BEIRUT: Lebanon expelled around 70 Syrian officers and soldiers on Saturday, returning them to Syria after they crossed into the country illegally via informal routes, a Lebanese security official and a war monitor said.

Many senior Syrian officials and people close to the former ruling family of Bashar al-Assad fled the country to neighbouring Lebanon after Assad’s regime was toppled on Dec 8.

Moreover, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Rifaat al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s uncle, left the country via Beirut airport around a week ago. Rifaat al-Assad arrived in Lebanon overland and “departed from Beirut airport normally, as there is nothing from Interpol on him” the security source said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a London-based organisation with sources in Syria, and the Lebanese security official said Syrian military personnel of various ranks had been sent back via Lebanon’s northern Arida crossing.

Bashar al-Assad’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, flew out of Beirut

SOHR and the security official said the returnees were detained by Syria’s new ruling authorities after crossing the border.

The new administration has been undertaking a major security crackdown in recent days on what they say are “remnants” of the Assad regime. Several of the cities and towns concerned, including in Homs and Tartous provinces, are near the porous border with Lebanon.

The Lebanese security official said the Syrian officers and soldiers were found in a truck in the northern coastal city of Jbeil after an inspection by local officials.

Rifaat al-Assad, 87, is accused by Swiss prosecutors of a long list of crimes, including ordering “murders, acts of torture, inhumane treatment and illegal detentions” while an officer in the Syrian army.

His part in the notorious Feb 1982 massacre in the western city of Hama, in which between 10,000 and 40,000 people were killed, earned him the nickname “the Butcher of Hama”.

He was not wanted by Lebanon’s General Security agency and there were no other documents requesting his arrest, the source added. The source said Rifaat al-Assad departed Lebanon around a week ago and “used a diplomatic passport”, without naming his destination.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a former translator for deceased Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and long-time political adviser to his son Bashar al-Assad, was similarly able to pass through Beirut airport, the source said, also on a diplomatic passport. A friend of Shaaban in Beirut previously said that the Assad adviser fled to Lebanon on the night of Dec 7-8 and then travelled to Abu Dhabi.

A former vice president Syria, Rifaat al-Assad went into exile in 1984 after a failed attempt to overthrow his brother Hafez al-Assad. He then presented himself as an opponent of his nephew Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000, travelling to Switzerland and later France.

In 2021, he returned to Syria from France to escape a four-year prison sentence for money laundering and misappropriation of Syrian public funds.

Earlier this month, Swiss newspapers reported that the country’s Federal Criminal Court was considering dropping a case charging him with alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The tribunal said that the defendant in his 80s was suffering from ailments that prevented him from travelling and taking part in his trial, the papers reported.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2024