But when he saw the familiar road to Syria, his country of origin, he felt the fear in his stomach rise to the back of his throat.
“I asked an officer, ‘Excuse me, but where are we going? Where are you taking us?’ He told me, ‘We got the order to deport you. We’re handing you over to the Syrian army.’”
The 26-year-old, now in hiding in Syria, shared his story with The Washington Post on the condition that he be identified by his nickname and that his location not be disclosed. Abu Hussein estimates he was one of about 250 Syrians deported that day by Lebanese authorities, who in recent weeks have begun turning over refugees to their Syrian counterparts.
Once across the border, some of the men have disappeared into Syrian custody — detained by authorities for past political activity or evasion of army conscription, according to human rights groups, who are calling for a halt to what they say are unlawful deportations. Amnesty International has so far documented at least four men who were detained upon deportation.
The timing of the returns coincides with a move by Arab states to normalize relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. After a 12-year suspension, Syria was welcomed back into the Arab League this month, and on Friday Assad attended a regional summit in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where the return of refugees was high on the agenda.
Abu Hussein is wanted by the Syrian government for working in media as protests engulfed the country in 2011 and quickly devolved into a brutal civil war. Assad refused to comply with popular demands to resign, cracking down on his people with bombardment, sieges, starvation and torture. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Millions more fled to neighboring countries. Abu Hussein stayed in Syria on fake papers until 2018, when he was found out, and then crossed the border into Lebanon.
He moved with his brother to Burj Hammoud, a neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, getting a job and successfully applying for residency. His passport was at Lebanon’s General Security Directorate for residency renewal when the army, along with officers from army intelligence and the information branch of internal security, descended on his house in late April.
“[My brother and I] talked to the officer from army intelligence and he told us, ‘Don’t worry at all. We’re going to fix your papers, and it’s the United Nations who sent us to fix your papers,’” Abu Hussein said. He showed the officers the green slip from General Security that meant his paperwork was being processed.
None of it made a difference. He was handcuffed along with his brother and held with dozens of others, including women and children, in a convoy of four or five army vehicles. The officers continued driving around Burj Hammoud and knocking on Syrians’ doors, he said, eventually moving all of the detainees to a General Security building, where their phones were confiscated.
The Lebanese soldiers beat up those who resisted, he said, but the herding was the most dehumanizing part: “They treated us like cattle.”
When he realized he was being sent back to Syria, he said, he told a Lebanese officer: “‘If you hand me to the Syrians, I don’t know what will become of me.’” He told me, ‘Your government can deal with you.’”
An official in Lebanon’s General Security, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, told The Post there are no exact numbers for deportees because of a lack of high-level coordination within the country’s security services. When asked about Abu Hussein’s account that Lebanese forces claimed to represent the United Nations, he said: “This is a stupid question, and what an unbelievable lie.”
Abu Hussein said he and his brother spent seven days on the Syrian side of the border, at two big dormitories that separated the women and children from the men. The officers handing out food and drink would issue blanket threats, he said. “They told us, ‘You’re now in Syria — we know how to deal with you.’”
The Syrians conducted interrogations in the dormitories, he said, waking the men at 1 or 2 a.m. “Here, we lost hope. We thought they were taking us to put us down,” he said.
Instead, he said, his interrogators pressed him on details large and small — how he got into Lebanon, the name of his cabdriver, if he had ever protested, if he had ever fought the government. “I lied about everything,” he said. “The only true thing was that I had not picked up arms” against the government.
Eventually, Abu Hussein and his brother were sent back to their home province. It took intelligence forces two days to come for them there, he said.
The men were ready, and had luck on their side: Living on the ground floor meant a swift escape was possible. The officers also came at 4 p.m. — unusual for Syrian intelligence, which tends to favor late-night raids.
“They don’t have the fortitude for these things anymore,” Abu Hussein said cheekily.
The men escaped to another province, aided by sympathizers along the way, including soldiers. “There are many people here who reject what is happening,” Abu Hussein said.
He spoke to The Post by phone as he walked around the city where he is hiding. He grew quiet if he ran into passersby, and his voice dropped to a whisper when he used words like “interrogation” and “army.”
“I didn’t come here with my papers, nor money, nor anything. I am standing now in the street. If a patrol passes by and stops me, I have no identification papers,” he said.
If caught, he said, he expects to be charged and tortured — “and if I lived afterward, they’d send me to military service.”
The Post could not independently confirm Abu Hussein’s account, but it lines up with the findings of rights groups and the accounts of others deported in recent weeks. Leila, a Syrian mother of two, said she emerged after seven days in custody on the border to find that her husband was missing. Her voice cracked with despair when she talked about him, an army defector, afraid to think of what he might be enduring in government custody. She spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her first name for security reasons.
“They told us, ‘A couple hours and you’ll be back,’” she said repeatedly, returning over and over to the moment the Lebanese army knocked on their door.
“Syria is still not safe for returns,” said Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, adding that rights groups have “consistently been documenting cases of refugees returning to Syria who are being subjected to killings and forced disappearance, arbitrary detention, sexual violence and a whole host of other human rights violations.”
Lebanon is prohibited from sending anyone back to a country where they are at risk of persecution, Majzoub said, citing the international “principle of non-refoulement.”
The United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, said it had observed “an increasing trend in raids taking place in Syrian communities” in Lebanon, including at least 73 in April.
“UNHCR continues to strongly advocate for the respect of principles of international law and ensure that refugees in Lebanon are protected from refoulement,” the agency said in a statement to The Post.
Abbas Ibrahim, a former head of Lebanon’s General Security, said the deportations are effectively an appeal for Western countries’ assistance: “Come and pay, come and do something for us, so that we slow down” these deportations.
The West, Ibrahim continued, doesn’t support the return of Syrians but is not doing enough to help Lebanon host the refugees.
“The West’s recklessness is no longer accepted,” he said, “so we want to do something to say no … come talk to us. We are the owners of this country.”
