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Lebanon's Politicians Want Syrian Refugees to Leave

Jamie Dettmer

   Thirty-four-year-old Syrian war refugee Samiha has been rearing two
   young daughters in Lebanon since 2013, after fleeing her Damascus
   suburb. She feared her girls wouldn't survive the deadly airstrikes
   razing her neighborhood.

   Weeks before her flight, her husband was killed in an air raid -- and
   days before, an older sister, a mother of five, died in an artillery
   barrage. "Sometimes I think I should return to Syria and die there --
   there's no dignity here, but then I think of my girls," she tells VOA
   in a Skype exchange.

   "We have nothing to go back for," she adds.

   Her apartment in Jobar is wrecked. Ninety-three percent of the Damascus
   suburb, the scene of intense fighting between the Syrian Army and
   various rebel groups from February 2013 to March 23 of last year, lies
   in ruins. Samiha's remaining family members are now scattered -- a
   younger sister was married to a Kuwaiti; another sister along with her
   husband and two small children are in Turkey, hoping to secure a visa
   to Europe or the United States, an increasingly bleak prospect.

   The young widow and her elderly parents face the same wrenching dilemma
   confronting more than one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The war
   refugees in Lebanon were at first welcomed, but sympathy for their
   plight is long gone, evaporating initially into indifference, then
   turning into hostility. Pressure is mounting on them to leave.

   After eight years of war in neighboring Syria, the Lebanese say they've
   had enough of the refugee burden, pointing out their country of 5
   million has the highest concentration of refugees per capita in the
   World. Just under a million Syrians have been registered as refugees,
   but U.N. officials, who were ordered to stop registrations in 2015,
   estimate the number is closer to 1.5 million.

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