AKKAR — Two families share a two-bedroom home in Bqerzla, a village in Lebanon’s northern Akkar governorate near the border with Syria. There is no work, so they spend many days crowded around a plastic table on the porch, sipping tea and recalling painful memories of their displacement from Syria earlier this year.
They fled in March, after more than 800 people were killed when clashes between Assad regime loyalists and government security forces sparked a wave of sectarian killings targeting Alawites in Syria’s coastal and central regions.
“When we left Baniyas, we walked past burnt corpses,” Umm Julie, 45, an English teacher originally from the Tartous town of Qadmous, recalled. “My mother’s friend lost her son, her granddaughter, her daughter, her daughter’s husband and their two children, who were shot in their home,” she added, fighting back tears.
Umm Julie fled to Lebanon with her husband and two daughters in mid-March. They were helped by a Sunni friend whose car had Idlib license plates, and the women wore hijabs to conceal that they are Alawites—members of the minority Shiite Muslim sect to which the ousted president Bashar al-Assad belongs.
Um Julie, 45, folds her hands as she sits in the two-bedroom home she shares with 10 other family members in Lebanon’s northern Akkar governorate since fleeing Syria’s coastal Tartous province in mid-March, 4/5/2025 (Natacha Danon/Syria Direct)
Her brother, Abu Reem (a pseudonym), also escaped with the help of a Sunni friend. He was stopped at a checkpoint and feared he would be killed, before that friend “ran towards me and called me ‘Abu Omar’ to conceal my name,” he recalled. “He told them I was from Damascus and the man at the checkpoint responded: ‘We thought you were Alawite, from the coast.’”
Abu Reem, his wife and four daughters stayed with that friend for a time until he was threatened for sheltering them, he said. The family then fled to a nearby forest, where they hid for nearly two weeks until they made it to Lebanon late March.
Since the Assad regime fell last December, approximately 120,000 Syrians have crossed into Lebanon, according to the UNHCR. They include nearly 39,000 refugees from Tartous, Latakia, Homs and Hama provinces—many of them Alawites who fled like Umm Julie and Abu Reem.
In Lebanon, both families have called the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) hotline multiple times hoping to register as refugees, to no avail. “They told us ‘we’ll call you’ and they still haven’t,” Um Julie said.
The UNHCR stopped officially registering Syrian refugees in Lebanon in 2015, at the request of the country’s government. However, the agency continued to informally register refugees, providing them with unique barcodes allowing them to access aid and apply for resettlement
“Among the new wave of Syrians who entered Lebanon following the fall of the regime, but also after the tensions that were happening on the coast of Syria, we don’t know of anyone who has gotten a barcode,” a source from the Beirut-based Access Center for Human Rights (ACHR) told Syria Direct.
When Abu Reem called the hotline, “we said we want to register with the UN and they said there is no registration currently,” he recalled. “They said to tell them how many members were in my family, and said if something happens we’ll contact you.”
“All of these people have called UNHCR to ask for this [registration] and they haven’t heard an answer back. We haven’t heard that they’ve stopped providing these barcodes, we just know that no one we have spoken to has been able to get one,” the ACHR source added, asking not to be named.
UNHCR Lebanon spokesperson Lisa Abou Khaled said the agency has not stopped informally registering Syrians. “Vulnerable Syrian families in need of assistance have and can continue approaching UNHCR to seek support,” she said. “UNHCR is in discussions with the Government of Lebanon on resuming [official] registration for new arrivals.”
Any form of registration is important for allowing aid actors to track new arrivals, and for refugees to access aid and apply for resettlement in other countries. Without it, and with aid dwindling for all refugees in Lebanon, those who recently arrived are largely on their own.
‘A growing number of people in need’
Up until May 2015, Syrians in Lebanon could formally register as refugees with the UNHCR, allowing them to receive cash and food assistance, apply for resettlement, rent homes and send their children to school. As of February 2025, around 752,000 of the estimated 1.5 million Syrians in Lebanon were registered refugees.
“Formal registration is fundamental under international law when it comes to being able to provide basic protections to refugees, full stop,” said Jesse Marks, Senior Advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International. Without it, “you lose the ability to track who’s in need,” he added. “If you’ve lost your system of identifying needs, then you lose the ability to…essentially implement your mandate.”
