There were hopes in Lebanon that the restoration of calm after the ouster of President Bashar Assad in Syria would mean that the large numbers of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon would return home. Some of that started to happen, but now a new influx of new refugees is reported in northern Lebanon.
Amid massacres of Alawite civilians in northwest Syria’s Tartus and Latakia Governorates, many thousands of Alawites are fleeing into north Lebanon, which is where that nation’s own Alawite community lives.
Villages in the northern Akkar District were the first to receive the new refugees. There are multiple Alawite villages in Akkar, and it’s the closest district, so it makes sense that’s the first place refugees would head. Thousands of people were reported in just a handful of villages.
18 villages in Akkar have reportedly opened up to the displaced, and more than ten thousand entered through Akkar overall. That’s a lot more people than they could reasonably hold, so many more are headed further south along the coast, to the major city of Tripoli.
The Jabal Mohsen neighborhood of Tripoli has a large Alawite population, so it was another place for refugees to go. That neighborhood has seen its own share of sectarian clashes with the Sunni neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh throughout the decades though, so there is a risk that an influx of new Alawites displaced by a Sunni Islamist government in Syria will add new tensions to that area.
Lebanon has absorbed well over a million refugees over the years, and in the summer of 2024 we were seeing growing anti-refugee sentiment in the country. That sentiment somewhat got sidelined during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon later in the year, though following the December regime change in Syria there were renewed calls for the Syrians to return home.
The hope clearly was that the new Islamist-dominated Syrian government’s promises of unity would lead to renewed calm, and indeed there were many reports of Syrian returning home en masse from all over the world.
Now, after well over a thousand people, mostly civilians have been killed in a little over two days in the northwest of Syria, there is simply a new round of refugees fleeing from the new government’s persecution. Lebanon, once again, is the most convenient option for many.
