed in a room in a house in one of the neighborhoods of Raqqa for the purpose of drying it and later selling it as fodder to livestock farmers.
Faraj al-Kadam, a resident of the camp, said that the problem of securing bread has not been solved despite the long passage of time since its establishment.
The Economy Committee asked for a census of the camp’s residents in order to allocate quantities of bread, “but this matter remained just promises,” according to al-Kadam.
Muhammad al-Nayef, head of the Office of Informal Camps Affairs in the General Council in al-Shamiya, acknowledged that there was a problem in securing bread for camp residents, especially Yunani Camp.
Al-Nayef indicated that the Informal Camps Affairs Office had contacted the Economy Committee in the Raqqa Civil Council to find a solution to end the suffering of the camp residents.
He called on those concerned to solve the problem and to conduct field assessments on the ground during which the suffering of the displaced would be directly revealed.