ARAMOUN: Ayman Jaber’s memories are rooted in every corner of Mhaibib, the village in southern Lebanon he refers to as his “habibti,” the Arabic word for “beloved.” The root of the village’s name means “the lover” or “the beloved.”
Reminiscing about his childhood sweetheart, the 45-year-old avionics technician talks about how the young pair would meet in a courtyard near his uncle’s house.
“I used to wait for her there to see her,” Jaber recalls with a smile. “Half of the village knew about us.”
The fond memory contrasts sharply with recent images of his hometown.
Mhaibib, perched on a hill close to the Israeli border, was leveled by a series of explosions on Oct. 16. The Israeli army released a video showing blasts ripping through the village in the Marjayoun province, razing dozens of homes to dust.
The scene has been repeated in villages across southern Lebanon since Israel launched its invasion a month ago with the stated goal of pushing Hezbollah militants back from the border. On Oct. 26, massive explosions in and around Odaisseh sparked an earthquake alert in northern Israel.
Israel says it wants to destroy a massive network of Hezbollah tunnels in the border area. But for the people who have been displaced, the attacks are also destroying a lifetime of memories.
Mhaibib had endured sporadic targeting since Hezbollah and Israeli forces began exchanging fire on Oct. 8 last year.
Jaber was living in Aramoun, just south of Beirut, before the war, and the rest of his family evacuated from Mhaibib after the border skirmishes ignited. Some of them left their possessions behind and sought refuge in Syria. Jaber’s father and two sisters, Zeinab and Fatima, moved in with him.
In the living room of their temporary home, the siblings sip Arabic coffee while their father chain-smokes.
“My father breaks my heart. He is 70 years old, frail and has been waiting for over a year to return to Mhaibib,” Zeinab said. “He left his five cows there. He keeps asking, ‘Do you think they’re still alive?’”
Mhaibib was a close-knit rural village, with about 70 historic stone homes lining its narrow streets. Families grew tobacco, wheat, mulukhiyah (jute mallow) and olives, planting them each spring and waking before dawn in the summer to harvest the crops.
The village was also known for an ancient shrine dedicated to Benjamin, the son of Jacob, an important figure in Judaism. In Islam, he is known as the prophet Benjamin Bin Yaacoub, believed to be the 12th son of prophet Yaacoub and the brother of prophet Yousef.
The shrine was damaged in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, then renovated. Pictures show the shrine enclosed in a golden cage adorned with intricate Arabic inscriptions beside an old stone mosque crowned by a minaret that overlooked the village. The mosque and the shrine are now gone.
Hisham Younes, who runs the environmental organization Green Southerners, says generations of southerners admired Mhaibib for its one-or two-story stone homes, some built by Jaber’s grandfather and his friends.
“Detonating an entire village is a form of collective punishment and war crime. What do they gain from destroying shrines, churches and old homes?” Younes asks.
Abdelmoe’m Shucair, the mayor of neighboring Mays el Jabal, told the Associated Press that the last few dozen families living in Mhaibib fled before the Israeli destruction began, as had residents of surrounding villages.
Jaber’s sisters attended school in Mays Al-Jabal. That school was also destroyed in a series of massive explosions.
After finishing her studies in Beirut, Zeinab worked in a pharmacy in the neighboring village of Blida. That pharmacy, too, is gone after the Israeli military detonated part of that village. Israeli forces even bulldozed their village cemetery where generations of family members are buried.
“I don’t belong to any political group,” Zeinab says. “Why did my home, my life, have to be taken from me?”
She says she can’t bring herself to watch the video of her village’s destruction. “When my brother played it, I ran from the room.”
To process what’s happening, Fatima says she closes her eyes and takes herself back to Mhaibib. She sees the sun setting, vividly painting the sky stretching over their family gatherings on the upstairs patio, framed by their mother’s flowers.
The family painstakingly expanded their home over a decade.
“It took us 10 years to add just one room,” Fatima said. “First, my dad laid the flooring, then the walls, the roof and the glass windows. My mom sold a year’s worth of homemade preserves to furnish it.” She paused. “And it was gone in an instant.”
In the midst of war, Zeinab married quietly. Now she’s six months pregnant. She had hoped to be back in Mhaibib in time for the delivery.
Her brother was born when Mhaibib and other villages in southern Lebanon were under Israeli occupation. Jaber remembers traveling from Beirut to Mhaibib, passing through Israeli checkpoints and a final crossing before entering the village.
“There were security checks and interrogations. The process used to take a full or half a day,” he says. And inside the village, they always felt like they were “under surveillance.”
His family also fled the village during the war with Israel in 2006, and when they returned they found their homes vandalized but still standing. An uncle and a grandmother were among those killed in the 34-day conflict, but a loquat tree the matriarch had planted next to their home endured.
This time, there is no home to return to and even the loquat tree is gone.
Jaber worries Israel will again set up a permanent presence in southern Lebanon and that he won’t be able to reconstruct the home he built over the last six years for himself, his wife and their two sons.
“When this war ends, we’ll go back,” Ayman says quietly. “We’ll pitch tents if we have to and stay until we rebuild our houses.”
In Lebanon, a family’s memories are detonated along with their village
https://arab.news/pfy7v
In Lebanon, a family’s memories are detonated along with their village
- The scene has been repeated across southern Lebanon since Israel invaded with the aim of pushing Hezbollah militants back from the border
Lifting sanctions on Syria will prevent Daesh resurgence and strengthen the nation, experts say
- Conference in Washington discusses effects US policies are having on post-Assad Syria, and the continuing economic hardships in the country that could fuel terrorism
- Participants praise US President Donald Trump for taking the right steps to help the war-torn nation move towards recovery and stabilization
Syria faces serious challenges in the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime a year ago, including rebuilding its economy, lifting refugees and civilians out of poverty, and preventing a resurgence of Daesh terrorism.
