'No Hope': A Deadly Tent Fire In Jordan Leaves Syrian Refugee Farm Workers In Despair

Ftaim al-Saleh's young nieces and nephews play in the dirt near her family's new tent on the road to Amman's international airport. Her own youngest children are buried up the road — four of them laid out in graves on a small, rocky hilltop cemetery overlooking the highway.

The children died in a fire early one morning in June, while she and her husband were in the fields where they work as farm laborers.

Saleh, 35, and her husband are among the thousands of Syrian refugees the International Labor Organization says make up about 70% of Jordan's farm workers — planting and picking vegetables and the strawberries that have recently become popular among middle-class Jordanians.

The strawberry fields where the Salehs worked on the day their children died are on the outskirts of Amman. Thousands of shoppers come and go to the giant Ikea store overlooking the fields. But unlike the Syrian refugees in Jordan's sprawling camps or crowded into impoverished urban neighborhoods, refugee farm workers are mostly unseen.