By RANA F. SWEIS MARCH 15, 2015

AL AZRAQ REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — Here in Jordan’s vast northeastern desert, row after row of white steel shelters built specially for Syrian refugees sit empty.

Storefronts lining a street designed to mimic an urban souk are shuttered, the silence broken only by the punishing wind that is infamous here. Layers of sand coat the windows and floors.

Syrian families live in other parts of the camp, one of the only places left in Jordan where most new refugees are allowed to settle. But nearly 11 months after the camp opened, there are many areas that are deserted.
It was not supposed to be this way.

Built with tens of millions of dollars of international donor money, Azraq was meant to solve myriad problems for both Jordan and the Syrians who have flooded over the border since civil war began to tear apart their country in 2011.

For Jordan, the camp was expected to relieve the burden that hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians are placing on the country’s fragile economy and crowded cities. For the refugees, Azraq was expected to be something of a step up despite its remoteness, a better-planned camp designed around “villages” where people from the same Syrian towns and cities could cluster near shared schools and playgrounds.

More troubling for Jordan, aid agencies say the vast majority of those who left the camp settled illegally in the very cities and towns the camp was built to relieve. (At least 625,000 Syrians have settled in Jordan since the war started, and only about 100,000 are in camps, according to the United Nations refugee agency.)

At least in public, donors who poured money into the camp are not pushing Jordan — an active ally in the military fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL — to change its policies. Money spent on Azraq, they say, is part of a broader policy of supporting Jordan as it struggles to maintain its security in a turbulent region.
“There are hard choices to be made by the Jordanian government, and we understand,” Mr. Terzi said in an interview. “National security is paramount.”

When Azraq opened, it was one of four camps housing displaced Syrians. The largest camp, Zaatari, opened in 2012 and was initially known for its crime and chaos. Azraq was, in some ways, envisioned as the anti-Zaatari, a better-designed camp meant to build a cohesive community.

To avoid Zaatari’s cramped quarters, Azraq is four times the size and was designed with precision, rather than piecemeal as Zaatari was at a time when Jordan was scrambling to house the early flood of refugees.

Azraq’s designers have succeeded in some ways. Security has never been a big issue here, as it was at Zaatari, in part because of more policing.

Azraq also has a well-equipped hospital and a well-stocked supermarket, where refugees can spend food coupons provided by the World Food Program to buy hunks of cheese, olive oil, rice and nuts, reminders of home. And rather than the tents used at Zaatari, small shelters designed to better withstand heat and wind house Azraq’s residents.
Still, life in the camp is routinely harsh. There is electricity provided by generators only in very limited areas. Refugees, many of them former city dwellers, worry about the scorpions, and about snakes they fear will be attracted by the mice that have already overrun the camp.

But perhaps the biggest complaint is the lack of bustle that would naturally accompany a larger population.
“Azraq still needs to get that sense of community,” said Andrew Harper, the top official with the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan.

In addition to the more than 80,000 Syrians at Zaatari, a bustling street market created and run by the refugees has contributed to what aid officials and refugees call a sense of “dignity.”

“The market is where people meet and drink tea,” said Jina Krause-Vilmar, director at the Near East Foundation, a nonprofit organization helping vulnerable communities. “It’s where a sense of community is established.”

The street market at Azraq would go a long way toward relieving the bleakness, but it remains unopened, according to the United Nations and the spokesman for the Jordanian government, Mohammad Momani, because the government wants to impose taxes and possibly other fees on those who set up businesses. (Mr. Momani said he expected the market to open soon.)

A man who would identify himself only as Abu Eiad, 51, is one of those who left the camp, in his case for a northern Jordanian town. He arrived last June from Damascus after a grueling journey with two of his remaining three children. A son who joined the Free Syrian Army, an armed group fighting the Syrian government, had already been killed, and his wife died during fierce clashes on a visit to her family’s hometown, Dara’a.

But after living in the camp for one month, he could not take the rough conditions. He said he left legally through a temporary travel permit, but never returned.

“My health was deteriorating,” he said. “I couldn’t take my kids out of the shelter at night because I was afraid they would be bitten by hyenas or vicious animals in the desert.”

Aid workers said the tide might be turning somewhat at Azraq, with a small number of refugees recently leaving cities and towns for the camp, but only because they are desperate. Living outside the camp, they receive considerably less international help than they do inside, where they are entitled to free health care and larger food rations.

Abu Eiad said he would not be moving to the camp.

“It’s true that I am living in poverty here and my son is not attending school,” he said, referring to the town where he has been living, “but if I was forced to leave this place, I would return to Syria, not to the camp.”

Correction: March 18, 2015

An article on Monday about the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, which currently houses only 14,500 of the 60,000 Syrian refugees expected by the end of last year, misidentified the United Nations agency that warned in December, after a drop in donor funding, that it would have to cut off food aid for Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps. It is the World Food Program, not the World Health Organization.

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