When the Syrian refugees first started streaming into this bedraggled border town, Gassim al-Moghrebi was their tireless benefactor, distributing donations of food, money and clothes and sheltering as many as possible in two apartments he owned.
“All of Ramtha was just like me,” Mr. Moghrebi said, describing a good will rooted in family ties that spanned the border, and sympathy for the victims of a pitiless war. “One man had 10 apartments. He gave them to the Syrians for free.”
But now, as Syria witnesses a new escalation of violence, including waves of Russian airstrikes, and as Syrians flee again by the tens of thousands, neighboring countries are increasingly overwhelmed and reluctant to let them in. In many places, that early altruism has hardened into resentment — an ominous turn for those searching for safety from the war.
Desperate Syrians are backed up at the borders of Jordan and Turkey, barred from entering or else just allowed to trickle in. Increasingly, they find escape routes closing.
“They have become a nuisance,” Mr. Moghrebi said.
In Ramtha, the bulging population has set off a competition between locals and the refugees for resources, including housing, water, schools and work. When the border crossing was closed, Mr. Moghrebi was forced to shut down his decades-old money exchange business. Instead, he has to rely on the income of his 29-year-old son, the only one of his 10 children who still has a job, he said. Jordan would be better off if the refugees stayed in camps, he added.
The anger has left many Syrians further marginalized in the already isolating struggle to survive. Mohamed, a 13-year-old Syrian with an irrepressible smile who now lives in the northern Jordanian town of Irbid, said he did not socialize with the other children on his street and had made only one real friend: another Syrian teenager who worked with him at a cleaning fluids factory, making the equivalent of $7 a day.
In his spare time, he said, he watched videos of the Syrian war.
Officials in Jordan, a longtime sanctuary for refugees from the region’s wars, now put the number of Syrians there around 1.4 million. They had been warning for years that the country had reached its limit. Last week, they made even more dire admonitions at a London donor conference on Syria, pushing for more aid while channeling the darkening mood at home.
There have been flashes of popular anger as the economy worsens, including a recent protest by tomato farmers who destroyed surplus crops they could not sell for several reasons, including the closed borders. Some Jordanian political figures, echoing the discourse of anti-immigrant movements in the West, have tried to link the refugees to rising crime, terrorism or a threat to national identity. But others have blamed the government for mismanaging the crisis and revived longstanding complaints about corruption.
In an interview with BBC News before the London conference, Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, said that the “psyche of the Jordanian people, I think, it has gotten to the boiling point.” If the country does not receive significant long-term support, he said, “We are going to have to look at things in a different way.”
“How can we be a contributor to regional stability if we are let down by the international community?” Abdullah asked.
The appeal, with its vague threat, had the intended effect: More than $10 billion was raised at the London conference, exceeding estimates. The largess was partly driven by the growing alarm in Europe over the number of refugees there and the desire to keep them in border countries.
But despite the ambitious proposals, the international aid is still widely regarded in Jordan as a short-term fix to a much deeper economic problem, as well as an attempt by Western nations to buy Jordan’s continued forbearance in order to ensure the refugees never reach their own shores.
The government promises to somehow lure new investment, but local and foreign funding are increasingly scarce because of regional turmoil, said Samer Tawil, a former economy minister.
“We have five ‘free economic zones,’ ” he said. “They are not creating jobs. There is hardly an investor there. There are no shipping lines from here to the rest of the world. The Syrian border is closed. The Iraqi border is closed.”
“How can we find jobs for Syrians, unless we want to open our labor market and treat them as nationals?” Mr. Tawil asked. “In that case, people will fire Jordanians to hire a cheaper Syrian.”
Others have made more direct appeals to nationalism, saying the refugees will upset the delicate balance in Jordan between so-called East Bank Jordanians and citizens of Palestinian origin. Bassam Btoush, a member of Parliament, said that the government had been too “flexible” in accommodating the refugees and should have restricted them to camps.
“They will settle here and become nationalized,” he said, cautioning that such a move would further dilute the privileges of East Bank Jordanians.
Such warnings have put growing pressure on the government, and possibly put the refugees at greater risk, aid workers say.
In a recent report, the Norwegian Refugee Council warned that new restrictions in the nations bordering Syria had made the country’s 4.3 million refugees more vulnerable than ever. The Lebanese borders are effectively closed, and costly new regulations threaten the legal residency status of hundreds of thousands of Syrians already in Lebanon.
The Jordanian frontier has also been all but sealed, resulting in “at least three major buildups of asylum seekers along the inhospitable informal northeastern borders, the latest with a reported 16,000 refugees,” the group said.
“There is no question that Jordan has been shouldering this problem on their own for all these years, and it is straining the resources of the country,” said Karl Schembri, a spokesman for the group based in Amman, the Jordanian capital. “No country in the world was ever prepared for these influxes of refugees.”
But the Syrians were faced with “an impossible situation,” Mr. Schembri said. Nearly half of the refugees the group has interviewed want to leave Jordan. But the odds of reaching Europe are long, and they are loath to return to the stampeding violence at home.
Mohamed Masalmeh, 70, a Syrian who has been waiting out the war with his family in Ramtha for four years, is barely scraping by, and hardly, it seems, straining the resources of the state. He supports himself, his wife and three granddaughters with the help of United Nations assistance that only just covers the rent.
“We thought it would be six months, a year,” he said. His granddaughters, whose father was killed in the war, barely know anything about Syria.
He does not intend on staying, as some Jordanians fear. “If there is any peace, we’ll go back,” he said.
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