A decade after finding refuge in Lebanon from civil war in his native Syria, Ahmad Mustafa fled in the other direction this week from a new conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
“We’re starting from scratch all over again,” the 46-year-old said after crossing the border into Syria with his wife and three children.
Mustafa recounted escaping his hometown of Raqa in northern Syria after Islamic State group jihadists overran the city in 2013.
“We fled with just the clothes on our back,” he said.
“Now it’s the same in Lebanon. We had to run for our lives under the bombs,” he said of his family’s escape from their home in the south Lebanon village of Wazzani under Israeli bombardment.
He and his family were heading back to Raqa, hoping to stay with relatives once they got there.
Lebanon became home to hundreds of thousands of Syrians after the repression of anti-government protests in Syria in 2011 sparked a war that has since killed more than half a million people.
But intensifying Israeli strikes on Lebanon since September 23 have prompted 310,000 people to flee to Syria, most of them Syrian refugees, according to the Lebanese authorities.
By comparison, the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah prompted around 250,000 people to flee from Lebanon to Syria in 33 days of war.
– ‘Never-ending plight’ –
Syrian refugee Jaafar al-Ali, 53, was another of those returning home through the border crossing near the Syrian town of Al-Qusayr.
He and his family fled Raqa in 2014, the year it became the de facto capital of the caliphate IS proclaimed after seizing large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
With US support, Kurdish-led forces slowly pushed IS out of Raqa and other cities, dealing a final blow to the IS caliphate in 2019.
Now Ali, his wife and three children have also been forced to flee Wazzani.
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah in its strikes in Lebanon, but officials say many civilians have also been killed.
Lebanese authorities say 1.2 million people have fled their homes.
“It’s a never-ending plight from one displacement to the next,” Ali said, waiting for a bus to take him back to a hometown where he no longer has a home.
“Today we’re heading to spend the night in the street in Raqa,” he said.
“I have nothing left there — no family, no relatives, no home.”
At the border, he had made a small makeshift room for himself and his family from cardboard boxes that had been used to distribute food aid.
Ali glanced sadly at his 13-year-old son Muayad as he brought his siblings water.
“He’s only known war and displacement,” he said.
“He hasn’t received an education and he can’t read or write — just like his other siblings.”
– ‘Death was stalking me’ –
Dozens of Syrians have been killed in Lebanon in the recent escalation, according to the United Nations.
More than 774,000 Syrian refugees were registered with the United Nations in Lebanon before the latest escalation, though the tiny country said that it hosted some two million of them — the world’s highest ratio of refugees per capita.
Many Lebanese believe the Syrian refugees are a burden and a strain on an already desperately struggling economy.
In recent years, fighting in Syria has reduced in intensity but it too is gripped by a deep economic crisis.
Bashar Hamaydi, 25, says he paid a fortune to escape Raqa in 2016 and seek a more promising life abroad.
But war caught up with him in Wazzani too.
“We heard the sounds of bombardment, and we saw bodies by the roadside as we fled by bus to Beirut.”
The home that he, his wife and three children lived in was destroyed, and several neighbours died in Israeli strikes, he said.
“I felt like death was stalking me. I turned around to see if it had come for me or a family member,” he said.
“I’ll never forget how my children screamed. It was a day of terror that I will never forget as long as I live.”
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