It’s a double punishment. The Israeli bombings raining down on Lebanon are forcing millions of people to flee the country. Among them, Syrian refugees who had already escaped the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the civil war that has ravaged their country since 2011. “When they crossed to go to Lebanon, they had already de facto lost everything, and today, most have nowhere to return to in Syria,” underlines Clément Chappe, head of the Médecins du Monde emergency unit.
There are no precise figures for these population movements, but estimates from various NGOs on the ground have recorded some 487,000 Syrian refugees who crossed the border from Lebanon to Syria, and among them, 25% were women. This projection only concerns Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), because some are not registered, specifies Clément Chappe.
The road leading from Lebanon to Syria was also targeted this Thursday for the second time since October 5, pushing the population to find new less dangerous crossing points, which further complicates their census.
Nowhere to go
Once there, the situation is also difficult. “If they make this choice to return to Syria, it is because they consider it less risky, but between the plague and cholera, it is not easy to choose,” summarizes a humanitarian source whose NGO is present in eastern Syria and particularly in Raqqa. “These people are mainly going towards the governorate of Aleppo and towards the Syrian north-east, under Kurdish authority. There are entire buses, or around 1,500 people per day, who also arrive in the former stronghold of the Islamic State which escapes the governorate of Damascus,” specifies this same source.
These people, once again forced to flee violence, try to “return to their families, but most, who have been in Lebanon for a long time, do not necessarily have a place to stay. Many find themselves either in informal camps for internally displaced persons or in slightly more formal camps, set up to accommodate them,” adds the anonymous humanitarian source. “They have meager resources and no safe place to go,” confirms in a press release the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.
Almost non-existent security
Syria is not a country considered safe by the UNHCR. And some Syrians who were forced to leave around ten years ago necessarily take risks for their security, including that of being arrested by the regime’s authorities. This is the case of Ahmad, whose wife was questioned by The World, and who chose not to follow his wife and stay in Lebanon. “We stayed until the end, but the airstrikes were too powerful,” Ali, in his fifties, tells the daily, who notes bitterly: “The war sent us to Lebanon, it sends us back to Syria. »
It is not so much a choice, but a forced displacement, believes our anonymous humanitarian source. For him, “if they did not return there before, despite an already extremely vulnerable situation in Lebanon, it is most certainly because the security conditions for them, for their families, are almost non-existent. »
Our file on the conflict in the Middle East
When the Syrian crisis broke out in 2011, Lebanon demonstrated a remarkable reception capacity, taking in some 1.5 million refugees, for a total population of 5.49 million inhabitants, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). But their conditions deteriorated considerably in 2019, when Lebanon collapsed economically, financially and politically. When the Lebanese population was thrown into great precariousness, recriminations against refugees were exacerbated. These Syrians were already experiencing “a complicated context pre-existing the Israeli bombings”, notes the humanitarian source. Strikes which made their living conditions even worse.
Source: www.20minutes.fr
