Barely 1,000 people live in Ain al-Beida, tucked on a hillside in densely wooded mountains five miles from the border with Turkey. But the population has tripled in the past two weeks as residents of a nearby town, Badama, have fled the advance of the Syrian security forces, fearing an attack that has not yet materialized.
On Saturday morning, Syrian troops swept into Badama, according to news reports. The Associated Press, citing the Local Coordination Committees, a group that documents anti-government protests, said troops backed by six tanks and several armored personnel carriers, entered Badama in the morning. The Reuters news service, citing eyewitnesses, reported that troops arrested dozens of people and burned houses as they entered the town.
The forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad occupied a neighboring village, Dreibat, on Thursday, residents of Ain al-Beida said, although they did not advance on their village on Friday.
The security forces’ brutal drive through Idlib Province has sent more than 8,000 people across the border into Turkey, where they are staying in tent camps set up by the Red Crescent. Thousands more are thought to be hiding in informal tent cities and small forest camps strung throughout the mountainous zone on the Syrian side of the border.
Here in Ain al-Beida, people are struggling to cope with an estimated 2,000 refugees who have sought shelter, living in cars and storerooms, at construction sites and in the school. The fortunate ones have been offered space in rough cinder block homes, on narrow streets that ramble down a slope from the border, with wire demarcations.
?“Every classroom in the school houses at least three families, and every house in town is housing three or four — in my house there are four,” said Ahmed, a resident who, like several others who were interviewed, gave only one name out of concern about retribution. He said most of the refugees had come from Badama and Jisr al-Shoughour, a major town in the province whose residents fled in advance of a military operation there last weekend.
Two weeks ago, fighting in Jisr al-Shoughour between security forces and military defectors or armed elements, or a mix of both, set the stage for the government’s aggressive crackdown in the region.
Many refugees said they left Badama out of fear that their town could be the next one to feel the government’s anger. Sheik Eyad Hassoun, 32, is from Badama, but leads prayers in the village mosque in Ain al-Beida. On Friday, he sat with a dozen men on thin mattresses in a tent pitched in a pasture above the town, just a few feet from the Turkish border. The men smoked cigarettes and grimly watched Al Jazeera’s coverage of protests in two Syrian cities, Homs and Hama, on a television connected by an extension cord to a distant cottage.
Sheik Hassoun left Badama after watching coverage of the military assault on Jisr al-Shoughour last Saturday and Sunday.
“I saw all the killing on TV and decided then to come here,” he said. He said he felt safe so close to the border because he could easily escape a government attack, if it came.
Down the hill in Ain al-Beida’s schoolhouse, the classrooms have been cleared of desks. Thin mattresses line the floors, and a jumble of pots and pans crowd around the blackboard. Electrical sockets are jammed with cellphone chargers. Children run across the schoolyard, whose wall has become a communal toilet.
“Life here is so hard,” said Hassouni, 19, who said he fled Badama a week ago with his family after plainclothes forces loyal to Mr. Assad drove down the main road firing randomly at civilians. He said his family was reluctant to cross into Turkey, fearing they might never be able to return home, so they came to Ain al-Beida instead.
After a week in the school, Hassouni said he was beginning to think that his family would inevitably end up in Turkey. “Going to Turkey is the last thing we would do, but now I think it is certain,” he said. “Things here will end. We will run out of food, and then we will have to go.”
Entire towns and villages in the region have emptied out, with people fleeing from the security forces, bringing economic activity to a halt. The security forces have set up a formidable line of checkpoints across the province, people in Ain al-Beida said, trying to block the flow of goods and people to the border zone.
“There are still people inside Syria who want to come here, but it’s forbidden,” said Abdullah, 32, a refugee from Badama who sat watching Al Jazeera with Sheik Hassoun.
Residents and refugees get by on stored goods and fruit plucked from the orchards, but they said their most important lifeline was a vast network of circuitous and secret smugglers’ paths that crisscross the fields and mountains leading to Turkey.
“We don’t get enough to eat; it all depends on what comes in from Turkey,” said Samar, 26, who left Badama with her husband and three young children. They were squatting in a bare room in an unfinished building overlooking a steep valley and Turkish military posts atop mountains on the other side. “It is our only source of food.”
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