The double refugees: The family who fled Syria’s civil war and ended up in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh

As soldiers advanced on the village, Raffi and his family fled without a single bag of clothes – setting off, once more, into exile.

The trio had left the hardships of Syria the previous year to start a new life in Nagorno-Karabakh, the breakaway enclave within Azerbaijan populated and controlled by ethnic Armenians. For Raffi’s family – descendants of Armenians who sought refuge in Syria from genocide a century ago – this distant land held the promise of a fresh start on native soil.

But the recent war over Nagorno-Karabakh has uprooted them a second time, along with tens of thousands of others. While many have since returned, a ceasefire deal that handed control of several areas to Azerbaijan has left thousands more refugees – or in Raffi’s case, double refugees – stuck in limbo far from home, facing an uncertain future.

“Our feet aren’t on the ground, we’re not up in the air – we’re somewhere I can’t even describe,” says 28-year-old Raffi, who asked to withhold his surname, fearful of being stigmatised by his community. “We have nothing left. All I want is to go home to Syria, but we don’t have the money to go back. We don’t know where to turn.”

As temperatures plunge through the winter, those who lost their homes in the fighting or in its aftermath find themselves in a precarious position as friends, relatives or sympathetic strangers put them up. In need of warm clothes and medication, struck by the trauma of displacement, some have sought temporary shelter at hotels, others at vacant buildings requiring renovation.

Paid work is scarce and livelihoods are stretched as war and the pandemic compound Armenia’s dire 16.6 per cent unemployment rate – two-and-a-half times the regional average.

With snow blanketing mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh, severe challenges also await those able to return home to a long winter that is exacerbating humanitarian needs in the aftermath of brutal hostilities.

Armenian authorities say the war displaced around 90,000 inhabitants out of the enclave's total population of 150,000. According to Russia’s peacekeeping force, more than 50,000 have returned since the end of the war in November. However, with no registration of returnees taking place, the UN says the precise number is unknown.

Homes, hospitals, schools, water systems and other vital infrastructure were destroyed during the devastating autumn war. Amnesty International says both sides violated international humanitarian law by repeatedly striking civilian residential areas with cluster bombs and other indiscriminate weapons.

Thousands of unexploded munitions are now strewn across the area, posing a threat to life and limb. “This is the most dangerous time, just after the end of the war as displaced civilians return,” says Miles Hawthorn, Nagorno-Karabakh programme manager for The Halo Trust, a humanitarian mine-clearance organisation.

Despite these risks, a heartening sense of normality is returning to the region’s bustling capital, Stepanakert, which became a ghost town during the war. Devoid of children during the conflict, youngsters are now seen knocking around footballs while the previously-bombed market throngs with shoppers and washing lines thick with laundry burst with colour, Yet challenges remain as people queue at aid centres for food packages, hygiene items, heaters and other urgent winter supplies.  

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, plans to distribute blankets, mattresses and direct financial support to those in need, while also training counsellors to help hospital patients and school pupils overcome the trauma of war. Humanitarian groups are seeking £45m to support displaced people over the coming months.

However, plans to deploy a UN fact-finding mission to survey humanitarian needs on the ground have hit a standstill. “Negotiations are ongoing and are complex because of the need to consult and agree with all concerned parties,” says Jens Laerke, of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

For Raffi’s Syrian family, this all follows a decade of turmoil. Born and raised in Qamishli, a Kurdish majority city in northeastern Syria, his prosperous farming family lost access to almost half of their croplands during the civil war. Raffi’s father died in 2017, while the ensuing economic crisis wrecked the family’s prospects further.

“Many of our Christian neighbours had already left so we thought, let’s go to Artsakh,” says Raffi, using the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding areas occupied by Armenians since the end of the first war in the 1990s. “We have Armenian roots and saw it as a safe haven.”  

Fuelled by patriotism and enticed by state-sponsored incentives, Armenian settlers there are given free homes, farming land and low-interest loans for livestock and agricultural equipment. Some newcomers receive new builds, others move in to homes abandoned by Azeri owners, expelled in the first war.  

