Lebanon town braces for new flood of Syria refugees

ARSAL: The Lebanese farming town of Arsal, already inundated with Syrian refugees, is bracing for another influx as the brutal civil war creeps over the horizon just across the border. The town has long been linked to Syria by well-worn smuggling paths over the mountains, now used by thousands of refugees fleeing the latest offensive by President Bashar al-Assad’s troops. The latest wave have fled from Qara, a village in Syria’s mountainous Qalamoun, a strategic region straddling supply routes between Damascus and the central city of Homs. Arsal, home to around 35,000 people, is a Sunni Muslim community sympathetic to the 32-month-old Syrian uprising, in which an estimated 120,000 people have been killed since March 2011.But it is situated in a region dominated by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which is fighting alongside Assad’s forces in a conflict that threatens to spill into overwhelmed Lebanon. "We are in solidarity with our neighbours from across the border because we are linked by family and social ties," says municipal councillor Wafiq Khalaf. As elsewhere in Lebanon, the new arrivals have mainly relied on local families, some of which have squeezed up to four refugee families into their modest homes. But Khalaf says space is running out, and new arrivals are being squeezed into tents, reception halls and even mosques. There are no official refugee camps in Lebanon, and scores of families live in tents that will provide little shelter from the winter cold. Underscoring the strains on the towns resources, a sign posted outside the town hall reads: "Notice to our refugee brothers -- please don’t use electricity for heating" and advises them to use just one light bulb per room. Khalaf fears that as Syrian troops press into Qalamoun -- which had been largely spared the fighting that has devastated the rest of Syria -- even more Syrians will arrive. The war has generated the largest refugee crisis in two decades, with millions displaced inside the country and in increasingly unstable neighbours like Iraq and Lebanon, which have both seen sectarian attacks mirroring Syria’s violence. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees puts the newest arrivals in Arsal at around 6,000, while the municipality estimates the total probably now exceeds the town’s population. Lebanon as a whole, with a population of just over four million, is hosting more than 800,000 Syrian refugees. "These people had to leave suddenly; they did’nt expect it, so they’ve come without anything," the UNHCR’s local representative, Ninette Kelly, said about the new arrivals in Arsal. "They need immediate support, they need food, they need blankets."