Reasons to Leave Syria—and to Return

In the no man’s land between two countries, a red-and-white-painted curb marks the end of Lebanon. A few hundred feet away, a blue metal sign reads, in English and Arabic, “Welcome to Syria.” Nearby, a photo of the recently deposed President, Bashar al-Assad, appeared on a billboard advertisement for the Commercial Bank of Syria. Someone had scrawled across it, “the dog.”

This past weekend, families, dragging wheelie bags and carrying blankets, were hurrying in both directions. Those leaving Lebanon proceeded through a kiosk in orderly lines, slipping their passports under a glass divider to procure exit stamps. Those leaving Syria drove underneath a tattered banner of Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, and through an abandoned checkpoint. They passed Bella Luna, a looted Italian restaurant, before exiting Syrian cars and transferring to Lebanese tuk-tuks and taxis.

Asa’ad Zain al-Deen, a Syrian chef, was unloading luggage from a minivan on the Syrian side, as he, his wife, their six children, and two rambunctious grandchildren waited for a taxi to take them to the Lebanese border. In 2012, after Deen’s brother was executed in prison by the Syrian regime, he fled with his family to southern Lebanon, where he opened a sandwich shop called Delicious Falafel. Several months ago, when Israel launched air strikes in southern Lebanon, as part of its war against Hezbollah, Deen shuttered his shop. Along with thousands of people, he took his family back to Syria for safety.

Now that the prospect of chaos loomed in Syria, the family was returning to Lebanon. “Maybe we’ll come back to Syria,” Deen said. He wanted to see how Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham—an Islamist group formerly linked to the Islamic State and Al Qaeda—and now the de-facto leader of Syria, behaved. To signal his intention to establish a functioning government, Jolani has cast aside his nom de guerre and now calls himself by his civilian name, Ahmed al-Sharaa. After a brutal, nearly fourteen-year-long civil war that began as an uprising against Assad and has killed an estimated six hundred thousand people, Jolani has promised to respect the rights of religious minorities, which in Syria include Assad’s sect, the Alawites. And yet questions of rights remain. In 2021, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, H.T.S. praised the group.

“When Jolani sits in the President’s chair, who knows what power will do to him?” Deen asked, with a fatalistic grin. He fussed with his family’s mountain of luggage and scanned the road, trying to locate the driver who would take them to Lebanon. Cold and bored, two of Deen’s daughters teasingly debated where was best to live. “There’s discrimination against Syrians in Lebanon,” Zahraa, who is twenty-two and soft-spoken, and was carrying a knockoff Saint Laurent purse, said. Her confident younger sister, Layal, grimaced. She was a baby when her family left Syria, so she didn’t feel tied to it as her home. “I prefer Lebanon,” she argued. (A million and a half Syrians live there.)

A few hundred feet away, in Syria, Anas Mazloum loaded a bag of clothes into his cousin’s sedan. A thirty-year-old with a thick red beard, Mazloum had fled Syria alone when he was thirteen to avoid being forced to join Assad’s army, and travelled to Beirut to seek help from UNICEF. “The regime grabbed boys out of cars at checkpoints,” he explained. Now that Assad was gone, Mazloum had come back to search for his brother Abed el-Rahman, a sweet-shop owner in the city of Hama, who had been arrested by the regime in 2014. Mazloum knew that his brother had been taken to Sednaya prison, where some thirty thousand people are believed to have been killed. “We last heard that he was alive from another prisoner who was released in 2021,” Mazloum said. Rahman’s wife was three months pregnant when he was arrested, and their daughter, now ten, asked constantly about her father.

For five days, Mazloum had searched prisons and hospitals for any evidence of his brother, but he’d found nothing. His face looked gray, and drawn with disappointment and exhaustion; he’d been sleeping in empty hospitals. Now a cousin, Ahmad Zaatani, had come to drive him to see his mother in Hama, three hours away. Mazloum planned to stay in Hama for about a month before returning to Lebanon for his job as a construction worker. He didn’t intend to stop looking for his brother. “I will search for him for the rest of my life,” he said.

