No end in sight after decade of displacement
BAR ELIAS, Lebanon — Mohammed Zakaria has lived in a plastic tent in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley for almost as long as war has raged in his native Syria.
He and his family fled bombings in 2012, thinking it would be a short, temporary stay. His hometown of Homs was under siege, and subject to a ferocious Syrian military campaign. He didn’t even bring his ID with him.
Almost 10 years later, the family still hasn’t gone back. The 53yearold Zakaria is among millions of Syrians unlikely to return in the foreseeable future, even as they face deteriorating living conditions abroad. On top of his displacement, Zakaria now struggles to survive Lebanon’s financial meltdown and social implosion.
“We came on the assumption that we would come in and out,” said Zakaria, sitting outside his tent on a cold day recently as his children walked around in wornout slippers.
Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, when Syrians revolted against President Bashar Assad amid a wave of Arab Spring uprisings. The protests in Syria, which began in March that year, quickly turned into insurgency — and eventually a fullblown civil war — in response to a brutal military crackdown by Assad’s security apparatus.
Nearly half a million people have been killed, and about 12,000 children have died or were injured in the conflict in the past decade, according to the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF. The conflict also resulted in the largest displacement crisis since World War II.
The Norwegian Refugee Council this week said that since the war began in 2011, an estimated 2.4 million people were displaced every year in and outside Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians face continued displacement with each year that the conflict continues and economic conditions deteriorate.
The war has left Syria divided and in ruins. Nearly a million children have been born in exile.
Of the country’s prewar population of 23 million, nearly 5.6 million are refugees living in neighboring countries and Europe. Some 6.5 million are displaced within Syria, most of them for longer than five years.
Lebanon, a small Mediterranean country with a population of about 5 million, hosts the highest concentration of refugees per capita, estimated at around 1 million. Most of them live in informal makeshift tent settlements spread out across Lebanon’s Bekaa, not far from the Syrian border.
Zakaria clings to the hope that he would one day go back to his home.
“God willing we will die in our country,” he said. “Everyone should die in their own country.”