In a razed Damascus refugee camp, one martial arts club holds its stance

The 17-year-old Muay Thai fighter, Mahmoud, looks across the Yarmouk Camp, Syria, down from the fifth floor of a shattered apartment block that his family hopes to rebuild. The fighter’s arm rests on the fresh concrete window frame as he leans out of the window.

The building is being rebuilt piecemeal with cash scraped together from Mahmoud’s occasional ad-hoc painting work, paid at a‑dollar-a-day, and they are a long way off having the full amount needed. ​“There is no electricity. We have nothing. It is a 30-minute-walk for bread,” Mahmoud says, while lacing up his running shoes for his daily training at his local Muay Thai fighting gym. ​“All I want is to fight – I love this sport”.

The stroll to the gym is a short one, snaking between alleyways and torn-up buildings turned inside-out; their concrete bodies popped like balloons by mortar shells, airstrikes and automatic bullet fire.

As we walk, our journey is interrupted by the faces and voices of returnees to Yarmouk who are eager to chat with their young neighbour, to gather new fragments of their shattered community.

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Set on the southern edge of Damascus, Syria’s capital city, the Yarmouk Camp was once a densely-populated and developed town of over 200,000 Palestinian refugees. It was a rich sanctuary of Palestinian-Syrian community-life. Now, Yarmouk’s population is reduced to just a few thousand returnees.

Founded in the ​’50s as a space to rehome those displaced by the 1948 Nakba – when Palestinians were violently removed from their ancestral lands by Israeli settlers – the camp grew to become the largest community of Palestinians in Syria’s vast lands. ​“Yarmouk is our home before the return to Palestine” one woman – a former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant – told us as she stopped Mahmoud for a brief conversation while we moved through the camp. 

Following the Syrian uprising in 2011, the former dictator Bashar al-Assad turned on the Palestinians, many of whom had joined the rebellion against him. Between 2015 and 2015, Assad and his supporters laid a brutal siege to Yarmouk, starving hundreds to death, and grinding the bricks of houses and their occupants into the dust of Yarmouk’s streets.

Arriving in the grounds of the Yarmouk Fighting Gym, a dayglo mural of Al-Aqsa mosque has been hand-painted; it reaches 7ft high, climbing up one of the gym’s exterior walls. The paint is freshly licked and brilliantly vivid – a memento of the belief that Palestinians will one day return to their ancestral homes and land. 

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Inside the small, dusty rooms of the gym itself, slivers of sunlight break through the caged windows, and catch the dust in the air as it eddies against the light. The sounds of fist, knee and foot slap against canvas, rhythmic bass to the treble of gasps and breaths. Jabs, parries and kicks disturb the air. Sweat flickers from headbands across the blue cushioned floors. 

Like much of Yarmouk, this gym was battered and crushed by Assad’s bombs. No NGO or government organisation has helped rebuild here, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA) has little to give these youth. The gym’s reconstruction came from the coach’s own shallow pockets.

While the coach is hesitant to speak on the record, his students reveal to me that he was ​“once a world champion in Muay Thai”, and that his commitment to his students’ training is limitless. ​“Without him there would be nothing here” Mahmoud tells me: ​“He’s the father to us all… orphans or not.”

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When I photograph the coach in a fighting pose outside the gym, he puts his fists in front of his chin and neck in a well-honed guard, and reveals an M16 automatic rifle tattooed up the front side of his left forearm in black ink. The coach won’t speak of his youth, and when asked for a follow-up interview he claims that he doesn’t even possess a phone.

“That’s Shabul, the one with the Golden Gloves.” Mahmoud gestures across the room, towards the huge grin of a 14-year-old lad, who is weaving away from fists cutting the air where his jaw had been a split-second ago, again and again, darting inches out of reach.

“Shabul has been training since he was six years old.” The fighter returned a week ago from fighting in the world competition, in Abu Dhabi. ​“He dreams of winning the world championships,” Mahmoud whispers. ​“He’s one of the best fighters in all of Syria, he has a strong personality too, he could fight or debate with a 20-year-old.” Born at the start of the uprising against Assad, Shabul now stands in the ring contesting world titles, the bruised but strengthening body of hope for a new Syria.

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Also present is a national victor who trains with the youth in Yarmouk too, Mohamed Adnan Yousef, 25 – a generation older than Shabul – who hits the bags at the gym with the ferocity and precision of a lifetime of training three times a week. He was crowned National Champion of Syria in the April championships. 

But, Mahmoud explains, despite the talent of his friends in the gym, none of the fighters in Yarmouk will be competing in the Syrian National contest, this month. ​“The tournament fees are minimal, but the preparation is expensive.” Despite Trump’s waiver of sanctions against the Syrian economy, economic improvement has yet to be felt where it matters – in the bellies of these fighters, or the stomachs of their families.

“We need about one to two months to prepare, improve our fitness and fighting tactics, and eat healthily to reach peak physical condition. We need to dedicate ourselves to training twice a day, which is difficult. We can’t work and train at the same time. There’s no work, so there’s no money, and that’s the hard part for us.” 

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Lacking resources that fighters from richer, more fortunate nations have, many of the fighters will never be competition ready, but in the gym it’s hard not to see a victory greater than those measured by trophies.

One of boxing writing’s greatest 20^th century characters, Norman Mailer, wrote in The Fight – his study of Muhammad Ali – that success in boxing is measured not just by the victories, but by the adversity that the fighter overcomes. By that measure the Palestinian-Syrians have champion pedigree.

“You may not believe me, but I feel my connection to Palestine is stronger than my parents’.” Mahmoud tells me, between breaths, between rounds. ​“My belief that fighting and not surrendering is the path to victory. That’s what I learnt when Bashar al-Assad’s régime fell.”

Jake Pace Lawrie is a journalist, filmmaker and photographer based out of Beirut and Damascus. Follow him on Instagram.

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