'Living like refugees': Syrians returning from Lebanon find little respite among ruins

The National visited a district of Homs where people are trying to rebuild their lives and destroyed homes

Al Salloumieh, as Abdelrezan Al Rai knew it, is gone. So is his house – once a two-storey villa with a garden. It was levelled shortly after he and his family escaped the bombing of his village in 2013 and, with Syria's civil war at full tilt, sought refuge in Lebanon.

Twelve years later, when the Al Rai family returned to their village in Syria's rural Homs, they were greeted by a shattered, concrete wasteland. Only the mosque’s minaret was left standing.

The agricultural village near the Lebanese border was destroyed in an offensive in 2013 by pro-Assad government forces aiming to recapture rebel-held areas. It was one of countless battles in Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, which displaced millions and produced one of the world’s largest refugee crises.

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Abdelrezan Al Rai stands on the ruins of his home in the village of Al Salloumieh. Ahmad Fallaha/The National

“The whole village was erased,” Abdelrezan said, taking a long drag of his cigarette. He clambered onto a cement boulder – what was once his living room wall – and gestured widely to display the remnants of his home with a mix of pride and despondency. “It was destroyed and looted. When the bombing was over, they [government forces] went in with trucks and bulldozers, and stole everything they could. They took the furniture, the doors, and the aluminium. They took the iron rods out of the cement walls. They even chopped down the electricity poles in the street."

Abdelrezan’s bearing is not of a man born into poverty but of one forced to grow accustomed to it. Before becoming a refugee, the father of four was a landowner, farmer and keeper of chickens.

“We knew we weren’t coming back to a village untouched by war,” he told The National. “But I thought our house would still be there, at least be salvageable.”

More than six million Syrian refugees living abroad – including 1.5 million in Lebanon – suddenly had the option to return. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, around 1.1 million people have returned to Syria, including an estimated 370,000 from Lebanon. But many question what they are returning to.

Syria remains scarred by war, its infrastructure shattered. Al Salloumieh is just one of dozens of villages, towns and cities throughout the nation that were severely damaged or destroyed, rendering many uninhabitable and complicating any return. Nearly a third of Syria’s physical infrastructure was destroyed or damaged during the civil war, the World Bank estimates.

"It's not just about the physical destruction," said Federico Jachetti, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council's Syria response. "There are many other factors that make those places uninhabitable."

Return to Syria is “not sustainable at all” for many, he said. Some people have even returned to refugee camps in northern Syria because their home villages – reduced to rubble – lack basic services like electricity and running water. More than half of the country’s water treatment and sewage systems are damaged or nonfunctional.

Poverty and food insecurity are widespread, with the UN estimating that more than 90 per cent of Syrians now live below the poverty line. Safety is another concern, with “a huge level of unexploded ordnance and explosive remnants of war” scattered across the country, posing a daily threat to those going back, Mr Jachetti said.

The scale of destruction of Al Salloumieh is evident in drone photos. Outcroppings of newly-built structures are visible amid the devastation. Ahmad Fallaha/The National

Living like refugees

Abdelrezan’s return was marked by hardship from the start. He now works doing odd construction jobs in Homs city, where he rents a small apartment in a war-damaged building in a badly damaged neighbourhood. Rent costs one million Syrian pounds ($91) a month in a country where the minimum wage is roughly $65. “And the landlord keeps threatening to raise it,” he said.

“We have to make [enough for] rent before we can put aside money for food, necessities and our children’s expenses,” he told The National bitterly. With no savings, rebuilding his home is impossible. It is a source of great resentment for Abdelrezan, a man in his early 50s who has been forced to rebuild life "from zero. Below zero. Sometimes I ask myself whether we were better off in Lebanon.”

