HERMEL \u2013 “They drove us out at gunpoint,” says Lebanese citizen Zeinab Qataya, who fled her adopted home in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and returned to her country to live in a camp built by Hezbollah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The construction of the Imam Ali Housing Compound has proved controversial, but Lebanese and Syrian families pushed out of villages just over the border in Syria say they now rely on the Iran-backed movement for safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hezbollah has acknowledged intervening in Syria’s civil war on Assad’s behalf starting in 2013 from their foothold in the Qusayr area, home to border villages like Zeita where thousands of Lebanese Shiites have lived for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The militant group was driven out of Syria during the campaign that toppled Assad, but it still holds sway in this pocket of northeast Lebanon, whose government has since vowed to disarm them<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They burned our homes,” says Qataya, a 56-year-old who fled Zeita for the Hezbollah-run compound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What matters to us is… being able to return home safely.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HERMEL \u2013 “They drove us out at gunpoint,” says Lebanese citizen Zeinab Qataya, who fled her adopted home in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and returned to her country to live in a camp built by Hezbollah. The construction of the Imam Ali Housing Compound has proved controversial, but Lebanese and Syrian families […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1472,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions\/1472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysadaepakistan.com\/English\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}