The world’s most unlikely safe haven
Summary
As war rages in the Middle East, Shia are fleeing to a deadly dictatorship
To grasp how bad things are in Lebanon, consider that Syria—where war and tyranny created the world’s largest refugee crisis—now seems like a safe haven. Since September around 500,000 people have fled Israel’s invasion of their country for the war-torn and fragmented ex-state next door. Many have gone on foot, some clambering over craters created by Israeli airstrikes near the border crossings. Most are leaving the country because the Lebanese do not want to shelter them.
More than two-thirds are returning Syrian refugees. The rest are almost all Lebanese Shia who hope Syria’s leader, who himself belongs to a splinter Shia sect, the Alawites, will be more welcoming than Lebanon’s rival sects. The meagre savings they have, following the collapse of the Lebanese currency, go further in destitute Syria, too. Some 16.7m Syrians rely on aid, according to the United Nations. There is a lack of basic services, but UN agencies hand out food, and rents are very cheap. Such is the influx that house prices and rents are climbing in the country for the first time in a decade.
Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator, has long relished the chance to replace the country’s Sunni majority—who abandoned the country’s cities in droves at the height of the civil war—with more pliant minorities. His Alawite base makes up just 10% or so of the population. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shias are a welcome addition. Many have sought shelter near Syria’s Shia shrines, like Sayida Zeinab on the southern edge of Damascus. Mr Assad is wooing those fleeing by waiving the $100 border fee for Lebanese (while maintaining restrictions on exiled Syrians, whom he suspects of sympathising with his opponents). Some are said to have received Syrian passports.
Given his dire economy, he might yet seek to monetise the refugees. Neighbouring Jordan, which has hosted hundreds of thousands of them in return for billions of dollars in aid, could be his model. EU policymakers, who had feared Israel’s war would push more refugees their way, have struggled to conceal their delight at the unexpected flight of Syrians east rather than west. Last summer eight EU countries signed a paper proposing to support some reconstruction in the war-ravaged country and ease sanctions if Mr Assad takes back some of the 1m Syrians who made it to Europe. (Miffed Turks would rather use the enclave they created for Sunni rebels in the north.)
For many of the displaced, though, Mr Assad’s broken realm is just a stopping point. Plenty of Sunni returnees fear Mr Assad’s vengeful goons, and head straight for the Turkish and Kurdish enclaves in the north and east. After months of prevarication, the rebels finally opened their crossing with the regime at Abu al-Zindain, north of Aleppo.
Nor are Lebanon’s Shia overjoyed about going to Syria. Israel suspects some are members of Hizbullah, the Iran-backed Shia militia in Lebanon, and has sent its warplanes and drones in pursuit. On November 3rd Israeli commandos launched their first ground foray into Syria, and abducted a Syrian who Israel said had ties to Iran. Hizbullahis remember the crucial role they played propping up Mr Assad’s regime and had hoped it would come to their aid. “We saved your regime, don’t let us now perish," pleads a distraught Hizbullah supporter. But Mr Assad’s battered forces would struggle against Israel’s and would rather keep out of the fray.
Local anger is also brewing. Some Syrians resent the fiercer competition for already limited rations. Others recall how Hizbullah fighters intervened in their civil war, devastating their towns and turning them into dens for manufacturing captagon, an amphetamine which has become Syria’s biggest export. Yet others fear the Lebanese arrival could turn them into Israel’s next theatre of war. “You can’t defend yourselves, let alone us," says a woman in Homs, a city near the Lebanese border. “Please don’t lead us into your conflict."
So tens of thousands of Lebanese are heading east to more prosperous Iraq. Iraqis in the cities of Karbala and Basra report hearing many more nasal Lebanese accents of late. The better-connected have moved into empty flats that Iraqis say Hizbullah bought during the country’s real-estate boom, when Lebanon’s economy plummeted.
Some of the Shia militia’s remaining senior commanders have taken Iraqi or Iranian wives. And Iraq’s Shia-dominated government is keen to welcome them. The prime minister has ordered that they should be issued with hard-to-get work permits and be given housing subsidies on arrival. Iraq’s well-armed Shia militias, who underpin the state, also offer far better protection than Mr Assad.
Population flight is nothing new to the Middle East, as Mr Assad himself has remarked. But these newest demographic changes are deepening sectarian divides already opened by the war.
