For two weeks, Umm Hadi has been living a nightmare on repeat. It has been 12 years since she last saw her elder son, who was detained by Syrian soldiers at a border crossing between Lebanon and Syria.
Now it has happened again. She says her younger son Hadi was at the al-Dabbousyia crossing on 7 October, attempting to flee Israeli airstrikes and cross back into Syria to try to reunite with his family, when he was arrested and taken away by government forces.
Sitting in a refugee camp in an opposition-controlled area of north-west Syria, Umm Hadi is distraught.
“We are just sitting here, waiting to hear his fate,” she says. Umm Hadi says when the Israeli bombs began to fall, Hadi sent his family back to Syria but because he came from a village in regime-controlled territory, he had been too scared to return. Two weeks ago, after the airstrikes intensified, his fear of the regime was replaced by a greater fear that he would never see his children again, so he decided to make the crossing himself.
“He was not involved with anything,” his mother says. “He was just a worker trying to feed his family. I am terrified I will also lose him to the regime like his brother.”
Hadi and his family had been living in Lebanon for more than a decade, part of a 1.5 million-strong Syrian refugee population who sought shelter in neighbouring Lebanon after the start of the civil war in 2011.
In the past month, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon have reversed this refugee flow, pushing an estimated 425,000 people – mostly women and children – back over chaotic and overcrowded border crossings, according to the UN.
About 70% of those making the crossing are Syrians, but Lebanese civilians – the majority thought to be from Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley – have also sought safety in a country still beset by economic strife, division and violence.
For many of the Syrians returning home after years of living in exile, the journey back home is a perilous one.
At border crossings and checkpoints in regime territory, there have been reports of disappearances, interrogations, detentions, forced conscription, bribery, beatings and harassment of returning refugees.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, there have been at least 23 documented cases of Syrian refugees who have been arrested and detained by government forces as they tried to move across Syria.
Thousand of returning Syrians who are too fearful of the wrath of the regime or who have nothing to return to in their home cities, towns and villages, are having to navigate their way through regime territory to try to reach opposition-controlled areas in the north-west of the country.
Asriya Awad, an 80-year-old Syrian woman, managed to cross over into opposition-controlled Idlib with 11 members of her family after a 10-day journey from Lebanon.
“We had been living in Lebanon for 10 years but we had to leave because missiles were falling on us,” she says.
“We left without taking anything with us, only the women and children of our family. We crossed at Jusiyah and I saw with my own eyes security personnel at the border assaulting young men, making them get off the buses and arresting them.
“My daughter-in-law and her daughters were detained and we had to pay another $1,000 for their release. Our village is under the control of the regime and our house has been destroyed. On the way here, a young man from our village was taken away by soldiers, so we had to flee to the Idlib camps as it is not safe to go back.”
Farid Suleiman and his wife, Haifaa Salal, also managed to make their way through Syria to reach Idlib, after a desperate and dangerous journey from Lebanon.
“We have seven children and we did not want to go back to Syria but we had nowhere to go because the shelters in Lebanon would not accept us,” he says.
After surviving multiple bombing attacks in Lebanon, Farid and Haifaa Salal first took their family to the Masnaa border crossing but say they were beaten by guards when they could not provide them with the correct paperwork, which had been destroyed in an Israeli attack.
Farid says they were forced to pay smugglers to try to get them across the border but the road they were on was bombed by the Israelis as they were attempting to cross.
“Glass flew towards my children and almost killed them,” he says.
When they finally managed to enter Syria, Farid says he was pulled off a bus at a checkpoint and arrested, and was only released after Haifaa Salal gave the soldiers her jewellery.
“The situation at all of the crossings and checkpoints is terrible because of the intimidation and exploitation,” says Haifaa Salal. “Nothing terrified me more than the fear of my husband being arrested, but the situation for women [travelling alone] is very difficult. We saw three women forced off buses and taken away by soldiers who didn’t come back.”
Now, even though they have survived the bombs and the checkpoints, the situation for many of the returning refugees seeking shelter in Idlib is grim.
According to the UN, at least 4.1 million of the 5 million people living in north-west Syria are reliant on humanitarian aid to meet their basic survival needs, with 1.9 million living in camps and temporary settlements.
“Unfortunately, the suffering of those who flee the bombings and cross to Syria doesn’t end at the border,” says Rula Amin, spokesperson for the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR. “A new humanitarian emergency is unfolding at the final destinations where most arrive with no or very limited resources.
“They go back to a country battered by 13 years of conflict, inflation, destroyed infrastructure, destroyed homes and an economic crisis. More than 7.2 million Syrians are still displaced inside Syria.”
Farid does not know where to turn. “I am from a village in Maarat al-Numan, which is under the control of the Syrian regime, and I cannot return there because I am wanted for compulsory military service,” he says.
“We have no home, no shelter, no clothes, no food. What should we do now?”
