When the civil war in Syria threatened his village more than a decade ago, a farmer and his family fled to neighboring Lebanon.
The farmer, Ali Kheir Khallu, 37, found work there growing oranges and bananas. Life was hard, he said, but at least he felt safe.
That feeling vanished last month as Israel ramped up its war with Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia, heavily bombing sites that it said belonged to the group. When the bombs fell near Mr. Kheir Khallu’s house, he packed up his family, left behind the new lives they had built in Lebanon and fled back to Syria, where they are now struggling to start over, yet again.
“You want to make up for all that you have lost,” he said. “But you are still in shock.”
As the war in Lebanon expands, more than 1.2 million people — one-fifth of the population — have been displaced from their homes, the government says.
While most have sought safety in other parts of Lebanon, more than 470,000 people, mostly Syrians, have crossed into Syria in the last six weeks, aid groups say.
Since Syrian rebels tried to topple the government in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad has fought to stay in power, with his forces bombing and besieging opposition communities and repeatedly using chemical weapons. The war drew in Russia, the United States, the jihadists of Islamic State and other forces, displacing about 12 million residents, or more than half the country’s population.
More than 1.1 million Syrians registered as refugees in Lebanon, most of them deeply impoverished and in Lebanese communities that wanted them to leave. Some of these refugees have now decided to try their luck in their own shattered country rather than under the bombs in Lebanon. But they must navigate Syria’s tattered economy, damaged communities and a government long known to trample on human rights.
Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government controls most of Syria’s major cities, but large parts of the country are dominated by either Turkish-backed armed groups in the northwest or a Kurdish-led militia supported by the United States in the northeast.
Human Rights Watched warned recently that Syrians returning home could face repression by the government, including forced disappearance and torture.
Mr. Kheir Khallu and other returning refugees spoke to The New York Times in the village of al-Rai in northern Syria during a visit facilitated by the Turkish authorities who oversee the area.
His uncle, Abdel-Majid Dahdou, 48, has also recently returned from Lebanon and said that Syrian war and the passage of time had transformed their village, Celame. Shelling damaged his house and looters cleaned it out, he said, leaving him to now borrow mattresses and blankets for his family.
When he left years ago, rebels were fighting the Syrian government. Now, Turkey supports the local security forces and provides basic services.
But the new Turkish-backed authorities there have refused to recognize his Syrian government identity card, he said, meaning that he cannot enroll his children in school or connect his house to the electric grid. So while trying to figure out how to get a local ID, he charges his cellphone at a relative’s house.
“At night, we sit in the dark,” he said.
Other Syrians said they had also found it hard to return.
Mohammed Najjar, 42, left his home and housewares store in the town of Azaz on the Turkish border in 2013 to go to Lebanon, where he sold clothes at an outdoor market and worked as a day laborer in agriculture. His family registered as refugees with the United Nations, he said, but stopped receiving aid years ago.
Then work grew scarce as Lebanon sank into a deep economic crisis that began in 2019, compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.
So when Israel began bombing near where his family lived, he said, he decided to head home.
“It was war. There was no money, and we worried about the children, how to pay the rent, where we would live,” he said. “So we decided it was safer to come home.”
He returned with his brother’s wife, Hamida Brimo, who had gone to Lebanon at age 10 and come home a 22-year-old mother of three. She got married in Lebanon, but her husband did not make the move to Syria with her and their children, she said, because he feared being forced to serve in the Syrian Army.
She said she didn’t know when she would see her husband again, but she hoped that at least she and her daughters would be safe in Syria.
“We came back, but we don’t know how our lives here will be,” she said. “We have to return and start over.”
The post Caught Between Wars, Syrian Refugees in Lebanon Return Home appeared first on New York Times.
