15 Syrian refugees freeze to death on mountain
CHTAURA, Lebanon — The mountain range that forms a natural boundary between Syria and Lebanon has long served also as a wartime conduit for people who cannot travel legally. On one night last month, it became a death trap. A storm whipped up at the moment a group of about 70 Syrian refugees was climbing over the mountain to try to reach Lebanon.
In the darkness, wind and snow, they began to falter. The refugees became lost and scattered.
One small group became so tired that they decided to lie down on the cold, hard ground and go to sleep.
By daybreak, 15 people had frozen to death, a sad new milestone in Syria’s seven-year-old war. Refugees have drowned trying to reach Europe and are regularly shot on the Turkish border. But this was the first known instance of a group dying of cold, according to the United Nations refugee agency and Lebanese authorities.
It was also a reminder of the continued desperate efforts of Syrians to escape the fighting. For those still fleeing to Lebanon, which is hosting about a million Syrian refugees, the only way in is across one of the mountain smuggling routes.
The fate of these recent refugees first came to light after rescue workers posted photographs on Facebook, offering clues to the horrors of the night. Three adults and a child lay rigidly alongside one another. A boy was crouched beside a wall. A woman had huddled in a thorn bush, the child she was carrying tipped upside down from her arms. And one little girl was found alive, lying in the snow. Half of her face was burned away from frostbite, and she was comatose from the cold.
Among those on the mountain that night were Shihab al-Abed, 43, and 13 other members of his extended family, who had come from the small village of Barghouz in Deir al-Zour province. The village has been under Islamic State control for years but was too small and unimportant to be caught up in the battles that have killed more than 300,000 people elsewhere. Late last year, everything changed. The Islamic State was rapidly being driven out of all of its major strongholds. More and more of its fighters began showing up in the village as they fled from other areas. After a night of intense fighting in late December, during which the family’s house was hit by a shell, they decided they would have to flee to survive, Shihab said. They piled into vehicles and made their way to Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Once in Damascus, they made contact with a smuggler who said he could take them to safety in Lebanon. The journey would cost $140 per person, just a half-hour walk, alongside the main road, and they would be in Lebanon. “But he was lying,” Shihab said. The Abed family had no idea what lay ahead. They struck out into the darkness and driving rain. The rain turned to snow. Shihab’s 70-year old mother, Hasba, was the first to fall back. Shihab’s wife, Anout, sister Dalal and daughters Amal and Abir stayed with her. Soon they had lost sight of the rest of the party.
The women grew colder and colder and sleepier and sleepier. “So we decided just to take a rest,” recalled Abir. “We lay down and said we would find the way in the morning.”
When dawn broke, Abir awoke. Her grandmother, mother, sister and nephew lay immobile beside her. “They were stiff and frozen.”
I hoped they were just asleep,” she said. “I could see a house, so I went to get help.”
Seven hours after they had set off, Shihab and the other survivors reached the bottom of the mountain. He learned that his wife, mother, sister and grandson Yasser were dead.
At the hospital in the nearby town of Chtaura, civil defense rescuers were ferrying in others they had found on the mountain, some dead, some alive. Over the next two days they would find a total of 15 bodies, all but three of them fleeing battles in Deir alZour, and six of them from the alAbed family, according to police.