BAB AL-SALAMEH, syria — Pregnant with twins, Fatima Abdallah survived shelling, hid under relatives’ beds and went without food during a treacherous weeks-long trip across the Syrian border.
Safely in a Turkish hospital, she gave birth to a healthy boy and a girl. But after just two nights, she was sent right back, the victim of the overwhelmed country’s ban of new refugee arrivals until more camps can be built.
Abdallah, 29, brushed away the flies in a cramped, 10-foot concrete shed near the border crossing, where at least 5,000 other refugees waited to cross into a safer haven from Syria’s 18 months of violence. She held her 4-day-old son son, Ahmed, as he sucked away on his pacifier, while her daughter Bayan slept, eyes tightly closed, in pink and blue fuzzy blankets.
“I want a clean house,” she said softly, gesturing at the mud-tracked concrete floor. “Just a safe home for them, it’s just not clean here.”
Her plight is part of the poignant ordeal of at least 5,000 refugees stranded with little food and unsanitary conditions at the Bab Al-Salameh crossing, camped in immense sheds where trucks carrying cargo were once inspected.
Ailing refugees wait outside, some stretched out on cots, to be treated by doctors for diabetes and food poisoning. A baby whose family fled the city of Aleppo weeks ago sleeps in a car seat, surrounded by mosquito netting.
The refugees are stranded on the border because of Turkey’s decision two weeks ago to ban refugees into the country until it can construct new refugee camps. The country has already taken in about 80,000 Syrians and will let women in like Abdallah, but only to give birth.
“We send delivery cases to Turkey, but the problem is that after they give birth, they are sent back on the same day or the next,” said Dr. Necmi, a Turkish doctor working at a small clinic on the border run by a Turkish aid organization that also provides meals to the refugees. He declined to give his surname.
“There is no healthy place here for these women to be comfortable,” he said.
The United Nations estimates that there are 1.2 million people displaced inside of Syria — half of them children — and nowhere is that more apparent than in Bab al-Salameh, which seems overrun by children of all ages, some as young as the 4-day-old twins.
Abdallah and her twins are actually more comfortable than most in their small room. Thousands of others sleep in the open, spreading plastic mats on the concrete at the mercy of the insects and the elements, their few possessions spread around them.
“A lot of the children have skin infections, from the flies, mosquitoes and other insects,” said the doctor.
He added that without fresh water and clean conditions, most of the children suffer from diarrhea. Refugees blamed the donated food and milk that is spoiled for making people sick.
Every few hours, a tractor pulls up to the huge sheds towing a water tank. Families rush to fill their bottles and cans for drinking and washing.
The seeming randomness of attacks, such as those heard nightly from the camps in the nearby town of Azaz, has the displaced yearning to cross into Turkey for the safety of the official camps.
“Last night there was shelling in Azaz, and it scared her,” said Abdallah’s brother, Hussein. “How can she produce milk? She’s afraid.”
Fears that the twins won’t have any breast milk to drink have sent Abdallah’s husband out scouring the countryside for baby formula, he said.
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Water pipe bursts in Aleppo • BEIRUT — Clashes between the Syrian military and rebel fighters burst a main pipe that delivered drinking water to hundreds of thousands of residents of Aleppo, opposition groups said Saturday.
The water shortage in Aleppo was the latest pinch in a particularly acute humanitarian crisis in Syria’s largest city, brought on by more than a month of street fighting and weeks of air attacks.
A witness and two opposition groups that track the violence said Saturday that heavy shelling from Syrian helicopters appeared to have ruptured the water pipe. The Associated Press reported that a Syrian official blamed rebel sabotage.
The opposition groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees, reported that water flooded into the neighborhoods of Al Midan and Bustan al-Basha in the north of the city.
After reporting a day earlier that they had captured a military headquarters in the Aleppo neighborhood of Hanano, rebels said Saturday that the battle was still underway, with parts of the complex controlled by the government.
Majed Abdulnoor, an activist and informal rebel spokesman interviewed online, acknowledged the presence of some foreign fighters among the rebels, touching on a theme that has been a hallmark of the government’s characterization of the civil war as a defense against foreign intervention.
Most of the fighters in Aleppo are from Aleppo, Abdulnoor said, “but to be honest with you, there are some from other countries.” Some brigades, he said, include a few Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Palestinians and others from Persian Gulf countries.
He said foreigners had come to Syria because of the belief, unconfirmed by the West, that Iran was sending soldiers and advisers to support President Bashar Assad.
“It is a point they try to make: If Iranians are fighting with the regime, they might as well come in and fight with us,” Abdulnoor said.
The Local Coordination Committees reported that 148 people were killed nationwide Saturday. Denver Post wire services
