JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Palestinian and Syrian families fleeing the Palestinian refugee neighborhood of Yarmouk in Damascus say that they refused to leave their homesin spite of years caught in the crossfire of the Syrian civil war, but that Daesh's terror finally forced them to flee.

According to a recent article by AFP, around 100 displaced Yarmouk residents now live in three classrooms in a school temporarily converted into a refugee camp in the Tadamon neighborhood of Damascus. 40 of the people living in the school are children. They were among 500 families to escape the Daesh assault on the camp on Wednesday, said PLO officials in Damascus.

40-year-old Umm Usama was among the 18,000 Yarmouk residents who stayed in Yarmouk over the years of war. Before the war, Yarmouk was home to 160,000 people.

"I left the camp despite myself," she said. "I’d stayed on despite the bombings and famine. It was terrible, we ate grass, but at least I was at home.The arrival of ISIS meant destruction and massacre. Their behavior is not human and their religion is not ours."

19-year-old Nadia had to flee the camp with her two-year-old baby, leaving her husband behind.

"I walked out hugging the walls so snipers couldn’t see me," she said.

AmjadYaaqub, a 16-year-old child who lived in the camp, described watching Daesh members play football with a beheaded human head in the street. He only survived Daesh's attack because he was left for dead.

"ISIS came to my home looking for my brother who’s in the Palestinian Popular Committees. They beat me until I passed out and left me for dead," said the youth, now injured.

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