“You can still ride for 2 kilometers. » At the last Lebanese checkpoint, the officer gestures mechanically in the direction of the deep crater which has engulfed the highway, in front of which vehicles trying to reach neighboring Syria end up. After a series of Israeli strikes targeted the area around the Masnaa border crossing on October 4, the main route to the Syrian capital became impassable. Thousands of displaced people, mostly Syrians, nevertheless continue to use it, determined to pass at all costs to escape Israeli bombings. A decision that they take urgently, many having established themselves in the poor regions of southern Lebanon, in the southern suburbs of Beirut or in the Bekaa plain: the regions most ferociously attacked by the air force. More than 300,000 people, Syrians and Lebanese, have crossed into Syria in the last two weeks.
Exhausted, Roqya scans with a lost gaze the path that remains to be covered, Sunday October 6 in the morning. The first stage must take her to the first vans which, coming from Syria and for 20 dollars (18 euros), come to collect these castaways to transport them to the Syrian post, 4 kilometers away. At his feet lies what remains of eleven years of his life spent in Lebanon: mattresses and a few bags. In the early morning, after another bombardment, 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. “Buildings and entire houses collapsed under the strikes, we had to leave, or we were going to die”she describes. “I have to join my in-laws. I don’t know how we’re going to do it or what it’s going to cost us.”she says, dreading the second part of the journey that awaits her. An agricultural worker, Ahmad, her husband, chose to stay in Lebanon. He cannot return to a country he fled to escape military service.
There are hundreds of them trudging along under the blazing sun, strollers under their arms or pulling suitcases on wheels that are shaken through the rocks. Old men are carried at arm’s length to overcome obstacles; an oxygen tank passes from hand to hand; further on, teenage girls carry their two cats in a box.
“The war sent us to Lebanon, it sends us back to Syria”, notes, fatalistically, Ali, in his fifties, who is exhausting himself carrying a dozen suitcases to the other side. He too took the road quickly in the early morning from Ouzai, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He had lived there with his family since 2014. “We stayed until the end, but the airstrikes were too powerful. » However, there is no question of returning to Al-Boukamal, their town of origin in eastern Syria, today “controlled by the Iranians” and where they had already lost everything, he specifies. A new exile, the third in ten years, awaits them.
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