Life was not easy for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The country hosts the world’s largest number of refugees per capita, while enduring one of the worst economic collapses in modern history. Corruption, mismanagement and political neglect caused the financial crisis, but Lebanon’s Syrian refugee population was blamed for accelerating the country towards breaking point. Anti-refugee resentment saturated Lebanon’s social and political life. Institutional barriers barred the vast majority of Syrians in Lebanon from legal residency and all but a few vocations, among other difficulties. Abdelrezan acknowledged “the harassment by the state and from people. Life in Lebanon was hard.”

But with no savings, no home, no access to national services such as electricity or water supply, and “no one coming to ask about us, life in Syria is harder”, Abdelrezan said.

“We’re living like refugees in our own country.”

At their own expense

Nearly a year since the Assad dynasty’s fall, Al Salloumieh remains in ruins. It was once an agricultural village blanketed by orchards of peaches, plums, pomegranates and olives – rolling greenery stretching as far as the eye could see.

Returning residents have now started the process of rebuilding; some have funded reconstruction entirely out of their own pockets. Here and there, bare mortar buildings have cropped up amid the desolate sprawl of rubble.

Khaled Subhi Al Rahi, a grandfather, returned with his three married children and their families. When they fled, the family numbered just four. Years later, it has grown to 17, a pattern of rapid expansion that Mr Jachetti of the NRC says is common among returnees after more than a decade away. “The scale of return is massive, beyond what any single organisation can cope with,” Mr Jachetti said. “What we’re seeing is that this cannot be the exclusive effort of the humanitarian sector, the private sector, the emergency sector, or the government. It requires a collective, comprehensive response.”

Khaled Subhi Al Rahi with some of his grandchildren. Together with his sons, Mr Al Rahi rebuilt the family home despite taking on a debt of $5,000 to do so. Ahmad Fallaha/The National

But with international organisations facing severe funding shortfalls and Syria in dire economic straits, little can meaningfully support the return and reconstruction process without substantial investment.

Together, the Al Rahis cleared the rubble of the old family home and built a four-room cement house. Seventeen people now share the space – one family per room – until the younger members can build their own homes on the land Khaled has apportioned to them. The project has led him into $5,000 in debt but he said: “It’s better than putting my whole family in tents.”

State services remain absent: no electricity, no running water, no sewage network. “We had to do it all ourselves,” Khaled said. Digging a water well costs $500. A German NGO rebuilt one of the village’s schools but it, too, has no power or running water. “At least the kids are going to school,” Khaled added.

Like Khaled and Abdelrezan, many returnees feel abandoned by the state. Years of conflict emptied Syria’s coffers, meaning the state does not have the necessary $216 billion estimated by the World Bank for reconstruction, despite the hard work going into courting investment.

The government has instead turned to community fundraising, with ministries, NGOs and wealthy Syrians pledging finance for specific areas. Early this month, a campaign was launched for Al Qusayr, the nearby town of which Al Salloumieh is a suburb, with hopes it would generate enough money to rebuild some public infrastructure.

Still, Khaled said, life in Syria, however hard, is better than being a refugee. “Just the word ‘refugee’ – it was a humiliation. Wherever we went, we were marked as Syrian. It was time to stop being refugees and live in our own country.”

Life returns to the village

Up the road, six tarpaulin tents – each emblazoned with the UNHCR logo – stand beside a newly built row of windowless shops. A cow grazes nearby as children help their father, Osama, load supplies onto a lorry.

Like many returnees, some of Al Salloumieh's residents have chosen to live in tents until they can afford to rebuild. Ahmad Fallaha/The National

“We knew it would be difficult and we prepared for it,” Osama said. “We brought these tarps with us and decided to live in tents for a few years, until we have enough money to rebuild our homes.”

Meanwhile, he and his relatives built a modest row of shops on their land in a bid to breathe life back into the village while saving to rebuild.

In one of them, Osama’s brother, a barber, carefully trims a customer’s beard beneath the glow of a battery-powered bulb – a quiet sign that, slowly but surely, life is returning to Al Salloumieh.