Why I’ve joined Lebanon’s exodus

In early autumn I was on a train travelling from London to Brighton, on the final leg of a journey that began earlier that day in Beirut, and which was taking me back to live in Britain for the first time in 22 years. It was late Friday afternoon and the man opposite me was droning into his mobile phone. He had not drawn breath since he joined at Clapham Junction except to take a swig from one of three bottles of Black Sheep beer he had lined up on the table. Friday night clearly couldn’t start soon enough.

Back then, the Islamic State had just begun to pick at the edges of Lebanon. A force of 6,000 fighters from IS and the Nusra Front were scrapping with units of the Lebanese army in and around the Bekaa Valley border town of Arsal. Five days later, 19 Lebanese soldiers, 16 civilians and over 50 jihadists were dead. The end-of-days shadow cast by IS across Iraq and Syria had begun to lengthen and creep over Lebanon. But invasion was not our only worry. There are now 1.5 million Syrian refugees — 1.5 million extra Sunnis — taking up residence across the country, upsetting Lebanon’s finely calibrated religious balance. Even without an IS invasion, it is hard to see how my country can survive.

The influx of Syrian Sunnis mean that tensions between the country’s two Muslim communities are at their most acute. Lebanon’s Shia blame Sunnis for ‘inviting’ IS fighters into the country, while the Sunnis are angry about Hezbollah’s dominance (mainly at gunpoint) of Lebanese politics over the past decade. Over the past few years Hezbollah’s influence within the army has grown. It has battled Syrian rebels on behalf of the Assad regime, and now that Assad is no longer the great bugbear of the West, it has lost its pariah status and gained legitimacy.