Rena Netjes is a Dutch journalist and researcher who has reported extensively from Syria throughout its war. She was previously the Cairo correspondent for Parool newspaper and BNR radio in the Netherlands.
Sophie Fullerton is a political scientist and human rights researcher based in New York who has written for The Washington Post, the Index on Censorship and other outlets.
Israel's escalating war in Lebanon has displaced more than 1.2 million people across the country in recent weeks. Those displaced are not only Lebanese civilians but also an estimated 250,000 Syrian refugees who have fled back into neighboring Syria since Israel's bombing campaign began last month. Some 1.5 million Syrian refugees living precariously in Lebanon for more than a decade, after fleeing civil war in their own country, have faced the threat of detention and deportation in recent years amid a growing backlash against refugees.
"I paid to escape the shelling in Lebanon to reach my village, which is also under bombardment by Assad's army," said one Syrian refugee interviewed by Al Jazeera after returning to his village in Idlib, in northwest Syria. As another Syrian refugee who had to flee Lebanon for Syria told scholar Jasmin Lilian Diad, who directs the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University: "No, I am not returning. I am rather leaving one foot in Lebanon and one in Syria. Syria is in no way a safe place. As men, we are at risk of arrest and forced conscription."
According to Etana, a Syrian research and policy center based in Amman, "two different realities have emerged at the Syria-Lebanon border: while Lebanese nationals cross without ID checks or fees, Syrians must present IDs and face entry costs. The disparity also extends to aid and services."
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians may be returning to their country to escape Israeli bombardment in Lebanon, but there are no "safe zones" in Assad's Syria.
- Rena Netjes and Sophie Fullerton
Last month, President Bashar al-Assad's government issued its latest "general amnesty" to political prisoners and Syrian men who have avoided their mandatory military conscription, although human rights organizations and other observers have long noted that these amnesties are hollow, with many loopholes. For example, they don't apply to thousands of Syrians who were detained for taking part in peaceful political protests and then convicted in sham military trials. "The Syrian government's strategy of issuing selective amnesties aims to give the appearance of reform while maintaining control through fear and repression," Human Rights Watch warned. "The repeated exclusion of those arrested for peaceful political opposition sends a clear message: there will be no justice or clemency for those who dared to challenge the government."
The amnesties are part of a long-running PR campaign by Assad's government to Syrian refugees—and the countries hosting them—that it is safe to return. It is a claim Assad has been making for years, even in the darkest days of Syria's civil war, like 2016, when Aleppo finally fell back into Assad's control after a long and brutal siege.
Among the countries Assad is targeting with this message are members of the European Union that have signaled their desire to normalize ties with Syria, so they can deport Syrian refugees, although they frame it as "resettlement." Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has been leading this pitch, calling on the EU to "review" its Syria strategy and "work with all actors to create the conditions for Syrian refugees to return to their homeland in a voluntary, safe and sustainable way." Meloni's rhetoric reflects a backlash against migration and refugees across Europe, from both the political right and left, although direct calls for normalizing with Assad remain more tacit.
Israel's bombing and invasion of Lebanon may lead to more calls from European leaders like Meloni to deport—or in their words "resettle"—Syrian refugees. "The situation in the Middle East has completely changed the discussion," an EU diplomat told Politico recently about the war in Lebanon. It comes after Lebanon's caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, declared earlier this year that "most Syrians" in Lebanon would be deported, once "the international community recognizes" the existence of safe zones in Syria.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians may be returning to their country to escape Israeli bombardment in Lebanon, but there are no "safe zones" in Assad's Syria. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented at least 17 cases of returnees arrested by the regime in recent days, and it is investigating dozens of others.
Thousands of Syrians from Lebanon have traveled over land for several days to reach Aoun al-Dadat, the only civilian border crossing into opposition-held areas in northern Syria, outside Aleppo. In interviews broadcast on the pro-opposition channel Syria TV, Syrian returnees have talked about walking north for five or six days, through regime checkpoints where they were intimidated, harassed and blackmailed. "Everything we have worked for in Lebanon for the past 12 years is lost to them," said one woman who fled the southern Lebanese town of Nabatieh and eventual reached Jebel al-Zawiya, in southern Idlib, which has been under Russian bombardment for several days recently. In the various opposition-controlled areas of northwest Syria, an estimated 1.8 million displaced Syrians already live in mainly makeshift camps. The Assad regime does not allow them to return to their homes in government-held territory.
Promises of amnesty or reconciliation for Syrian refugees resettling in regime-held territory instead end with mass arrests and forced conscription.
- Rena Netjes and Sophie Fullerton
The country is clearly not a safe haven for the millions of Syrians who have fled Assad's regime and the horrors of the civil war. Over the past year, many Syrian refugees have been forcibly deported from Lebanon and immediately arrested at the Syrian border. Most of those arrested at the border have been taken to detention centers run by the Syrian military and mukharabat in the governorates of Homs and Damascus.
One such refugee was 27-year-old Mahmoud Hassana, who was deported from Lebanon in May, back to Assad-controlled Syria. He reportedly tried to flee to opposition-held areas but was killed by Syrian security forces at a regime checkpoint.
These are the realities in Syria that no longer make headlines. In 2019, more than a thousand internally displaced Syrians left the remote and desperate Rukban camp in Syria's southeastern desert, along the border with Jordan and Iraq, under a supposed reconciliation deal negotiated with Syrian and Russian forces. The United Nations office in Damascus and the Syrian Red Crescent helped secure the agreement, which claimed it would guarantee the safe return of camp residents to their home towns and amnesty for those who had missed their compulsory military service.
Thousands of Syrian refugees in Rukban have essentially been trapped for years in a no-man's land, only a few miles from the U.S. military outpost at al-Tanf, putting the camp under de facto American control. They have been unable to enter Jordan, which sealed its border, while aid to the camp has been cut off by the Syrian government, which blocks nearly all humanitarian aid from reaching areas outside its control and has besieged the territory around Rukban for years.
The Syrians who left Rukban in 2019 under this deal did not find amnesty. Instead, the families say they were put in schools in Homs, which Syrian authorities called "shelter centers," where they were interrogated. Hundreds of these Syrian civilians were then imprisoned, according to local journalists, activists and relatives. The young men were forcibly conscripted into the Syrian army, many of them later killed on the frontlines.
The refugees from Rukban were not an exception. Activists say that promises of amnesty or reconciliation for Syrian refugees resettling in regime-held territory instead end with mass arrests and forced conscription. It matches the extensive reporting by human rights organizations for years now on the abuses and persecution that refugees face when they return to Syria.
Among the young men who left Rukban with false promises of resettlement was Mohammed Munir al-Saghir. The 20-year-old was detained and forcibly conscripted. His family was later informed of his death by one of Syria's security branches. Mohammed Mahmoud al-Zaytoun al-Thuraya, a young engineer by training, also left Rukban camp through the 2019 deal. He was arrested and taken to the Political Security Directorate in Homs, where, according to his family, he was tortured and killed.
Is this what European leaders want Syrians to go back to?
