While Syrian refugees don’t want to return, officials in Lebanon and Syria see exodus as opportunity

While Syrian refugees don’t want to return, officials in Lebanon and Syria see exodus as opportunity
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians refugees have returned to their country since Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment on wide swathes of Lebanon in September. Many who fled to Lebanon after the war in Syria started in 2011 did not want to go back. (AP/File)
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Updated 09 November 2024
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While Syrian refugees don’t want to return, officials in Lebanon and Syria see exodus as opportunity

While Syrian refugees don’t want to return, officials in Lebanon and Syria see exodus as opportunity
  • According to the UN refugee agency, more than 470,000 people — around 70 percent of them Syrian — have crossed the border since the escalation in Lebanon began in mid-September
  • Lebanon’s General Security agency estimates more than 550,000 people have fled, most of them Syrian

BEIRUT: Hundreds of thousands of Syrians refugees have returned to their country since Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment on wide swathes of Lebanon in September. Many who fled to Lebanon after the war in Syria started in 2011 did not want to go back.
But for officials in Lebanon, the influx of returnees comes as a silver lining to the war between Israel and Hezbollah that has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million in Lebanon. Some in Syria hope the returning refugees could lead to more international assistance and relief from western sanctions.
’I wasn’t thinking at all about returning’
Nisreen Al-Abed returned to her northwest Syrian hometown in October after 12 years as a refugee in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The airstrikes had been terrifying, but what really worried her was that her 8-year-old twin daughters need regular transfusions to treat a rare blood disorder, thalassemia.
“I was afraid that in Lebanon, in this situation, I wouldn’t be able to get blood for them,” Al-Abed said.
During their dayslong journey, Al-Abed and her daughters were smuggled from government-held to opposition-held territory before reaching her parent’ house. Her husband remained in Lebanon.
“Before these events, I wasn’t thinking at all about returning to Syria,” she said.
According to the UN refugee agency, more than 470,000 people — around 70 percent of them Syrian — have crossed the border since the escalation in Lebanon began in mid-September. Lebanon’s General Security agency estimates more than 550,000 people have fled, most of them Syrian.
Most of the returnees are in government-controlled areas of Syria, according to UNHCR, while tens of thousands have made their way to the Kurdish-controlled northeast and smaller numbers to the opposition-controlled northwest.
Political leaders in Lebanon, which was hosting an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees before the recent wave of returns, have been calling for years for the displaced to go home, and many don’t want the refugees to return.
Lebanon’s caretaker Minister of Social Affairs Hector Hajjar told Russia’s Sputnik News last month that the war in Lebanon could yield “a positive benefit, an opportunity to return a large number of displaced Syrians to their country, because the situation there is now better than here.”
A political opening for Syria?
Officials in Damascus point to increasing economic pressure from the masses fleeing Lebanon as an argument for loosening western sanctions on President Bashar Assad’s government.
Syria was already suffering from spiraling inflation, and the sudden influx of refugees has driven prices up even more, as have Israeli strikes on border crossings that have slowed legal cross-border trade and smuggling.
“Everyone knows that Syria is suffering from difficult economic conditions: hyperinflation, import inflation, and an economic blockade,” said Abdul-Qader Azzouz, an economic analyst and professor at Damascus University. The influx of refugees just “increases the economic burden,” he said.
Alaa Al-Sheikh, a member of the executive bureau in Damascus province, urged the US to lift sanctions on Syria because of the huge number of arrivals.
“The burden is big and we are in pressing need of international assistance,” she said.
Rights groups have raised concerns about the treatment of returning refugees. The Jordan-based Syrian think tank ETANA estimates at least 130 people were “arbitrarily arrested at official border crossings or checkpoints inside Syria, either because they were wanted for security reasons or military service,” despite a government-declared amnesty for men who dodged the draft.
Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, noted the number of arrests is small and that Assad’s government might not view the returnees as a threat because they are mostly women and children.
Still, Daher labeled government attempts to show the returning refugees are welcome as “propaganda,” saying, “they’re unwilling and not ready in terms of economics or politics to do it.”
UNHCR head Filippo Grandi said this week that his agency is working with the Syrian government “to ensure the safety and security of all those arriving,” and he urged donors to provide humanitarian aid and financial assistance to help Syria recover after 13 years of war.
A temporary return
UNHCR regional spokeswoman Rula Amin said if people leave the country where they are registered as refugees, they usually lose their protected status.
Whether and how that will be applied in the current situation remains unclear, Amin said, underscoring the exodus from Lebanon took place “under adverse circumstances, that is under duress.”
“Given the current situation, the procedure will need to be applied with necessary safeguards and humanity,” she said.
Jeff Crisp, a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Center and a former UNHCR official, said he believes Syrians are entitled to continued international protection “because of the grave threats to their life and liberty in both countries.”
Some refugees have entered Syria via smuggler routes so their departure from Lebanon is not officially recorded, including Um Yaman, who left Beirut’s heavily bombarded southern suburbs with her children for the city of Raqqa in eastern Syria.
“When I went to Syria, to be honest, I went by smuggling, in case we wanted to go back to Lebanon later when things calm down, so our papers would remain in order in Lebanon,” she said. She asked to be identified only by her honorific (“mother of Yaman”) to be able to speak freely.
If the war in Lebanon ends, Um Yaman said, they may return, but “nothing is clear at all.”