So, in July 2019, Raffi left Syria with his wife and his mother, flying from Damascus to Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Since 2011, 24,000  Syrians have fled civil war to the land of their ancestors in Armenia, which in turn has welcomed them as returning citizens.

“It was very difficult to leave,” says Raffi. “My best memories were in Syria.”

They pressed onwards to Nagorno-Karabakh. Eventually they were given a two-bedroom house in neighbouring, Armenian-held Lachin District where around 76 other Syrian-Armenians are reported to have settled, despite the looming threat of war in this disputed territory.

This resettlement policy has been controversial. For Armenians, it offered a way of tackling population decline in what they regard as liberated historical lands. But for Azerbaijanis, it amounted to an aggressive breach of international law that undermined peace talks and hindered the potential return of Azerbaijani refugees.

Despite the free home, Raffi's new life in this isolated region proved tough. His first job involved working seven long days a week as a tractor driver over the course of a month. This earned him less than £500 to see him through the next three months without further employment.

Work picked up around harvest time but dropped away again, while the family struggled to grow a sufficient amount on their patch.

“It was nice being around Armenians – they’re our people and this is our motherland – but I did miss home in Syria,” says Raffi. “It was hard to make any money and we started doubting our decision to come here.”

Those doubts deepened last September when Azerbaijan launched a military offensive to retake lands lost to Armenian forces decades earlier. One morning, as the assault gained momentum the following month, neighbours began shouting that Azerbaijani soldiers were close.

“There was no time to gather anything,” says Raffi.  The family hastily left the village before the soldiers arrived, thinking they would be able to return a few days later. Hidden in their home were all their valuables, including thousands of dollars of savings – all in cash and their only financial lifeline.

Over the coming weeks, the family would scour newspaper ads for free rooms as Armenia faced a dramatic influx of refugees. First they stayed in a town just over the border, then headed to Yerevan.

On 9 November, the fate of their village was sealed. As fighting reached a devastating crescendo, Armenia’s prime minister capitulated into signing a ceasefire agreement that required all Armenian forces to withdraw from occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh – including Lachin District where Raffi’s house was situated.

His family continued to move between a succession of flats and houses until ending up in a small twin-room at a hotel on the outskirts of Dilijan, a sleepy town in mountains to the north, living among 50 other refugees.

“We’re very thankful to the hotel for taking care of us,” Raffi’s mother told The Independent on the hotel’s wooden veranda. “But we never know when we’re going to be told to move on. We left home with only the clothes on our backs. Every day we think of the valuables we lost that could get us out of this mess.”

Even civilians able to return are confronted by new uncertainties. In the absence of reliable security arrangements, the new line of contact between the opposing sides runs right through villages, while freshly demarcated borders bring while new borders are demarcated, bringing rival forces face-to-face.

Heated rhetoric in Azerbaijan and political upset in Armenia, coupled with tensions along the front-line and anger over stalled prisoner swaps, risk prolonging the agony of the deadlock. “When you do not work towards reconciliation, these things certainly increase the chances for future conflict,” says Olesya Vartanyan, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank.

With Raffi and his family now dislodged into Armenia, Azerbaijanis who were expelled en masse during the 1990s war eagerly anticipate the opportunity to return. Yet, given the destruction wrought by two wars, some question if the wait was worth it.

“When I learned that I could visit my home, I came here but I saw only ruins,” says Shadiya Qahramanova, a 60-year-old Azerbaijani schoolteacher, in a neighbouring district to where Raffi’s family lived. “This wasn’t what I waited 26 years to see”.

Raffi, and thousands more like him, now face an interminable exile. Looking out from his small hotel room, the scenic view of icy, rugged mountains is cold comfort to a family that has lost everything.

“We have nowhere to go,” he says as snow began to fall. “We’re just trying to survive from day to day. We can’t think further than that.”