The Syrian Refugees Problem

[Originally posted at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Sada journal]

A combination of security, economic, and above all political considerations has the Lebanese government seeking for the first time to limit, and ultimately reduce, its Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian refugee population. Human rights groups have criticized these new restrictions on Syrian refugees, saying the denial of refuge to those in need violates fundamental principles of international law. But Lebanon’s political power brokers are fearful of more than just the economic and social burdens of Syrian refugees.

The exact details of the new stipulations, passed by cabinet in June, vary for Syrians and Syrian-Palestinians (that is, Palestinian refugees previously residing in Syria). Refuge will, from now on, only be granted to those “coming from regions where battles are raging near the Lebanese border,” in the words of Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas, with “humanitarian and necessary” exceptions. Additionally, all refugees traveling to Syria, for any reason or duration of stay, are stripped of refugee status upon their return. On top of these restrictions, Syrian-Palestinians also face further monetary charges and onerous administrative requirements that amount in practice to a near-total ban on coming to Lebanon.

Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian refugees number well over a million and are expected to comprise a third of Lebanon’s population by the end of the year. At present, refugees are scattered across the country, living wherever they can afford to, including in over 1,200 ad hoc, self-built camps. A proposal that has been contemplated since the start of the crisis would set up formal camps to house existing refugees along the Lebanese-Syrian border. While this is unlikely to move forward at present for a number of reasons, it could potentially be adopted in a partial or revised form in the future. A recent revival of the proposal divided Lebanese officials, with the health minister calling it the only solution, while the foreign minister vowed to “oppose [it] no matter the pressure.” The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) came out against it, arguing the state would be able to provide neither the infrastructure nor the security necessary for it to succeed.

Either way, there is clearly a new mood shared among Lebanon’s power brokers with regard to the refugees. Although the underlying factors fueling it have been accumulating since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the translation of this mood into executive action was largely triggered by a single event. On May 28, 2014, tens of thousands of Syrians waving Hezbollah flags and posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad descended upon the Syrian embassy east of Beirut to vote in their country’s presidential elections, which were widely regarded as illegitimate. The unexpectedly vast turnout halted traffic across the capital for hours, and led to mild clashes with overwhelmed Lebanese soldiers guarding the embassy.

Within hours, Lebanon’s anti-Assad March 14 coalition, which holds over a third of cabinet seats, issued furious condemnations of the spectacle, calling it a “provocation” orchestrated by Syrian intelligence and Hezbollah, and demanding the deportation of all Syrian supporters of Assad. Less than a week later, on June 2, the cabinet decided on the new entry restrictions, and while the official explanation was “security concerns,” a Western diplomatic source cited the embassy controversy as a likely stimulus.1 Similarly, UNHCR said the government had acted in the hope of “ensuring that actions by refugees (including exercising their right to vote inside Syria) do not provoke adverse reactions inside Lebanon or stoke hostility between refugees and the communities in which they reside.”2

To be clear, it was not the relatively benign happenings at the embassy itself that mattered so much as what they represented. Until then, the refugee presence had arguably been politically useful for March 14. More than a million destitute men, women, and children were daily reminders of the tragedy of a brutal war they could blame on Assad and their key domestic rival, Hezbollah. However, seeing that the same refugees could also be mobilized—whether on their own or coerced by political groups—in their tens of thousands against them was an unwelcome surprise for March 14’s public as much as its politicians.

This shifted March 14’s outlook to something closer to that of its pro-Assad rivals, the March 8 coalition, who have never been comfortable with the Syrian refugee presence. Christian members of March 8 in particular, such as the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), have long been accused of stirring xenophobia and paranoia with their public allegations of “conspiracies” to settle the refugees permanently and thereby change Lebanon’s sectarian demography. In 2013, one FPM member, who has since become foreign minister, went as far as calling for deporting all refugees. While March 14’s large Sunni Muslim constituency has no such anxieties about the predominantly Sunni refugees, the embassy episode nevertheless resulted in a degree of convergence of political opinions and interests between the two blocs.

