It was just a concrete hut near the Lebanese border, but she had spent five years trying to make it cozy for her children after fleeing the war in Syria.“Every year, we fixed up one thing after another so that we could live in what you’d call a home,” she said, standing in the room leveled to the ground in the remote Lebanese town of Arsal. “Now, there’s nothing left.”
She and her four small children are now crammed into their neighbor’s hut across the dirt road with a dozen people. Some worry they will not manage to cobble together the permitted tents from wood and plastic sheeting, which would barely shield them from Arsal’s harsh winter. Human Rights Watch described the shelter order as “one of many recent actions to crank up pressure on Syrian refugees to go back.” These include more arrests, deportations, shop closures, curfews, evictions and other measures in the past months, it said on Friday.
Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, the president’s son-in-law, has pushed hard for Syrians to go home, insisting they should not wait for an elusive peace deal to end the war.