Crossing Deadly Landscapes, Syrians Reach Havens in Lebanon
By ANNE BARNARD
Sam Tarling for The New York Times
The Akkash family reached Lebanon's Bekaa Valley seven months after fleeing their bombed-out house in Aleppo.
Families keep making the journey out of Syria to escape government
forces, Islamist-ruled rebel areas, and now possible American missile
strikes.
Sam Tarling for The New York Times
The Akkash family reached Lebanon's Bekaa Valley seven months after fleeing their bombed-out house in Aleppo.
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: September 6, 2013
AYYAT, Lebanon — A family of nine crouched on a sunbaked plain here in
the Bekaa Valley, the wind whipping the plastic awning that was their
only shelter. The children’s faces were smudged with dirt, the baby
girl’s pale pink patent-leather shoes caked with mud.
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Sam Tarling for The New York Times
Makeshift refugee camps line the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.
But the mother, Nasra Youssef Akkash, could not stop smiling. She and
her children had finally reached Lebanon seven months after fleeing
their bombed-out house in Aleppo, in northern Syria. Their journey
zigzagged through Islamist-ruled rebel areas and towns wracked by
fighting, finally taking them through the outskirts of Damascus, where
people were seized with new fears of impending American missile strikes.
All along the way there was never enough food or decent shelter.
On Thursday, she told visitors that she and her family had slept
peacefully for the first time in months after crossing the border on
Wednesday, finally free from the sounds of shelling — frightened only
briefly by a barrage of wedding fireworks that sent them diving to the
ground for cover. Even without blankets, they had barely noticed the
chilly nighttime wind.
“You look here and see a body, you look there and see another one,” Mrs.
Akkash said, describing the landscapes where she had sought shelter
with her children, ranging in age from Moussa, 30, to Narmeen, 1. “This
house is flattened, that house is destroyed.”
After holding out for two and a half years of war, the Syrians entering
Lebanon these days — part of a flood of two million refugees across the
region — bring news of war and economic hardship across the country. As
they flee Islamist extremist rule in the northern city of Raqqa,
government and rebel shelling around Damascus, food shortages and
criminal gangs, they say they see the threat of an American attack as
just one more in a dizzying array of dangers.
“Obama will strike for the people,” said Abdelkader, a municipal
employee from Raqqa who supports the government. “The regime also is
fighting for the people, and the opposition is fighting for the people.
And the people are damned.”
He welcomed into a cramped box-shaped shelter more than a dozen members
of his family who had bribed their way across the border on Thursday.
Ms. Akkash’s journey began when she watched, from a few hundred yards
away, as a projectile exploded her house — fired from a government
warplane or a rebel mortar, she never knew.
She fled with the few bundles she could salvage, and the clothes on her
children’s backs, including the Smurfs and “Sesame Street” T-shirts, now
faded, that her young boys still wear. Her husband had died earlier of a
heart attack, so she relied on her grown sons for help and protection.
First the family traveled to Tal Abyad, in the northern province of
Raqqa. As Islamist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda gained ascendancy and
infighting spread between rebel groups and between Arabs and Kurds, the
family backtracked, heading south toward Damascus, slipping from
village to village.
Humanitarian aid was spotty, Ms. Akkash said, with aid groups unable to
reach many of the areas they passed through. The family, like the
estimated millions of internally displaced people within Syria, relied
on sporadic handouts from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent or local relief
groups.
“The Crescent gives you a box — some rice, some sponges,” she said,
throwing up her hands. “All I wanted was something to cover my
children’s heads.”
They reached Nabak, west of Damascus near the Lebanese border, where
fighting overflowed sporadically and displaced families clustered during
clashes in Homs and Qusayr to the north.
They spent the past several weeks in Deir Attiya, west of Damascus, in a
crowded makeshift shelter in an unfinished construction site. Clashes
between government and rebel fighters filled the nights with the thuds
and crashes of shelling. And in recent days, people talked nonstop about
new anxieties and questions over an impending American attack.
“There is a lot of fear, an unusual amount of fear,” Ms. Akkash said as
she breast-fed her baby. “Fear that these strikes will include
everything and everyone.”
“What will happen if they come?” she asked.
“World War III,” said Hussam Isber, 44, who had just arrived from the same area with his wife and four children.
Originally from Homs, they fled that city as it was engulfed by war, but
could not get away from the fighting. His place of refuge, Nabak, was
gradually drained of civilian inhabitants as the original residents
fled, and he eventually joined them.
Asked whether he had left out of fear of chemical weapons, or the American attack, he laughed.
“The regular weapons are enough,” he said.
Both his and Ms. Akkash’s families fled across the mountainous border,
and were settling in with the help of Sawa, a Lebanese aid organization
that works with Unicef to provide water and dig latrines in makeshift
refugee camps lining the Bekaa Valley.
Down the road in the town of Youneen, Abdelkader’s family, from Raqqa,
said they had managed to bribe officials on both sides of the border.
Some family members had to make a risky trip to Aleppo to win special
permission to leave.
The Syrian government has forbidden essential public-sector workers to
leave without authorization, and the Lebanese government has tightened
entry rules for Syrians, leaving many trapped.
The family members supported the government — one was a Baath Party
member, and one had a tattoo of Mr. Assad’s brother Bassel on his chest —
and declined to give their family names for fear of reprisals from
rebels.
Their problems began early this year when Islamic rebel groups swept
into Raqqa, they said. One relative, a soldier, was kidnapped and
released after they paid $1,000, they said. Abdelkader was briefly
imprisoned, accused of being a pro-government militiaman. Ahmed, a
teacher, said his school had been ransacked. Ola, 17, said rebels had
taken over her house; after long negotiations she was able to get back
some of her possessions, including a refrigerator that was returned with
bloodstains inside.
But it was economic hardship that finally drove them out, they said.
Salaries had been paid only sporadically since the rebel takeover, they
said. They piled into a van and drove for a day and a night to the
border. Along the way, they had to pass many checkpoints manned by both
sides.
“And then there is the third side,” Ahmed said. “The criminals. They will take everything from you.”
To cap it off, at a rebel checkpoint, one gunman, who they believed was
from Saudi Arabia or Yemen, ordered Ola, who wears a loosely draped head
scarf, to cover her face. When she refused, he looked away.
“She should look like a mummy,” Ahmed joked.
The family is Sunni Muslim like most of the rebels, but it objects to
the extremists ascendant in its hometown, and accused President Obama of
supporting them.
If America strikes Syria, Abdelkader said, “all the region will be burned.”
Ahmed added, “Of course, the people will be burned first.”
U.S. Official Predicts ‘War of Attrition’ Among Syrian Fighters After Strike
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
As a debate ensues on the severity of a strike on Syria, a State Department official said an attack would most likely not alter the military balance in the country.copy http://global.nytimes.com/
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