Increasing number of Syrian refugees are leaving Lebanon

In the last few weeks in the field, our team has met an increasing number of Syrian refugees who had been in Lebanon since the beginning of the war in Syria in 2011, and have recently been forced to leave Lebanon and start their journey to Europe – as most of them perceive Western EU member states as safe and believe they will be granted international protection there.

It is estimated that approximately 1 500 000 refugees have fled from Syria to Lebanon, since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, and only a bit more than half the number has been registered by the UNHCR. In the last few years, Lebanon has been grappling with grave economic and political crises, which has particularly hit the refugee population. According to the international organizations’ data, the Lebanese government has deported thousands of Syrian refugees back to Syria since the beginning of 2023. This is exactly what we have been hearing from refugees we had spoken to in the field. Afraid they will be handed over to the Syrian regime, people that our team has talked to stated they had decided to go to Europe.

While visiting one of the informal settlements near Serbia’s northern borders, our team spoke to a man from Syria who had left Lebanon four months prior, after he had spent several years in the country. “There is no life anymore in Lebanon, the crisis is huge. They are deporting refugees back to Syria, hand them over to the regime who enrolls you into army forces and send you to die in the frontline.”, the man told us. He had paid a smuggler to take him out of Lebanon by land, and had spent most of his time while on the move in Turkey because he was pushed back from Bulgarian – Turkish border several times. "A lot of people leave Lebanon by sea, but I didn’t dare. It is not safe, smugglers put too many people in a single boat, and many drown in the sea. The other day a boat sank close to the Lebanon coast, there were no survivals”, he said.