Fatima, 33, mother of five sits crossed legged on the floor in a cold shelter unit in a camp for displaced near the Turkish border in Northern Syria. She keeps her voice low when she talks, so her youngest daughter, who is playing on the floor beside her, won’t hear the parts Fatima still cannot bear. They lived in Aleppo during the conflict for months and she loved her city. “Going shopping on Aleppo’s old market with my children is my favorite memory.” Today, that part of Aleppo is a skeleton of the place she remembers. The market is now heavily damaged. The place where she once chose dresses for birthdays and holidays is rubble and dust.
In early 2016, she had decided to flee the city. “I was so scared all the time, with all the planes and bombing. That day I felt I could not handle it anymore and wanted to take a bus to flee to relatives. We already bought the tickets.” But before they could leave, cluster bombs fell nearby. They sought shelter in a neighbor’s house and postponed their departure. When the barrel bomb punched through the ceiling, Fatima had her baby son in her arms. The room went dark. The smell hit her before she understood what had happened. She remembers the moment with a clarity that still stiffens her breath. “My children were sleeping when it fell through the roof. It hit everyone but did not explode. I remember the smell of chlorine and acid. And that all my children were injured and bleeding. My nine-year-old daughter, Roua, did not wake up. My beautiful daughter died. She had blond hair and green eyes.” She takes out a photo on her phone, her eyes full of tears. A green velvet dress. Two ponytails. Purple bows. A nine-year-old girl who should have had a chance at life. Roua was buried at the relatives’ home. The place the family had intended to reach that same day. Fatima still carries the unbearable logic of it. “We planned to go there 1 day earlier with the bus, but Roua arrived at her destination, but dead.”
Two months later, Fatima gathered her surviving children and fled. They have lived displaced in northern Syria ever since. Five years in a tent, and the last five years in a small shelter unit in a camp near the Turkish border. For families like hers, these camps have become semi-permanent cities over the last decade, filled with people who have no homes left to return to. “It was very harsh to live in the tent, with no access to water. Here there are aid organizations who helped us a lot. Without them, we would not have survived.” Winter is coming again. And this winter feels sharper, heavier.
The mats on the floor are thin. Her blankets are thin. The air inside air already bites. Her heater is broken. Fuel is unaffordable. She burns what she can find. “We collect and burn plastic or old boots and clothes. It smells very bad, but it’s better than the cold. We normally receive support in the winter, but that has stopped. I still hope that someone will come and help us this winter.” She avoids turning on the electric heater even for her youngest. “Yesterday, I wanted to change my daughter’s diaper and wanted to turn it on but then I saw the cost and my heart dropped.”
She checks the weather forecast constantly. Next week temperatures will fall sharply. “We are very scared. It makes me feel so much despair, because there is never anything I can change about our situation. Every winter, we struggle to continue.” For the last 1.5 years, CARE has provided water and waste management for the camp. But that funding ends at the end of 2025, with no replacement on the horizon so far. Across Syria, humanitarian funding has been steadily cut, even as prices rise and families slide deeper into debt. After the regime change in December 2024, many international donors began reducing or redirecting their funding. Aid programs that had supported water, winter aid, sanitation, and basic living needs in displacement camps were scaled back or ended entirely. With fewer resources, families like Fatima’s are left without alternatives. Fatima feels these shifts every day. “The camp is growing empty. Some relatives left for Aleppo. This luxury I do not have. My house is destroyed.” While some return home, many others are fleeing again, not because of bombs and rockets, but because aid has stopped and life has become unaffordable. Shops have closed. Markets have vanished. “I do not know where to buy my food now. This scares me a lot. Also, there are a lot more stray dogs in the streets.” A pregnant brown-yellow dog wanders past her door as she speaks. The units around her stand hollow—doors ripped off, debris on the floors, only children’s drawings left on the walls. A child’s name: Nahsa. A handprint. A pink birthday cake. A makeup brush, perfume, eyeshadow in bright colors. A coffee cup, with a small hand-drawn heart beside it. Lives once lived here. Now reclaimed by wind and dogs. Down one lane, a stone shop has collapsed, only three walls are still standing. The painted words remain: “Al-Nour Supermarket”, the Syrian flag, and “Thank God.” This was where Fatima used to buy bread for her children.
“We are without alternatives now,” Fatima says. “I am the one who normally decides for the family. But now I do not know what to do. We cannot go, we cannot stay, we cannot return. What shall I do?” She wants to start a small business again, as she once did sewing clothes in a workshop. But the workshop closed three months ago and left the camp. Her husband sends what he can from daily labor in Idlib, but it is not enough. She is borrowing money she cannot repay. “I am alone here. They all left me. We have gone through so much during the war and terror. But I always had solutions, ideas and found ways out of it. But not now. There is no more alternative.”
Outside, the wind pushes through an empty door against a broken frame. Inside, Fatima pulls a blanket around her youngest child and watches the sky darken, knowing the cold will settle deeper tonight. And that she has nothing left but hope, and the terrifying question of whether anyone will come in time.
