MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
For more than a decade, some 6 million Syrians fled the Assad regime for other countries. Now, the opposite is happening. With the fall of that dictatorship last December, a new kind of refugee is fleeing Syria - those who sympathized with or even fought for the former regime. NPR's Emily Feng and Jawad Rizkallah met some of them across the Syrian border in Lebanon, where many are hiding.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
RUBA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: The two Syrian families we meet here in northern Lebanon pour us tiny but strong glasses of herbal mate - a bitter tea beloved in their home country.
RUBA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: One of the women, Ruba, says they left just one day before the Assad regime fell. Like many of the Syrians interviewed in this piece, she asks that we only use her first name to protect family who are still living in Syria. Ruba and her family paid smugglers $100 U.S. a head to bring them to a narrow river separating Syria from Lebanon...
RUBA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: ...Where Ruba said she saw people of several sects flee, not just Alawites like her - an offshoot of Shia Muslims which former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family also belong to and who sit here and say they are experiencing an uptick in persecution under the new rebel government. The new leadership has dismissed such claims but conceded there may be some revenge attacks.
ABU YACOUB: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Ruba's brother-in-law, Abu Yacoub, interjects. "The new government is not just Islamists," he says. "They're extremists."
ABU ALI: (Speaking Arabic).
YACOUB: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: "There's no security anymore," Abu Yacoub continues. "At least under the former dictator, Bashar al-Assad," he says, "there was security."
His brother, Abu Ali, admits the Assads, accused of killing tens of thousands of their own people, were not perfect.
ALI: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: But, he says, at least under the Assads, you could imagine a future and come and go with security. He says the Syria he knew is gone. And now they are gone, too - part of an exodus of Syrians who had benefited under the old Assad regime and now have a lot to lose. Abu Ali's wife and relatives and many other newly-minted Syrian refugees were smuggled through one Lebanese area called Wadi Khaled on the Syrian border.
SHEIKH AHMED AL-SHEIKH: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: We meet the area's mayor, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Sheikh. He estimates some 1,000 Syrians somehow tied to the Assad regime are being smuggled through his village every day...
AL-SHEIKH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: ...Via makeshift paths his residents simply clear through the mountains with bulldozers.
AL-SHEIKH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Also among those fleeing Syria now are some of the more than 200,000 people who fought for Assad's army, though many say they were forced to fight. We meet some of them at our final stop at a Shiite shrine in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Singing in non-English language).
JAWAD RIZKALLAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: The shrine is glittering, covered in turquoise and white tiles. Hundreds of people eat, sun and pray here, and nearly all of them are Syrians. We head into the shrine's basement.
Normally, this would be the mosque basement, and now it's just been subdivided by blankets into places where people can sleep.
They're mostly Syrian fighters with the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, who fought alongside Syria's army against the rebel groups now in power. The fighters say Hezbollah helped them cross into Lebanon and houses them in this shrine. The fighters survive now in the shadows of the building, fed by a soup kitchen run by volunteers from Iran - a country which sponsored both the Assad regime and Hezbollah.
IBTISSAM HUMHOM: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Ibtissam Humhom says she left Syria because she was afraid the new government would kill her husband, the Hezbollah fighter. She forbade her teenage son from joining.
RAJAB HUMHOM: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Though, her son, Rajab Humhom grins and says he'd join up if he could. He saw fighting for the Assad regime as a way to protect their village.
A few rows away in the shrine basement, Ali al-Ahmed, a 27-year-old Syrian Hezbollah sniper, says he joined Hezbollah when he was just 14 years old, in part because it paid far more than his Syrian army wage of $5 a month. When his unit heard that the Syrian government was crumbling, his Hezbollah commander told him to flee.
ALI AL-AHMED: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Al-Ahmed says he dug a hole in the ground. Inside it, he buried one of his guns, then threw his sniper rifle in the trash. He burned his Syrian military uniform and fled to Lebanon. Holding his young daughter as he speaks to us, he says he was prepared to die fighting Syria's rebels. His side lost.
AL-AHMED: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: But if he gets the call to fight again with Hezbollah, he says he would heed it.
Emily Feng, NPR News, the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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