Living in mud-brick huts in the middle of the desert, under the toughest siege of Syria’s civil war, the 8,000 displaced people left to rot in the isolated Rukban camp thought they would never make it out alive.
For nine years, the Assad regime strangled supplies of food, water and medicines into the camp, closing even smuggling routes, earning it the moniker the forgotten “no man’s land”. This is despite the fact it is located just a few kilometres from a US military base and the Jordanian border and in territory that the US had de facto control over.