North Gaza hospital director says Israeli strikes hit facility

North Gaza hospital director says Israeli strikes hit facility
Updated 06 December 2024
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North Gaza hospital director says Israeli strikes hit facility

North Gaza hospital director says Israeli strikes hit facility
  • Beit Lahia has been the site of an intense Israeli military operation for the past two months
  • The Israeli army has stormed Kamal Adwan on several occasions since the start of their offensive nearly 14 months ago

BEIT LAHIA, Palestinian Territories: The director of north Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital and the territory’s civil defense agency said Israel conducted several strikes on Friday that hit the facility, one of the last functioning health centers in the area.

“There was a series of air strikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital, accompanied by intense and direct fire,” Hossam Abu Safieh said, adding that four staff were killed and no surgeons were left at the site.

The Israeli army has not yet responded to AFP requests for comment on the strikes.

Mahmud Bassal, Gaza’s civil defense spokesman, said on Friday morning that the Israeli army entered Kamal Adwan hospital, evacuated patients and arrested several Palestinians.

The city of Beit Lahia has been the site of an intense Israeli military operation for the past two months that has intensified in recent days, forcing thousands to flee amid bombing, the civil defense agency said.

The Israeli army has stormed Kamal Adwan on several occasions since the start of the war nearly 14 months ago, while the hospital said that its intensive care unit director Ahmad Al-Kahlut was killed in an air strike late last month.

The army’s storming of Kamal Adwan comes just days after the UN’s World Health Organization said an emergency medical team had reached it for the first time in 60 days.

With little to no aid reaching Kamal Adwan since the start of the Israeli operation in Gaza’s far north in early October, the hospital had run out of most supplies, including fuel.

The Israeli army says its operation in the north aims to keep Hamas militants from regrouping there.

Rights groups have accused it of pursuing a plan to evacuate or starve all those remaining there, which it denies.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said on Thursday that residents of the north would not be allowed to move back there as long as the military operations are ongoing.

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s surprise October 7, 2023 attack which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has resulted in at least 44,580 deaths, mostly civilians, according to data from the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.


UN says Syria fighting has displaced 280,000 so far

UN says Syria fighting has displaced 280,000 so far
Updated 16 min 10 sec ago
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UN says Syria fighting has displaced 280,000 so far

UN says Syria fighting has displaced 280,000 so far
  • UN’s Samer AbdelJaber warns that numbers could swell to 1.5 million
  • ‘That does not include the figure of people who fled from Lebanon during the recent escalations’

GENEVA: The escalation in fighting in Syria has displaced around 280,000 people in just over a week, the United Nations said on Friday, warning that numbers could swell to 1.5 million.
“The figure we have in front of us is 280,000 people since November 27,” Samer AbdelJaber, head of emergency coordination at the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), told reporters in Geneva.
“That does not include the figure of people who fled from Lebanon during the recent escalations” in fighting there, he added.
The mass displacement has happened since militants led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) launched their lightning offensive a little more than a week ago.
That occurred just as a tenuous ceasefire in neighboring Lebanon took hold between Israel and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ally Hezbollah, following two months of full-blown war that drove hundreds of thousands to flee into Syria.
WFP warned that the fresh mass-displacement inside Syria, more than 13 years after the country’s civil war erupted, was “adding to years of suffering.”
AbdelJaber said the WFP and other humanitarian agencies were “trying to reach the communities wherever their needs are,” and that they were working “to secure safe routes so that we can be able to move the aid and the assistance to the communities that are in need.”
He also stressed the urgent need for more funding to ensure humanitarians are “ready for any scenario basically in terms of displacements that could evolve in the coming days or months.”
AbdelJaber cautioned that “if the situation continues evolving (at the current) pace, we’re expecting collectively around 1.5 million people that will be displaced and will be requiring our support.”


Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive

Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive
Updated 06 December 2024
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Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive

Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive
  • Militants have captured two major cities so far and are now thrusting toward Homs
  • Seizing Homs would cut off Damascus from the coast, a longtime redoubt of Bashar Assad

BEIRUT/AMMAN: Thousands of people fled the central Syrian city of Homs overnight and into Friday morning, a war monitoring group and residents said, as militant forces sought to push their lightning offensive against government forces further south.