But experts in two panel discussions during a conference at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, attended by Arab News, agreed that US President Donald Trump had so far taken all the right steps to help the war-torn nation move toward recovery and stabilization.
One of the discussions explored the effects American policies are having on the rebuilding of Syria, including the lifting of sanctions and efforts to attract outside investments and stabilize the economy. Moderated by the institute’s vice president for policy, Kenneth Pollack, the participants included retired ambassadors Robert Ford and Barbara Leaf, and Charles Lister, a resident fellow at the institute.
The other discussion focused on the continuing economic hardships in Syria that could fuel terrorism, including a resurgence of Daesh. Moderator Elizabeth Hagedorn, of Washington-based Middle East news website Al-Monitor, was joined by Mohammed Alaa Ghanem of the Syrian American Council, Celine Kasem of Syria Now, and Jay Salkini from the US-Syria Business Council.
“As we went into a transitional era, US diplomacy took a back step for a while as the Trump administration came into office,” Lister noted during the first panel discussion.
Everyone has been “super skeptical” of where the new government led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a former commander with the Syrian opposition forces, would lead the country, he said, but Trump had stepped up through policies and support.
“Frankly, I think in January none of us expected that President Donald Trump would be shaking hands with Ahmad Al-Sharaa” a few months later, he added.
“Despite the obvious challenges, this new (Syrian) government has to be engaged.”
The US had maintained strong ties to the Syrian Democratic Forces, and with Al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, Lister said, in the decade leading up to the collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime on Dec. 8, 2024.
“Of course, we’ve had 10 years of a superb partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces, but they were a non-state actor not a sovereign government,” he continued.
“Now, we have a sovereign government that we could test, we can engage, and we can see where that goes. And in working through a sovereign government, there is no comparison that comes anywhere close to what we’ve seen on Syria.”
Lister praised Trump, saying: “I think a lot of that goes down to President Trump’s own kind of gut instinct of the way to do things.
“But there is a deeper, deeper government bench that has worked on this through Treasury and State and elsewhere. I think they all deserve credit for moving so rapidly and so boldly to give Syria a chance, as President Trump says.”
Ford said a key aspect of the process as Syria moves forward will be the removal of all sanctions imposed by the US against the Assad regime under the 2019 Caesar Act, an effort that is now underway in Congress.
He said Trump recognizes that the future of Syria and the wider Middle East lies in the hands of the Arab people, and has pursued policies based on “shared interests” including a “national security
strategy” to help the war-torn country shift away from extremism and violence toward a productive economy and safer environment for its people.
The Trump administration recognizes this reality, Ford added, and will “work on a practical level towards shared interests.”
However, he cautioned that “Syria is not out of the woods, by any stretch of the imagination” in terms of ensuring there is no resurgence of violence driven by desperate people burdened by the harsh economic realities in the country.
“If they can work with the Syrian government, and with more and more important regional actors as the United States retrenches — like Israel, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt; it’s a long list — it will become more important,” Ford said.
“There is still a way for the Americans to work with all of them, even if we don’t have big boots on the ground, or if we’re not providing billions of dollars.”
Nonetheless, “America’s voice will still be heard,” he added, thanks to the interest Trump is taking in Syria.
Adopted by Congress six years ago, toward the end of Trump’s first term as president, the Caesar Act imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Syria, including measures that targeted Assad and his family in an attempt to ensure his regime would be held accountable for war crimes committed under its reign. The act was named after a photographer who leaked images of torture taking place in Assad’s prisons.
Lister noted that the removal of the US sanctions has been progressing at “record-breaking speeds.”
In pre-taped opening remarks to the conference, which took place at the institute’s offices in Washington, Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of the US Central Command, said the Trump administration’s priority in Syria is the “aggressive and relentless pursuit” of Daesh, while working on the integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces with the new Syrian government through American military coordination.
“Just to give an example, in the month of October, US forces advised, assisted and enabled Syrian partners during more than 20 operations against (Daesh), diminishing the terrorists’ attacks and export of violence around the world,” he said. “We’re also degrading their ability to regenerate.”
Cooper added that the issue of displacement camps in northeastern Syria must also be addressed. He said he has visited Al-Hawl camp four times since his first meeting with Al-Sharaa, “which reinforced my view of the need to accelerate repatriations.”
He continued: “The impact on displaced persons devastated by years of war and repression has been immense. As I mentioned in a late-September speech at the UN, continuing to repatriate displaced persons and detainees in Syria is both a humanitarian imperative and a strategic necessity.”
The US is working with Syrian forces to “supercharge” this effort, Cooper said, noting that the populations of Al-Hawl and Al-Roj camps have fallen from 70,000 to about 26,000.
The second panel discussion painted a very bleak picture of the economic challenges the Syrian people face, with the average income only $200-$300 a month, a level that the experts warned could push desperate people to violence just to survive.
The US-Syria Business Council’s Salkini said many major companies and factories that once operated in Syria had relocated to neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Turkiye.
“We’re looking at about 50 percent-plus unemployment,” he said. “Let me give you statistics on the wages: A factory worker today, his salary is $100-$300 a month. A farmer makes $75-$200 a month in salary. A manager (or) a private in the military makes $250 a month.
“So you can imagine how these people are living on these low wages, and still have to buy their iPhone, their internet, pay for electricity.”
Many displaced people are unable to return to their former homes, the panelists said, because they were destroyed during the war and there is no accessible construction industry to rebuild them.
The capital, Damascus, faces many challenges they added, and the situation is even worse in the country.
