ISIS Is Just Miles Away From Assad's Presidential Palace In Damascus

For the last remaining Palestinian residents of Yarmouk outside Damascus, this week’s takeover by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is a “siege within a siege.”

For almost two years, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has been suffocating rebel-held Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee settlement turned residential neighborhood just 10 minutes from the heart of Damascus.

Water has been cut off, available only when aid groups sneak it in, and medical supplies and food are scarce. Yarmouk, once known as the capital of the Palestinian diaspora, has shrunk from a prewar population of 180,000 to just 18,000, with about 200 people starving to death since the regime blockade began in 2013, the United Nations says.

The camp’s plight worsened on April 1, when ISIL fighters surged into Yarmouk from their nearby stronghold of Hajr al-Aswad and swiftly overpowered its Palestinian defenders, Aknaf Beit Al-Maqdis, a Hamas-aligned militia. As of Thursday, ISIL had taken over 70 percent of the camp, assisted, sources said, by elements of Jabhat Al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) — Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and, normally, ISIL’s chief rival.

About 2,000 people managed to escape since ISIL infiltrated, but the rest “are now trapped in a siege within a siege,” said Salim Salamah, a Yarmouk native who left in 2012 and now heads the Palestinian League for Human Rights in Syria from Sweden.

Sources on the ground describe a terrifying scene. Farouq al-Rifai, an activist from Yarmouk who said he spoke from an “adjacent neighborhood” but is in contact with many in the camp, said that pitched street battles have broken out and that sniper fire from roofs has killed fighters and civilians alike. The last remaining relief workers in the camp have been forced to flee after several were killed and others were kidnapped by ISIL.

Meanwhile, regime warplanes add to the chaos by dropping barrel bombs “all over the camp — north, south, east and west,” Salamah said. People are running out of food, but “they can’t leave their houses to find it because they don’t know where clashes on the ground will take place.”

Though the situation on the ground is murky, with conflicting reports that Palestinian factions in the camp have conspired with the invasion, the broad consensus is that Yarmouk has fallen casualty to a turf war between ISIL and an array of disjointed rebel factions active in the area. 

It is unclear whether all Palestinian factions in the camp have agreed to Syrian government intervention.

Anti-government Palestinian militiamen and some Free Syrian Army fighters have been leading the fight against IS.

“The operation will be conducted in cooperation between the Palestinian groups in Syria and the Syrian government through a joint operation centre,” Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official Ahmed Majdalani – who is heading a Palestinian delegation in Damascus – told the BBC.

Who exactly will do what in the operation, and how the plan will work, is far from clear, the BBC’s Jim Muir reports from Beirut.

The Aknaf, the main Palestinian force fighting the militants, was not involved in the agreement – it has been cooperating with Syrian rebels battling both government forces and Islamic State, our correspondent reports.

Reports emerged yesterday of Isis militants beheading captives after taking over a large proportion of the camp. Mr Abdurrahman said two men were beheaded after the clashes broke out on Wednesday and five others were shot dead by militants.

He said the beheaded men appeared to have been aged between 25 and 35, but he did not know the ages of the other men. These reports could not be independently confirmed.

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