Lebanon deports dozens of Syrian refugees amid spike in racist rhetoric

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s authorities have deported more than 50 Syrians back to their war-torn country in the past two weeks, local officials and a humanitarian source told Agence France-Presse on Friday, despite warnings from rights organizations about the threats they face back in Syria.

Army and security officials said that Lebanon’s army intelligence unit has recently intensified its raids against undocumented Syrians across the country. “The army’s detention centers are full,” the army official explained. “So the army had to take this measure and place them outside Lebanese borders.”

The latest move was not coordinated with Damascus, according to the officials, who explained that the Syrians were handed over to border guards who then moved them to Syrian territories.

Thousands of Syrians have left Lebanon since 2017 as part of a so-called “voluntary repatriation program” organized by the Lebanese General Security and Syrian authorities in Damascus, who claim that Syria is safe for their return. But rights organizations have criticized the move, saying that Syrians are being forcibly deported back to the war-torn country where their lives are at risk.

“In enthusiastically facilitating these returns, the Lebanese authorities are knowingly putting Syrian refugees at risk of suffering from heinous abuse and persecution upon their return to Syria,” Amnesty International said in a report in October 2022.

More than 5 million Syrians have fled the civil war since 2011 to neighboring countries, UNHCR data shows. Lebanon is hosting more than 2 million Syrians, according to local polling center Statistics Lebanon, while more than 800,000 are registered at the UNHCR.

Lebanese officials have politicized the issue of the Syrian refugees’ return amid political divisions over the war in Syria, with some backing the Assad regime and others supporting the rebels. Calls for their return have significantly increased after the 2019 economic collapse, as many blame the refugees for being behind the country’s economic, social and security failures.

But many Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty and in dilapidated camps, facing almost daily discrimination and abuse amid growing anti-Syrian sentiment across the country. 

The General Federation of Trade Unions in Lebanon announced during a press conference earlier this week a “national campaign to liberate Lebanon from the Syrian demographic occupation,” calling on authorities to organize their return to their areas in Syria. In the Baalbeck-Hermel governorate in eastern Lebanon, the governor asked on Thursday the Lebanese State Security to crack down on commercial shops in the governorate employing undocumented Syrians and dispense of them.

Last summer, a 14-year-old Syrian boy died from his injuries in the southern city of Sidon after being attacked by a Lebanese father and his three sons. In 2019, another 14-year-old Syrian fell to his death from the sixth floor of a building after he was chased by municipal police in a Beirut suburb. Rights organizations have also accused the military and security institutions of torturing Syrian refugees in their custody.

From 1976 until 2005, Lebanon was under Syrian occupation until the last Syrian troops left the country in 2005. Of note, Lebanese officials do not refer to the Syrians in their territories as refugees but rather as displaced persons.