Turkish Flotilla To Yarmuk Camp Stymied By Nonexistence

“In practice, it’s insanely difficult to organize an endeavor this ambitious without there actually being anyone here who genuinely cares about the Palestinians except as a pretext to attack Israel.”

Istanbul, April 15 – Organizers of a flotilla to bring supplies and humanitarian relief to the suffering Palestinians of the Yarmuk Refugee Camp in Syria complain of a lack of progress on the initiative as a result of there being no such people or effort afoot.

The IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish group with declared sympathies for the beleaguered Palestinians, spearheaded a 2010 flotilla to the Gaza Strip to break Israel’s control of maritime passage to and from the territory, a mission the Israeli Navy intercepted. To demonstrate the movement’s commitment to alleviating Palestinian misery even when not inflicted by Israel, IHH announced this week that a new relief flotilla would depart from Istanbul port and head for the Syrian coast, where it would rendezvous with local human rights activists to deliver aid to the 18,000 remaining residents of the besieged Damascus-area camp. However, the IHH leaders who made the announcement failed to account for the obstacles inherent in the fact that neither they nor the flotilla exist.

El-Yarmuk, formerly a distinct camp but now a suburb of the Syrian capital, has shrunk from 160,000 residents to 18,000 over the course of the four-year-old Syrian Civil War. Pressed in on all sides by the various fighting factions, the few residents who have not fled continue to brave sniper attacks, deprivation, shelling, disease, and looting. Over the last several weeks Islamic State fighters have taken over the camp and imposed an even more brutal existence, summarily beheading and torturing large numbers of Palestinians.

The IS butchery, which had heretofore largely spared the Palestinian refugee community, spurred the Turkish activists to once again prepare to set sail on behalf of the oppressed. “Our desire to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hand of their persecutors takes no account of the identity of those persecutors,” said Raçep Kiboshian, an IHH organizer who has the misfortune of not actually being a real person. “Or at least that’s the idea. In practice, it’s insanely difficult to organize an endeavor this ambitious without there actually being anyone here who genuinely cares about the Palestinians except as a pretext to attack Israel.”

Kiboshian, who participated in several other imaginary relief efforts to help Palestinians facing threats other than Israel, confessed that he and his cohorts were caught unprepared for the sheer magnitude of the effort required to put together an operation similar to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. “The original flotilla only called for docking and unloading, but the Yarmuk camp is inland, so we would have to get the supplies and people from whichever port – probably Latakia, but since we’re in the realm of fantasy anyway, there’s no reason to limit it to there – over land, through patches of territory controlled by different groups, and finally to the camp itself.”

“That would be a tall order for anyone, but it’s infinitely more difficult for people who only exist in some alternative universe,” he lamented.