Woman who fled Isis reduced to tears by refugee camp fire in heartbreaking video

Two Syrian children died and several people were admitted to hospital with severe burns after huge fires ripped through two informal refugee settlements in Lebanon last week

Lebanon’s fertile Bekaa Valley is beautiful. In the July sun, gold wheat fields reflect the light and the sky is blue and clear over the mountains which form the border with Syria.

The Bekaa’s lush landscape is usually at odds with the poverty found there: 39 per cent of Lebanon’s registered 1.1 million refugees are living in the 2,564 informal settlements dotted across the Bekaa, according to UN data.

This week, however, blackened fields where two refugee settlements once stood are an unmistakable reminder of the bleak situation Syrian refugees in this part of the country face.

The fire is thought to have been started by someone using a gas canister, commonly used in the camp for cooking, inside a tent (WorldVision)

In the space of just four days, huge fires ripped through two different camps, killing two children and sending around a dozen more people to hospital with severe burns.

Souriya Nasser al Ahmad, 39, lives in one of the settlements affected just outside the town of Qob Elias, where it is thought the blaze was started by someone using a gas canister to cook in one of the camp’s 94 tents.

Her memory of what happened on Sunday afternoon isn’t clear because everything happened so quickly, but she recalls scooping up her younger children and running for the camp’s only entrance as towers of black smoke rose into the air.

“It was terrifying,” she told The Independent.

While cooking fires are common in the haphazardly built settlements in which many Syrians in Lebanon are forced to live, they are normally quickly contained, affecting a tent or two before residents manage to put them out.

Thanks to the searing 40 degree summer heat wave and wheat crop surrounding the camp, however, it spread very quickly. Several residents said that the fire extinguishers they used to try to put it out had expired and didn’t work properly.

Ninety-one of the camp’s 94 homes were completely destroyed, leaving around 700 homeless. Almost everyone’s identification papers and the few souvenirs and trinkets from home that survived the dangerous journey across the border were destroyed.

“We’ve never seen anything as severe as this. Usually fires are under control much quicker,” said Antoine Ghazaly, the UN Refugee Agency’s child protection officer for the region.

Identification papers and the few trinkets from home that survived the dangerous journey across the border were also destroyed (WorldVision)

Souriya – named for her country, an old fashioned moniker which Syrians do not often give their babies these days – came to Lebanon with her husband Hamoud and their children in 2013. Natives of Raqqa, when Isis began to gain a foothold in the area they decided to get out while they still could.

Now they have a family of six. Hamoud does odd jobs around the camp for cash in accordance with the strict rules set for Syrian work permits, but the family are desperately poor. He often suffers from migraines which leave him too unwell to work.

The usual image associated with refugees is one of camps filled with row upon row of white tents – but after taking in so many Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and fearful of encouraging people to stay, the Lebanese authorities have not set up official government-run camps for those displaced by Syria’s civil war, complicating the work of aid organisations.

As a result, Syrian families often make their own homes out of the materials to hand – with limited UN and NGO assistance – or move into derelict or abandoned buildings, often in already overcrowded Palestinian areas.

Thanks to a summer heat wave and wheat fields surrounding the camp, the fire was able to spread quickly (WorldVision)

One hope that kept Souriya going for the last few months was the promise of a new home her father was helping build for the family: a four by four metre semi-permanent house made from timberframe, breezeblocks and tarpaulin, which would have its own latrine.

Like everything else at Qab Elias camp, it went up in flames.

While rebuilding work has already begun in earnest – every family reconstructing their own shelter with help from the local Lebanese community – it does not mitigate the sense of loss for many. Souriya's family's case is complicated by the fact they were missing the right permits and papers in the first place.

Talking about the house she had dreamed about, Souriya began to cry. “I don't understand,” she said, her children sitting around her. “They're telling me I'm not able to have my own tent [or the new one her father was building]. It makes my life so complicated."