MAFRAQ, Jordan — Watering the plants on her balcony back home in Syria this spring, Wedad Sarhan took delight in how they were stirring to life after the winter months. A jasmine tree filled the small balcony with its sweet scent. An apricot tree, planted eight springs earlier, was blossoming for the first time.
A rocket exploded on the balcony minutes later. Ms. Sarhan was standing inside. Two of her granddaughters were wounded. Their father, Hasan, quickly carried one girl to a nearby clinic, unaware that the other lay more grievously wounded under a pile of clothes.
Ms. Sarhan found her. “I pulled her out by her shirt,” she recalled. “I took her in my arms, and then I started screaming, ‘There’s no leg!' ”
That evening, the Sarhans fled Dara’a, their hometown in southwestern Syria, and crossed into Jordan, three generations of refugees. Their large clan, already torn apart by the Syrian civil war, was now scattered across Jordan and Syria.
Today, the Sarhans in Jordan, like other Syrian refugees cast into an increasingly unwelcoming region, make vague plans about returning to a homeland that has all but vanished. But the war, raging just half an hour’s drive from here, relentlessly forces the Sarhans to remake their lives in this new home.
They are venturing uneasily into their new neighborhoods, anxiously sending their children to new schools, reluctantly opening a new business. Updates from family members in Syria are gleaned from brief, shaky cellphone calls.
“Our family story is just one of many,” said Noman Sarhan, Ms. Sarhan’s eldest son. “You can find Syrian families who have had an easier time than we’ve had, and others whose stories are more horrific. But almost all Syrian families have these in common: a relative who’s been killed or wounded, who is detained or wanted. Every family has suffered.”
The Sarhans are among the more than two million people whom Syria’s civil war has so far spread throughout the Middle East and even into Europe. As the 31-month war has festered, growing ever more violent and deepening along sectarian lines, the number of refugees has swelled.
An interactive feature on the Web site of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees presents the precise number of registered refugees on a particular date: 475,494 on Jan. 1, 2013; 1,078,881 on April 13, when the Sarhans came to Jordan. It is a dry, digital chronicle of a humanitarian crisis that the world body has characterized as the worst since the Rwandan genocide two decades ago.
With an estimated 4.25 million Syrians displaced within their own country, the conflict has uprooted more than a quarter of Syria’s population. More than 100,000 have been killed.
About 40 miles south of here, in the capital, Amman, Ms. Sarhan has been staying with one of her wounded granddaughters at a rehabilitation
center. Ever the optimist, she appears cheerful at first. Yet a terrible grief comes over her when she recounts her family’s losses.
Two of her children and nine grandchildren are safe in Jordan. But 6 children and 21 grandchildren remain trapped in Syria. A daughter has moved to an abandoned house with her family; another has sought shelter in a house under construction. Her youngest son was recently wounded in the leg by a sniper. Another is on the run, wanted by government forces for his activism. Two others are in detention, including one in a military prison in Damascus. That son, she says, has not been heard from in eight months.
As for her husband, Hussain, 62, he is marooned in the family home, holed up in a rebel-held area that is the focus of regular shelling and rocket attacks. Fearing looters, he refuses to leave. When the fighting eases, he sometimes walks up a nearby hill for a cellphone signal. “I’m O.K.; is everybody O.K.?” he asks his wife before hanging up.
An Eldest Son’s Burdens
“Where are the Jordanians?” Noman Sarhan, 38, said, repeating a joke popular among Syrians in Mafraq.
Most Syrian refugees have gravitated not into camps, but into cities like Mafraq, where the population has doubled to 250,000. With a reputation for being hard-working, resourceful and skilled at business, many Syrians have found jobs, sometimes at the expense of Jordanians. Others have started businesses, including Mr. Sarhan and his wife, Feda, who, with a $25,000 investment from a cousin, recently opened a hair salon
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