Syrians are spending the last of their savings to get to Europe only because they have given up hope of ever returning home says Mercy Corps’ country director for Jordan

Thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan have given up hope of returning home and consider travelling to the UK and other parts of Europe as a last resort.

Dominic Graham, Mercy Corps’ country director for Jordan, said refugees are completely demoralised living in camps they expected to be in for a few months but have now been stuck in for up to four years.

Speaking to TFN in Edinburgh, where the international aid agency's European headquarters are, Graham said many refugees have spent their savings and sold their assets to get to Jordan and survive there. They therefore face a stark choice between the dangerous and expensive trip to Europe or staying in horrendous living conditions in Jordan in the hope that an unexpected peace breaks out.

Whenever you talk with refugees either inside or outside the camps the overwhelming majority of people want to go back to their lives, they want to go back to Syria, they want to go back to their villages

Dominic Graham

“Whenever you talk with refugees either inside or outside the camps the overwhelming majority of people want to go back to their lives, they want to go back to Syria, they want to go back to their villages,” Graham said.

“The problem is that as time goes by, a lasting political solution to the civil war in Syria is looking less and less immediate, so people are losing faith in their ability to go back to their former lives and they are forced to start thinking of other futures for themselves.

“They talk about coming to Europe and they talk about different ways of doing it. It costs a fair amount of money and it’s a very dangerous crossing, where people are exposed to people smugglers and other risks along the way.

“It’s not something people want to do, but people spend their savings and sell their assets to maintain life in Jordan. Then they get to a point of no return, where they have to decide whether they are going to stay in Jordan until they have nothing left or jump now while they still have a little bit.”

Currently there are around 700,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan but there are also refugees from previous conflicts in Iraq, Palestine and other countries in the region.

Prime Minister David Cameron singled out Jordan as one of the countries where the UK would take many of the 20,000 refugees it expects to rehome by 2020. It is also where the 100 refugees who arrived in Scotland just last week came from.

“The UK, Germany and Sweden are the three countries most commonly mentioned by refugees," said Graham. "I wouldn’t say the UK is number one on that list but it does come up.

“I think for a lot of people it is more about getting to Europe rather than any particular place.”

According to Graham, around 80% of refugees in Jordan live in towns and villages, some of which have doubled in size, and the remaining 20% live in two official refugee camps.

Azraq opened in 2014 and is home to up to 30,000 refugees and Zaatari, which opened in 2012, has a massive population of around 90,000.

In the short term Mercy Corps is concerned with making sure the refugees survive Jordan’s harsh winter, which is expected to be cold and snowy.

Longer term its 120 paid staff in the country – which includes 114 Jordanian nationals – along with a couple of hundred Syrian refugees volunteers are focussed on maintaining stability in Jordan and carrying out psychological work with young people, who make up around half of the refugee population.

This work is essential not just from an immediate humanitarian point of view, but for long-term stability in the region.

Mercy Corps’ research has found when refugees feel connected to society and that their community, are listened to and treated fairly they are much less vulnerable to jihadist ideologies.

As a result, the organisation is working with tens of thousands of young people in Jordan and has partnered up with 193 community groups

“Some people have had a relatively tough but manageable time of it,” Graham added.

“Others have had incredibly stressful experiences, they have seen family members and friends killed, they have been forcibly relocated several times.

“If you are stressed for a month or two it’s okay but when it becomes two years, three years or four years of stress everyday, it is very difficult and it changes the way people see the world and themselves.

“It starts to erode their self-confidence and puts them in difficult places where they are at risk of falling into bad practices, turning to drugs or to alcohol and all the sorts of social ills that you might expect.”

Mercy Corps is not involved in the process for selecting which refugees would come in to the UK. That is between the British and Jordanian governments, but Graham did praise the decision of the UK to only accept refugees from official camps in a bid to deter others from trying to arrive in Europe of their own volition.

“Whether taking 100 people out of a camp is effectively deterring tens of thousands from making the journey, I don’t know but I think the principle is decent," he said.

Air strikes in Syria, which UK Prime Minister David Cameron has now said he considers to be in the UK’s national interest, however are a different matter.

“I think experience has shown us that bombing people doesn’t fix a situation on its own.

“The civil war in Syria is more complicated than just ISIS, there are many different groups competing with each other there.

“In the end it is going to be very difficult to achieve a lasting, durable peace in Syria, it is going to have to be a politically won battle.”