That convergence against the presence of Syrian refugees was also made possible by the shared burden of an economic collapse brought on by a more than 25 percent population increase in three years. Social Affairs Minister Derbas recently put the direct cost to Lebanon of the refugee crisis at $7.5 billion, or 17 percent of GDP. Unemployment in some regions has doubled as Lebanese manual labor is undercut by Syrian competition. Electricity and water resources, already insufficient to meet Lebanese demand alone, have had to be spread that much thinner. The overall impact of the Syrian war and its occasionally bloody “spillover” into Lebanon has been a decline in GDP growth from 7 percent in 2010 to 1 percent in 2014, according to latest IMF estimates. Tourism, which in better years would make up a quarter of national income, has particularly suffered. While none of this, of course, is the refugees’ fault, it has predictably bred resentment and revived xenophobic sentiments picked up during 29 years of Syrian occupation. In short, Lebanese of all political persuasions have become fed up.

For the refugees themselves, the government’s new policy adds yet another source of hardship to an already grueling existence. It is unclear how many Syrians have been turned away since the June 2 decision, but a new Amnesty International report documents a number of what it calls “shocking” cases among Syrian-Palestinians, including pregnant women fleeing the besieged Yarmouk camp in Damascus being denied refuge at the border, and children in Lebanon being separated from parents who entered Syria briefly to renew identity documents. Syrian-Palestinians make up less than 5 percent of all refugees from Syria. As the restrictions spread to the broader Syrian refugee population, the new policy will likely have widespread humanitarian repercussions. All of this serves to underscore the need for a far more determined global response to the Syrian refugee crisis.

1. Interview with the author. ↩
2. Correspondence with the author. ↩

Is Lebanon Winning Against Al-Qaeda?

[Originally posted at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Sada journal]

Despite its weak and fragmented state, Lebanon has had evident success against al-Qaeda, though it may be too soon to declare “mission accomplished.”

In the first two months of 2014, Lebanon appeared to be descending rapidly, almost inexorably, into a mire of alarming bloodshed and instability. An unprecedented wave of al-Qaeda-linked attacks on civilians was accelerating, adding 34 deaths to the more than 50 men, women, and children that such attacks had killed in the second half of 2013. And then, almost without anyone noticing, the attacks ceased. April 2014 was the first month to witness no explosion since October 2013. Even before then, a slowdown had been detectable—from five suicide bombings in February 2014 to two in March, the latter confined to the Syrian border region. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, stated confidently in an April interview that “the risk of [further] explosions has diminished very significantly.” While this was a plainly political statement—aimed at retroactively justifying his group’s controversial military intervention in the neighboring Syrian war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad—it appears to have held up so far, and has been echoed by the head of the Lebanese army.

How, then, did a weak and fragmented state like Lebanon manage to prevail against al-Qaeda? The principal reason was that al-Qaeda’s Lebanese franchisees, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, united Lebanon’s most powerful actors against them. Foremost among these actors is Hezbollah, which, in addition to its paramilitary manpower and hardware, also maintains its own intelligence-gathering and telecommunications networks that allowed them to keep close tabs on the two groups. Jabhat al-Nusra and the Abdallah Azzam Brigades made hostility to Hezbollah their raison d’être, branding it a heretical “Party of Satan” (playing on its name, which means “Party of God”) and stating after every attack that they would continue until the party’s militants withdrew from Syria. Then there are the state forces, which also run multiple and sizeable intelligence-gathering operations. The general outline of the response to the attacks, then, consisted of a manhunt carried out by state security forces in tandem with Hezbollah, based on their combined intelligence, with the blessing of the political establishment and its international backers, including the United States.

