Syrian refugees in Beirut rejoiced Assad’s downfall on Sunday, with some saying they are considering returning to Syria.
“After all these years of suffering, God granted us relief,” Hilal Youssef, a Syrian from Hama, said on Sunday. “We will go back to Syria with pride and joy. We got rid of this army. We got rid of the injustice that we lived before and freed Syria. Now we can go there anytime we want.”
“For sure we want to go back,” said Bilal al Khleif, also from Hama. Refugees will return “to Hama, to Damascus, to Idlib and all areas and chant ‘Freedom,’” he said.
Syrians had already crowded the Lebanese side of the Masnaa border crossing Sunday waiting to cross back into Syria after Assad’s fall.
Lebanon’s General Security closed the crossing overnight but reopened it in the morning, allowing Syrians to freely cross out of Lebanon while restricting their entry from Syria into the country.
Lebanese officials have long complained about the country’s population of refugees — the largest per capita in the world. As of Sept. 30, some 768,353 Syrian refugees were registered with the UN refugee agency in Lebanon, with hundreds of thousands more believed to be unregistered.
Many fled Lebanon after the escalation of the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah in late September, but others crossed back from Syria into Lebanon in recent days as the opposition fighters marched toward Damascus.
With Syrian officials having abandoned the Syrian side of the border, an Associated Press photographer who crossed from Lebanon into Syria said he saw some people taking the opportunity to loot the duty-free store between the two borders.