The head of the Syrian faction leading the sweeping assault told CNN that his group — a former Al-Qaeda affiliate now known as Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) — aimed to “build Syria” and bring Syrian refugees back home from Lebanon and Europe.

It was Abu Mohammed Al-Golani’s first interview since his group began seizing territory from Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces on Nov. 27. Militants have captured two major cities so far and are now thrusting toward Homs, a key crossroads city linking the capital Damascus to Assad’s coastal heartlands.

After years locked behind frozen front lines, the insurgents have burst out of their northwestern Idlib bastion to reel off the swiftest battlefield advance by either side since a street uprising against Assad mushroomed into civil war 13 years ago.

Assad regained control of most of Syria after his key allies — Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group — came to his support. But all have recently been diverted by other crises, giving Syrian Sunni Muslim militants a window to fight back.

Hezbollah sent a small number of “supervising forces” from Lebanon to Syria overnight to help prevent anti-government fighters from seizing the strategic city of Homs, two senior Lebanese security sources told Reuters.

A Syrian military officer and two regional officials close to Tehran also said that elite forces from Iran-backed Hezbollah had crossed over from Lebanon overnight and had taken up positions in Homs.

Hezbollah has suffered major blows in its war with Israel in Lebanon, which assassinated some of its top leaders.

Meanwhile, the militants said they had taken over the towns of Talbisa and Rastan, bringing them within kilometers of Homs.

In another alarming development for Assad, the head of the US-backed Syrian Kurdish force said the radical Daesh group, which ran a reign of terror in large swathes of Iraq and Syria until it was defeated by a US-led coalition in 2017, had now taken control of some areas in eastern Syria.

“Due to the recent developments, there is increased movement by Islamic State mercenaries in the Syrian desert, in the south and west of Deir Ezzor and the countryside of Al-Raqqa,” Mazloum Abdi told a press conference, referring to areas in the east of the country.

FLIGHT FROM HOMS

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said thousands of people had begun fleeing from Homs on Thursday night toward the Mediterranean coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus, strongholds of the government.

A coastal resident said thousands of people had begun arriving there from Homs, fearing the militants’ rapid advance.

Seizing Homs would cut off Damascus from the coast, a longtime redoubt of Assad’s minority Alawite sect and where his Russian allies have a naval base and air base.

Russian bombing overnight destroyed the Rustan bridge along the M5 highway, the main route to Homs, to prevent militants using it to advance, a Syrian army officer said.

“There were at least eight strikes on the bridge,” he added. Government forces were bringing reinforcements to positions around Homs, he added.

Assad relied heavily on Russian and Iranian military backing during the most intense years of the civil war, helping him to claw back most territory and Syria’s largest cities before front lines hardened in 2020.

But Russia has been focused on its full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022. And many in the top leadership of Hezbollah, the most powerful Iran-aligned militia force, were killed by Israel over the past two months. Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, pledged to stand by Syria in a television statement.

MILITANT LEADER SPEAKS

Amid concerns that HTS would seek to impose strict Islamist rule in the new areas it controls, Golani told CNN that his group “may dissolve at any time. It’s not an end in itself but a means to perform one important task: Confronting this regime.”

Golani said that through its offensive, HTS aims to return Syrian refugees from the civil war who are dispersed across the Middle East and Europe back to their homes.


Israeli strikes hit two Syria border crossings with Lebanon

Israeli strikes hit two Syria border crossings with Lebanon
Updated 06 December 2024
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Israeli strikes hit two Syria border crossings with Lebanon

Israeli strikes hit two Syria border crossings with Lebanon
  • Strikes hit the Arida crossing in northern Lebanon and the Jousieh crossing which links to eastern Lebanon

BEIRUT: Israeli strikes early on Friday hit two border crossings linking Lebanon with Syria, Lebanon’s transport minister Ali Hamieh said.
The strikes hit just across the border on the Syrian side of both the Arida crossing in northern Lebanon and the Jousieh crossing which links to eastern Lebanon, Hamieh said.
Both crossings are important access points to Syria’s Homs province, where anti-government rebels are seeking to advance against government forces after sweeping through northern Syria.


Iran says it conducted a successful space launch in program long criticized by West

Iran says it conducted a successful space launch in program long criticized by West
Updated 06 December 2024
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Iran says it conducted a successful space launch in program long criticized by West

Iran says it conducted a successful space launch in program long criticized by West
  • Iran conducted the launch using its Simorgh program, a satellite-carrying rocket that had seen a series of failed launches

MANAMA, Bahrain: Iran said Friday it conducted a successful space launch, the latest for its program the West alleges improves Tehran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran conducted the launch using its Simorgh program, a satellite-carrying rocket that had seen a series of failed launches. The launch took place at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Spaceport in rural Semnan province.
There was no immediate independent confirmation the launch was successful.
The announcement comes as heightened tensions grip the wider Middle East over Israel’s continued war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and as an uneasy ceasefire holds in Lebanon.