“You can still go 2 kilometers. » At the last Lebanese checkpoint, the officer makes a mechanical gesture in the direction of the deep crater that has submerged the road, in front of which the vehicles trying to reach neighboring Syria end. After a series of Israeli attacks against the area around the Masnaa border crossing on October 4, the main route to the Syrian capital became impassable. However, thousands of displaced people, mostly Syrians, continue to use it, determined to pass at all costs to escape Israeli bombing. A decision they make urgently, since many have settled in the poor regions of southern Lebanon, in the southern suburbs of Beirut or in the Bekaa plain: the regions most fiercely attacked by the air force. More than 300,000 people, including Syrians and Lebanese, have crossed into Syria in the last two weeks.
Exhausted, Roqya stares blankly at the path she still has to travel on Sunday morning, October 6. The first stage must take them to the first vans that, coming from Syria and for 20 dollars (18 euros), come to pick up these castaways to transport them to the Syrian post, 4 kilometers away. At his feet lies what remains of eleven years of his life in Lebanon: mattresses and some bags. Early in the morning, after another bombing, this Syrian woman from Aleppo decided to take the road with her six children from Gazieh, a town located about forty kilometers south of Beirut. “Entire buildings and houses collapsed with the attacks, we had to leave or we were going to die”describe. “I have to meet my in-laws. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it or how much it’s going to cost us.”he says, dreading the second part of the journey that awaits him. Ahmad, her husband, a farm worker, decided to stay in Lebanon. You cannot return to a country you fled to escape military service.
There are hundreds of them trudging under the scorching sun, with strollers under their arms or dragging suitcases with wheels that shake between the rocks. The elderly are carried at arm’s length to overcome obstacles; an oxygen tank passes from hand to hand; Later, some teenagers carry their two cats in a box.
“The war sent us to Lebanon, it sends us back to Syria”, observes, fatalistically, Ali, about fifty years old, who is exhausted carrying a dozen suitcases to the other side. He also quickly hit the road early in the morning from Ouzai, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He lived there with his family since 2014. “We stayed until the end, but the airstrikes were too powerful. » However, today he is not considering returning to Al-Boukamal, his hometown in eastern Syria. “controlled by the Iranians” and where they had already lost everything, he specifies. A new exile awaits them, the third in ten years.
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