After 2015, “informal registration was a way that they could be known to the UN, for the UN to then basically advocate for them,” Marks explained. With new arrivals struggling to complete even this step, “the UN basically has lost sight, or has the potential that they lose sight, of what is a growing number of people in need.”
Previously, the government of Lebanon also allowed even informally registered refugee children to attend school. Increasing restrictions in Lebanon have whittled down Syrians’ options over the years however, with multiple municipalities banning even formally registered refugees from attending public schools if they do not hold legal residency.
Read more: Syrians continue to flock to Lebanon after the regime’s fall
Residency permits in Lebanon are largely out of reach due to prohibitive costs and bureaucratic obstacles. “In the last year, General Security became more and more reluctant to grant new residency permits even for the kafala [guarantor] system or even to renew the existing ones,” said Friedrich Bokern, Secretary General of the peacebuilding organization Relief & Reconciliation International.
In response to the influx of refugees from the Syrian coast earlier this year, his organization provided food baskets and housed families at their community center in Akkar, which provides education services to Syrian and Lebanese students alike.
Umm Julie’s family initially received some support from the UN, but she said it was not enough. “The UN came and gave us very simple things, like towels, sanitary pads, socks…things that have no value,” she said. She currently relies on her sister in the United States (US) to meet her family’s monthly expenses, in the absence of any form of financial assistance.”
Support for Syrian refugees in Lebanon—whether formally registered or newly arrived—is dwindling as humanitarian actors face dramatic funding shortfalls, in part due to US funding cuts. Only around 14 percent of the UNHCR budget for Lebanon is currently funded.
In February, the World Food Program (WFP) cut the number of Syrian refugees receiving cash assistance in Lebanon by 40 percent. Without new funding, “resources will run out by June 2025,” it said in a March report.
No return
Abu Hassan, 46, also fled Syria in March with his wife and three children. From Tartous city, they made their way to Lebanon, crossing the Nahr al-Kabir river into Akkar. While they hope to return to Syria, they have ruled out the possibility of doing so anytime soon.
“The situation isn’t safe, there’s kidnapping. Nothing indicates that there is currently a state…there is chaos, you might die at any moment,” Abu Hassan said.
“I’m afraid of my daughters being kidnapped or killed in Syria. I’m also afraid of not returning and they’ll lose their education,” Umm Julie echoed. “We’re very stressed about their education.”
Umm Julie’s youngest daughter wants to be a doctor, while the oldest wants to be a pharmacist. “They have strong ambitions. It’s like I’m caught between two fires,” she said.
“If we return to Syria either they will kill us or arrest us,” Abu Reem feared. “More important than anything else, I have girls,” he added, referring to reports of kidnappings of Alawites.
Hundreds of extrajudicial killings—predominantly of Alawites—have also taken place in central Syria since the start of the year, with state security forces accused of involvement in some cases.
Read more: Extrajudicial killings of Alawites plague Homs city
Abu Reem shows a photo of an acquaintance’s brother, who was shot and killed with his father on their rooftop during the violence on Syria’s coast in March, 4/5/2025 (Natacha Danon/Syria Direct)
“We don’t want anything in this life except our children’s education, and to go back to work. I hope we can go back to normal life in any European country and get back on our feet,” Umm Julie added.
“They didn’t leave us anything in Syria. They took my money, my car, my workshop…they ransacked and stole from our homes. So what do I want to return to?” Abu Reem said. In Damascus, hundreds of Alawites have been evicted from privately owned homes since last December by the security forces, Reuters reported in April.
“Hopefully I can travel to a European country and ask for asylum. The most important thing for me is to put my girls in school,” he added.
However, many European countries have paused or stopped giving asylum to Syrians.
“Newly arriving refugees, especially from the Alawite areas of Syria, face a big number of challenges…The biggest challenge is that Lebanon has harshened the conditions for Syrian refugees in general, gradually over the last decade,” Bokern said.
“So there are many problems and the new arrivals are faced with all this and now UNHCR is not responding. The hotlines are dead…there is no reply anymore and no registration whatsoever. UNHCR has a clear mandate, its very reason to exist is to protect refugees and protection starts with registration,” he added.
The Lebanese government, for its part, is not likely to prioritize any form of refugee registration at the moment, as Marks sees it. “The Lebanese government is focused on getting Syrians out…not welcoming more in.”
