Ana Maria Luca and Nadine Elali

The Qatari Red Crescent set up their small headquarters in the school of Al Rama in the Lebanese municipality of Wadi Khaled. The mayors of several villages hold a meeting in the school yard, while volunteers from Qatar give away humanitarian aid – boxes of diapers, food and some medicine – to Syrians who fled the besieged towns of Tal Kalakh and Arida and took refuge in the villages along the Lebanese side of the Kabir River.

Three men, refugees from Tal Kalakh, sit with the mayors and discuss how they can find a way to leave the border villages, already over-crowded with people, and find their way to their relatives elsewhere in Lebanon. “I have relatives in Beirut, but we need to know that we have a legal way to reach Beirut,” a man in his early 40s who goes by the pseudonym Abu Youssef tells NOW Lebanon. “I don’t want to be a burden to these people. I would gladly stay with my family. But we need to have free passes from the Lebanese state to know what our status here is,” he adds.

Abu Youssef, a school teacher, says he and the other two men and their families left Tal Kalakh because there was no other choice; it was a matter of life and death. “I was part of the demonstrations – I was one of the people who organized them – and I can tell you that the only crime we committed was to say, ‘Bashar, step down, we don’t want you anymore,’” he says. He asks for a sheet of paper and starts drawing a map of Tal Kalakh and its surroundings, with the town itself in the middle, the roads leading to the four Alawite villages around it, the road toward Arida – the town straddling the border with Lebanon – the Homs-Tartous highway nearby, and the location of the Political Security headquarters.

“This is their strategy,” he says while he keeps drawing. “Take this and apply it to any city – Banyas, Daraa, Homs – and you’ll have the same situation. It’s only that they have no media there to tell this story.”
The protesters had created the Committee for Reform in Tal Kalakh, which was made up of religious figures, intellectuals and the heads of all the families in town. He says the committee was ready for dialogue and was asking for reforms, and that violence was not in their plans. “While the Sunnis were organizing peaceful protests, the regime was arming the Alawites in the villages surrounding Tal Kalakh,” he says.

The violence started on Friday, May 13. The night before, the committee had reached an agreement with the head of intelligence in the Homs district in which Tal Kalakh sits. “He had assured the community leaders that no violence was going to happen. The next day we went on with our routine demonstration: We met at the mosque, we prayed, then we walked to the central square, where we chanted our slogans for around two hours. Nothing happened; we went to bed quietly. The next day the violence started. At around 6 to 6:30 a.m., people from the Alawite villages blocked all the roads except for the one leading to the Homs-Tartous highway. They wanted us to empty the town,” he explains.
He says he took his mother and brother and walked through surrounding fields to another village to take refuge. Word had been spreading for a month already that people could cross into Lebanon, but he was afraid. “They stood at the barricades with their guns and shot at people who tried to reach the border crossing in Arida. They shot at a bus with women and children trying to reach Lebanon,” one of the other men says.

But for those who took the only open road leading to the Homs-Tartous highway, things didn’t go any better: The security forces stopped the cars and arrested all the young men trying to pass through. The people who made it through the checkpoint had no way of warning the ones left in the town that they were in danger, because the phone lines were down.
“The shelling went on in Tal Kalakh. The next Tuesday, on the 17th, when the town was empty completely, they went in and looted the houses,” he says. He also says that the Shabiha followed the refugees fleeing toward Arida, and that is why the town on the border was shelled just like Tal Kalakh.

The teacher says he managed to sneak back into Tal Kalakh via a smugglers path, and he found his house had been looted. “They ripped my clothes, took the 25 Syrian pounds I had in a drawer. It’s funny that they didn’t take the 600 Euros I was saving. They probably didn’t know what they were,” he says, smiling.

Several Lebanese army vehicles packed with Special Forces troops patrol the roads along the northern Lebanese border. From their rooftops in the villages, the people can see into the Syrian villages where the Syrian army is heavily deployed. “We already know that the Lebanese army will not let any refugees in anymore through Arida. But we have our ways behind the mountain to get our relatives in,” says a man from Wadi Khaled, who insists that we not disclose his name.