There, at the first trickle of floodwaters and the cradle of fragility, displacement camps are born.
A camp is not a place of permanence or stability; it is a state of suspended passage, caught between the margins of cities and the edges of deserts—forever in limbo.
The vast, barren desert of Al-Jufaina, on the outskirts of Marib, was once a minefield and the proposed site for a Kuwaiti-funded sewage project meant to manage the city’s waste. Then the war came—swift and unrelenting—transforming it into a sprawling camp, now the largest refuge for displaced people in Yemen.
I have been here with my family since 2017.
Like any other camp, this place distills a singular humanitarian tragedy into the shared suffering of thousands. It becomes a feeling, materialized into an invisible geography—unseen by the world except to those who live within it and to the war’s newest victims, arriving in endless waves.
Marib alone hosts over 200 displacement camps, according to the Executive Unit for the Management of IDP Camps, sheltering nearly two million displaced people. In total, the war has uprooted five million Yemenis—a nation of tents, of which I am one citizen.
International organizations, which are expected to support war victims in conflict zones, do not operate in Yemen as they do elsewhere. Here, after a decade of war, they barely acknowledge the camps’ existence—offering only fleeting, superficial interventions, their presence as transient as the fires and floods they occasionally respond to.
The local government in oil-rich Marib concedes that its resources are insufficient to handle the immense population surge triggered by the war. A city once sparsely inhabited is now overwhelmed by a relentless tide of people.
And as the war drags on, the prospect of return fades. Many homes have been deliberately reduced to rubble—some by the war, others by design. Displacement, once thought temporary, stretches into permanence. Yet the camp remains a restless place, an uncertain non-place, offering neither safety nor stability.
It is collective fear, scattered and chaotic—a makeshift existence assembled in haste. An emergency state, fragile and precarious, playing out in the gray zones of a land long scarred by battles over ownership.
So where do the displaced go if the war does not end—if the country remains stranded in the uneasy limbo between half-war and half-peace?
The fragile truce, precariously balanced on a thin thread, could snap at any moment. And if war resumes, it will not only shatter the illusion of peace but also extinguish the displaced people’s hope of returning to the lands of their childhood—lands of both innocence and gunpowder.
Meanwhile, an unspoken unease lingers among the host community: an implicit fear that long-term displacement could alter the region’s demographic fabric. Beyond the immediate crisis lies the unsettling reality of a people gradually settling into the “nowhere” that is the camp—transforming it into an unintended home.
This silent apprehension manifests in subtle yet significant ways. For instance, children born in the Marib camps are not officially registered as natives of the governorate. Marib—the land that once stretched wide to shelter millions fleeing war—somehow shrinks when it comes to recognizing the birth of a new, laughing child.
