—How long have you been walking?
— I don’t know, what time is it?
— One o’clock.
— Calculate, I left at 07.00.
If Syrian refugee Mohammed has been fleeing Israeli bombs on foot for six hours, it is partly because, he says, “Lebanon is not what it used to be.” He is not referring to the deadliest bombings in the country in decades, which have killed nearly 600 people in two days and forced him to flee and wait – sitting at a crossroads, with two crutches and his foot bandaged – for his friend Osama to arrive. He says this because Lebanon, the country that welcomed him when he fled in 2014 from an offensive by the Bashar al-Assad regime (supported by Russia and, precisely, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah) in the mountains of Aleppo, has been embracing xenophobic discourses and practices towards them, conveniently turning them into scapegoats for the many ills of the country, especially since the beginning of the brutal economic crisis in 2019. And that these days comes to light with Syrian families walking for miles under the sun, shelters that refuse to take them in – or, at best, do not give them blankets or mattresses, because they are “only for the Lebanese” – or gas stations that do not give them fuel, according to their accounts during their exodus. Poorer and with fewer support networks, they make up around 1.5 million (the figure is also a matter of controversy) of the 5.3 million inhabitants of Lebanon. It is the country in the world with the highest percentage of refugees in relation to its population, also due to the prior absorption of Palestinians and Iraqis.
As happens with every mass refugee flight, many Syrians have remained close to the border, watched in the background by the mountains they have crossed. That is, in the Bekaa Valley and in the northeast, two of the territories most affected by Israeli bombings that – paradoxically – have achieved what the State has long wanted: for them to return to their country on their own. Hundreds of people have crossed back into Syria since Monday, despite the fact that the war is still going on and some of them risk being arrested or enlisted for 10 years by the Armed Forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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This is what worries Mohammed, 20, the most. “If it were one or two years… But ten years is like playing roulette for your life,” he says. He is also worried about the Israeli attacks, so this is the first time he has considered returning to his country since he arrived in Lebanon as a child. “If this drags on for too long,” he explains. “I was eight years old in Syria, but I remember that the planes would go down until they dropped the bomb and then go back up. Here, however, you don’t see them. You only hear the explosion,” he says.
Mohammed’s situation is bleak: he can’t walk because, he says, he worked as a carpenter and fell from a fourth-floor roof. He has trouble remembering the name of the person who will host them for a few nights in Beirut. He describes him as “a friend”; then admits that he is, in fact, “an acquaintance from work”, also Syrian. On Monday, while he was fleeing from the bombs, a Lebanese man told him: “You have ruined this country, go back to your own.” He says it with an accent that is more Lebanese than Syrian: it is where he has spent most of his life.
He is sitting alone, at a major bypass of the coastal highway near the city of Sidon, which has been experiencing 48 hours of incredible traffic jams with families fleeing the south. The bridge leads to Beirut and the road below leads into the mountains, which is where the bottleneck forms. Syrian families walk along both, carrying bags and suitcases, next to the traffic and the honking of horns. Vans, buses and trucks with empty seats pass by.
“Undo the damage”
It is a road like those that have been lined for months with anti-refugee slogans such as “We have had enough” or “Undo the damage, before it is too late”. A Christian party has demonstrated, promoting a theory along the lines of the great replacement (in the Sunni Syrian refugee version) and some Syrians were beaten and humiliated in April, simply for being Syrian, following the arrest and murder of a Christian political leader. The police attributed it to a mainly Syrian criminal gang.
Osama, 19, arrives on his motorbike and explains that he has been given excuses at a service station for not giving him petrol. “There were Lebanese cars next door and this is a motorbike. It costs five dollars to fill it up, it is not going to run out because of that,” he protests.
Mohammad Aruri also describes discriminatory treatment. “We tried to sleep in three schools. In all of them they told us that they were only for Lebanese. In the last one, they allowed us to sleep in a courtyard, but not in the classrooms, even though on the third floor there were some empty ones. They didn’t give us blankets or mattresses either,” he says, sitting on a motorbike with his children on the side of the road. “And I was shaking, having almost died three times. A missile fell near my house; another one further away, but I was still alive.” [la onda expansiva] It affected her more. And, on the way, near Zeita, a bomb fell nearby and I escaped on the motorbike in the middle of the smoke, holding my son with my arm.”
His wife, Yazi Issa, arrives sweating and on the verge of tears. It is very hot, she has been walking for an hour and a half along the side of the highway and she gulps down the bottle of water that is handed to her. There was not enough room for everyone on the only motorbike they have, so the father took the children and she just caught up with them on foot. “I could have tried to stop a van. [que cubren una ruta y se dividen el pago]but there is so much traffic that it would have taken longer. It is faster to walk. Otherwise, it could have been five or six hours,” he argues. trolley sticking out of a basket of vegetables they have tied to the motorbike. A Syrian friend helps them to continue their journey without separating.
“What happened to me there, happens to me here now”
Others cannot help but connect their two experiences fleeing bombs. “What happened to me there is happening here now. And it is strange, because I left 13 years ago and for me the war in Syria seems like something from the past, something I don’t think about. But this here, now, is where I am. And it is real,” says Ahmed Abu Saleh, 24. Ali, 16 years older, can hardly believe that he is escaping death again, as he did in 2011: “It is humiliating, degrading…” There are four of them on the motorbike and he says that he slept under a bridge on the way: “It was not serious,” he downplays. “We were not the only ones.”
The passing of the years (13 years of war in Syria) with no solution in sight has contributed to the success of a xenophobic discourse based on hoaxes and half-truths and the feeling that the European Union is closing its doors to refugees while “bribing” Lebanon with a package of 1 billion euros for the period 2024-2027 to control the “problem”: Syrians are a large part of those who take the illegal migration route to Cyprus. Added to this is a structure based on identity, whereby the Maronites perceive the integration of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Syrians, another of the three major confessions that share the representative positions in the country, as an existential threat.
Last September, in a 90-page report with 16 witnesses, the NGO Human Rights Watch accused the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Cypriot authorities of collaborating to prevent refugees from reaching Europe – something they are increasingly trying to do, given the deterioration of their situation in their host country – and then returning them to Syria, regardless of their status or the risks they face there. That same month, the Lebanese government ended up revoking, under pressure, a decree it had issued allowing Syrian children to enroll in public schools, even if they reside illegally, a status to which they are condemned by the authorities’ refusal to formally treat them as refugees.