This manhunt involved both arrests and targeted killings. In March 2014, a militant wanted for involvement in at least one of the car bombings in Beirut’s southern suburbs was gunned down in a Lebanese army ambush in the mountainous outskirts of the town of Arsal, near the Syrian border. Less clear were the circumstances of the October 2013 killing of a suspect wanted in connection with two car bombings, whose vehicle was reportedly targeted by rocket fire in a remote area, also near Arsal. While state media described it simply as an “armed ambush,” Hezbollah was also accused. Similar mystery surrounded the death in custody of Majid al-Majid, the internationally wanted Saudi leader of the Abdallah Azzam Brigades, credited with masterminding a double suicide attack on Beirut’s Iranian embassy in November 2013. His demise in December, just nine days after his arrest by Lebanese army intelligence, was officially attributed to natural causes—but the Brigades blamed Hezbollah, who in turn pointed the finger at Riyadh.

State authorities also made swift progress on other fronts. A jihadist cleric from Arsal arrested in January 2014 reportedly informed the army of the identity of one Naim Abbas, a Palestinian refugee who became Lebanon’s most wanted suspect and was arrested the following month. Abbas was charged with overseeing two suicide bombings in Beirut’s southern suburbs and reportedly revealed the locations of several explosive-laden vehicles, which were subsequently intercepted by the army. Various other associates of Abbas were also arrested.

As the arrests and indictments mounted, a clearer picture began to emerge of how the militants operated. Prosecutors identified a network linking the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in the southern city of Sidon with the eastern border town of Arsal. A common denominator in more than one attack was the fugitive Lebanese cleric, Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, who went into hiding after his militiamen fought a bloody battle with the army and Hezbollah in Sidon in June 2013. At least three suicide bombers claimed in video testimonies to have fought alongside Assir’s men in the clashes.

It was Arsal, however, that Hezbollah officials repeatedly branded as the principal gateway for extremists entering Lebanon from Syria. Three kinds of checkpoints were set up around the town—two manned by the army, and one by Hezbollah gunmen (aptly symbolizing the partnership between the two). Though the latter checkpoints became notorious for harassment and even violence against passers-through, and were eventually removed, the system did have some success as a barricade against attacks—both of the two most recent suicide bombings took place at these checkpoints.

Undergirding all these efforts was the carte blanche given to the army and Hezbollah by the political class, including the patrons of the Sunni community. This in turn was encouraged by influential regional and international powers, including the United States, which has reportedly been sharing intelligence with the Lebanese authorities since July 2013; this was apparently instrumental in the arrest of Naim Abbas. “What happened proves once again that the security situation in Lebanon is directly related to the political situation,” said Riad Kahwaji, head of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. “Whenever we have political agreement, the security situation suddenly becomes very good.”

With that said, the “mission accomplished” attitude struck by Nasrallah and the army commander may yet prove premature, as well as counterproductive. For while Hezbollah may tout its recent advances in Syria’s Qalamoun region on the Lebanese border as a “grand victory” against “terrorism,” this will only harden the hostility felt toward the Shia group by the many Lebanese Sunnis who continue to see the Syrian rebel cause as a just struggle against tyranny. While the country’s Sunnis are on the whole a moderate community, any inflammation of sectarian animosity can only be a boon to the extremist minority, which has grown in numbers and resources as a result of the Syrian war—particularly after Hezbollah’s intervention there.

That Hezbollah has given no indication it intends to withdraw any time soon—and is, indeed, believed to be eyeing new offensives in Aleppo and Daraa—means a fundamental underlying cause of the jihadists’ proliferation is set to remain for the foreseeable future. Moreover, it remains possible that Hezbollah’s displacement of Syrian rebels, including al-Qaeda-linked militants, from Qalamoun has in fact had the effect of drawing them across the highly porous border into Lebanon. New reports of Jabhat al-Nusra conducting kidnappings in Arsal, following a series of skirmishes between Syrian gunmen and the Lebanese army in the area, suggest this process may already be underway. In which case, Lebanon’s al-Qaeda problem may not have been resolved so much as merely interrupted.