Ten years after he fled his home in war-torn Syria to seek refuge in neighboring Lebanon, Ahmad Mustafa is once again living the nightmare of exile, this time going the other way to escape Israeli bombs.
"We are going from one war to another," summed up the visibly tired 46-year-old man after crossing the border with Syria with his wife and three children in the area of Qusheir.
Ahmad Mustafa has not forgotten the day he fled his hometown of Raqqa in northeastern Syria, a city that fell to Islamic State jihadists in 2013. "We left with only the clothes we were wearing," he said. "And now the same is happening in Lebanon, we had to leave while bombs were falling, to save our lives." The family lived in the community of Ouazani, near the border with Israel.
"We're starting from scratch, once again," he said after boarding a bus chartered by a businessman in Raqqa.
Mustafa hopes the family will be able to stay with relatives in the town they left a decade ago.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon
Lebanon has taken in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – two million, according to the authorities, 770.000 according to the UN – since the civil war broke out in 2011.
Anti-government protests suppressed by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned into a civil war that subsequently involved jihadist organizations and regional and international powers, with Russia and Iran supporting the regime.
Thirteen years and hundreds of thousands dead later, the country is fragmented and fighting continues in certain zones.
In Lebanon, the war resumed a year ago, when Hezbollah opened a front of "support" for the Palestinian Hamas in the south, after the latter attacked Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. After Israel's massive bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds began in southern and eastern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. About 310.000, mostly Syrians, crossed the border into Syria after 23 September.
Suffering without end, from one movement to another
Jaafar al-Ali, 53, is one of those returning Syrian refugees. He left Raqqa with his family in 2014, the year that city was declared the "capital" of the Islamic State's "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq. The "caliphate" dissolved in 2019 after the jihadists were driven out by Syrian Kurdish forces backed by an international coalition led by the US. However, cores of IS still remain active in some areas.
"It's a never-ending pain, from one commute to another," says Jaafar al-Ali, as he waits for the bus to take him to the city where he was born. "We go to Raqqa to sleep on the street. I don't have anything there anymore. No family, no relatives, no home,” he said bitterly.
Jaafar looks sadly at his 13-year-old son, Muayyad. "All he has known is war and displacement. He didn't go to school, he doesn't know how to read or write," he says.
Bashar Hamaidi, 25, paid a fortune to leave Raqqa in 2016. Now, he has left Ouazani, in southern Lebanon. "We saw bodies on the road" leading to the border with Syria, he claimed.
Many of his neighbors in this southern Lebanese village were killed by Israeli strikes.
“I had the feeling that death was following me. I was turning my head to see if he was following me and my family. I will never forget the children's screams. It was a day of horror that I will remember for the rest of my life," he concluded.
Source: iefimerida.gr
