AL AZRAQ REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan (NY Times) — His face was bright red from the desert sun, and his son’s eyes, blank with exhaustion, gazed into the distance. Bahjat Sheikh, 58, and his family had crossed the Jordanian border to safety after an arduous two-and-a-half-day journey, mostly on foot, from the central Syrian city of Hama.
The Sheikhs, staring up at their gleaming new white roof as if in disbelief, were one of the first families to arrive at the United Nations’ newest Syrian refugee camp, Al Azraq. Since they settled in early this month, more than 6,500 Syrians have arrived.
United Nations officials say the camp, a remote, dusty expanse covering about six square miles, could grow even bigger than Jordan’s Zaatari camp, which shelters more than 100,000 Syrians and is the world’s second largest.
That forecast is a measure of the crisis facing Jordan, which has absorbed waves of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees over the decades. And it is adding to Jordanians’ fears that the new influx will deepen social and political tensions, even as their government comes under international pressure to maintain at least a partly open border with Syria.
With no end in sight to the Syrian conflict, Pope Francis urged the world last week, on his visit to Amman, the Jordanian capital, “not to leave Jordan alone in the task of meeting the humanitarian emergency.”
During three years of conflict, more than 2.8 million Syrians have fled their country, with nearly 600,000 of them heading to Jordan, mostly women and children. Those numbers include only people who have requested United Nations assistance; aid workers believe that the total is significantly higher.
Lessons learned from the exponential and sometimes chaotic growth of the Zaatari camp have informed the design and management of Azraq, officials said.
At Zaatari, tents have flooded in winter, riots have broken out and refugees have complained of crime in the city like settlement. Poor Jordanians nearby have chafed at the drain on resources and the new economic competition from the growing tide of arrivals.
At Azraq, refugees are to be settled with others from their hometowns, in villagelike clusters designed to give the feeling of communities within a town rather than an emergency camp, aid workers said. Security has been stepped up, and transitional shelters have replaced tents.
The camp, whose name means “the blue one” in Arabic, was deliberately built far from any settlement, a half-hour’s drive from the city of Azraq, once an oasis but now mostly an arid desert area about 60 miles east of Amman.
Officials say the remote location, along with plans to finance the camp entirely through nongovernmental agencies, will minimize the impact on the subsidized services that Jordan is already providing to the refugees who live outside camps, who are known as urban refugees and constitute nearly 80 percent of those fleeing Syria.
But even as the new camp opened, Jordanian officials and aid workers sounded notes of caution.
“The absence of a political solution to address the root cause of the humanitarian crisis will mean the hemorrhage from Syria will continue to flow into Jordan and other countries,” Jordan’s foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, said at a meeting of foreign ministers at the Zaatari camp on May 4.
Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, the head of the Azraq field office of the United Nations’ refugee agency, said officials hoped that the new camp would not reach its full capacity of 130,000, adding that the agency would prefer to manage two medium-size camps.
But Robert Beer, country director for Jordan at the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest agencies working at Azraq, said, “We all expect Azraq to get big.”
The camp is enclosed by fences and barbed wire. There is a large security station inside, and the Jordanian military runs strict entry and exit checkpoints.
Smoothly paved roads slice through rows of shelters, 13 feet by 20 feet, built from zinc and metal to withstand wind and heat. The government is keen to avoid any cement or concrete construction, to prevent a sense of permanence.
The concept of the Azraq camp, which received more than 2,000 refugees in its first week, is that each “village” cluster will have easier access to services and will include people who already know one another or come from the same towns in Syria. There is also room to build more shelters next to existing ones, so that new refugees can move in next to extended family members.
“We are trying to build a sense of community and ownership,” Ms. Castel-Hollingsworth said. “What is important to remember is that if the refugees can coexist here, they can coexist when they go back, and we are trying to foster this.”
During its first week, the camp still faced logistical problems — no gasoline for cooking, no electricity — and refugees were adjusting to the limited water resources, a chronic problem for parched Jordan.
Still, the shelves were loaded in a large, fancy, air-conditioned market: jam, Tropicana juice, packaged turkey slices, Coco Pops (known as Cocoa Krispies in the United States), flavored coffee. The refugees receive vouchers from the United Nations’ World Food Program but can use them for essential food items only.
Sitting on the family’s new mattress in their shelter, Mr. Sheikh’s wife, Fayzeh, 43, said her children had not gone to school for three years.
“Back home, Syrians are sleeping in schools,” she said. “They have been hiding there to get away from the violence.”
The couple brought their three sons, leaving their adult daughter, who is married, back in Hama.
“Before the war, my farm gave us life,” Mr. Sheikh said. “We sold pistachios and lentils. Life was simple.”
The family had found some respite, but they still seemed shellshocked, radiating the sense of ambivalence and uncertainty that pervades refugee life.
Echoing a phrase used by waves of refugees in the past, Mr. Sheikh said, “I don’t think we’ll be here for long.”