Around them, the street bustled with men on motorbikes, dressed in fatigues and flip-flops. Gleeful, they greeted one another with back-clapping hugs. Shops were open, and many of the men were buying bread and gasoline. The Assad regime had controlled prices and rationing. According to local residents, twenty litres of fuel, which had cost the equivalent of forty U.S. dollars, now cost fifteen. Bread had dropped from two dollars to about thirty-five cents.

“I don’t know anything about Jolani,” Zaatani said. “He’s a hero to us because he got rid of Assad, and he seems to respect all religions.” Now he was speaking to an American reporter in the middle of a busy market square, which, he observed, was unthinkable a week earlier.

A man named Khalil Abed al-Nabi approached. A fashion designer, he was curious to join the conversation. Like so many others, he had fled Syria during the war to avoid forcible conscription. This border area was his home, he explained, as he laid out its complex geography. On one side of the road was Yabous, a Sunni village where Nabi had been born. On the other was Jdeidet, a predominately Shia village, which, until days earlier, had been held by Hezbollah fighters who’d come to help prop up the Assad regime. Nabi led a tour through the mostly empty streets of Jdeidet, stopping at a field of rubble, the site of an Israeli air strike that targeted a local Hezbollah headquarters. Amid the wreckage, there was an empty carton of Bud Light, and a greeting card that read “Together Forever” and contained a letter from a student to her teacher. “I love you,” it said. A charred red BMW was blanketed by crumbled mud.

Only the day before, Nabi explained, the local H.T.S. commander had allowed Hezbollah fighters to leave without being attacked, and many Shia residents had fled with them. Nabi led us across a roundabout to a knot of approximately a dozen men in mismatched camouflage, armed with AK-47s, who were kissing one another’s cheeks. They were members of H.T.S., who called themselves “liberating soldiers” and explained that they’d just come down from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, which divide Syria from Lebanon. At their center was their leader, Abed al-Bari al-Asa’ad, an H.T.S. commander who’d been fighting for the past thirteen years, and was responsible for a fifteen-square-kilometre swath along the mountains. He was rotund, with curly, bobbed hair, and he laughed when he told me his name. To an outsider’s ear, it might sound the same as Bashar al-Assad. “Be careful,” he warned, jokingly. “I’m not Assad.”

Asa’ad claimed that he’d never spoken to a reporter, and wasn’t particularly keen to do so now, but in the general air of celebration, he assented. “The press gave a black image to the revolution. Also to us,” he said. “We are not like that,” he said, referring to their depiction as Sunni extremists. He said his soldiers had handed out bread to Shia and Christians who had remained in the town and who had been afraid, at first, to come out of their houses.

“George!” the commander called to a passerby in a red Nike baseball hat and a military jacket. “We let him dress like us,” the commander joked. The man, who was carrying a bag of tomatoes and a package of imitation Oreos, called Marios, looked surprised. He stopped. He gave his name as George, and said that he was among the last Christian families in the area. He ran a barbershop across the street. “I feel very safe,” he said, glancing at the well-armed men surrounding him. (Later, on his own, he said that, despite his enthusiasm for Assad’s ouster, he remained uncertain about the future.)

The giddiness seemed ominous. Many of the people I spoke to feared the first days of liberation were unfolding along a familiar pattern, in which bonhomie would soon give way to sectarianism and retribution. That evening, in the no man’s land, a field strewn with empty water bottles, four Shia families sat on a picnic blanket around a burner attached to a gas tank, looking scared and drinking yerba mate. They’d decided to leave Syria that morning after learning that their neighbors in Damascus and their cousins’ neighbors in Homs had been killed. They weren’t certain who was behind the deaths. “Jolani has said that he can’t be responsible for everything that happens,” one man, who gave his name as Abu Youssef, said. So he’d closed up his gaming shop, where teen-agers came to play Call of Duty, on three Playstations; collected his brother, sister, and mother; and took a taxi to the border. His brother, who called himself Abu Alaa, admitted that he’d been in Assad’s military for a long time. “The prices were high, but we felt safe under Assad,” Abu Alaa said. “We’re the last Shia we know from our neighborhood to leave.” Border officials kept the families waiting for twenty hours before they finally allowed them to cross. They arrived in Lebanon and took a taxi to a shrine in the Bekaa Valley. ♦